LABOR MATTERS
IA Endorses Angelides for California Governor
compiled by Jeff Burman
 Jeffrey Burman |
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) got the jump on a number of groups by endorsing Democratic State Treasurer Phil Angelides for governor of California in early February.
“He envisions a California with even more jobs in the entertainment industry, first-class schools, affordable health care for working families and protections for our environment,” said IATSE president Tom Short “Workers in film, television and stagecraft well remember his active, consistent and continuing support for tax incentives that will, when enacted, make the entertainment industry even stronger and increase the number of entertainment jobs in California.”
A month later, the California Labor Federation endorsed Angelides as well. “Today we endorsed Phil Angelides because he has a vision to put California back on the right track. He has a vision for a California where good jobs are created and where the economy works for ordinary Californians, not just corporate CEOs,” said Art Pulaski, the Federation’s executive secretary-treasurer. The state federation stopped short of pledging the sort of huge television ad campaign that unions waged last year against Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, writes Mike Finnegan in The Los Angeles Times.
 California gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides, who won the early endorsement of the IATSE, picks up support from basketball great Earvin "Magic" Johnson on November 29, 2005. AP Photo/Ric Francis |
Angelides has been endorsed by a long list of labor organizations, including the California Federation of Teachers, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers, as well as major elected officials and environmental, law enforcement and business organizations.
The primary election is June 6, 2006 with the general election scheduled for November 7.
Former Senator, Actor Launch Campaign for Hotel Workers
Former US Senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards and actor Danny Glover began a national tour to support “Hotel Workers Rising.” The campaign by UNITE HERE will turn on the newly aligned expiration dates of the hotel workers’ union contracts, allowing them increased leverage with the big hotel chains. Many consider these upcoming contract negotiations to be the key labor story of 2006.
 Former US Senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards speaks to 2,000 hotel workers and supporters at a kick-off rally for UNITE HERE's "Hotel Workers Rising" tour in San Francisco. Photo by David Bacon |
Edwards’ involvement in the campaign is a significant return to the national spotlight as he considers whether to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.
“It used to be that poverty was invisible in America,” writes John Edwards and UNITE HERE president John Wilhelm in The Boston Globe in February. “When Michael Harrington published The Other America in 1960, he wrote about the unseen millions living in inner-city housing projects, in Appalachia, in rural America. The poor were stuck in isolated ghettos, dying towns and industries that Harrington called the economic underworld of American life. As the rest of the country went to work and prospered, the poor were bypassed.
“Our nation launched a war on poverty in the 1960s and 1970s that helped move millions of Americans out of poverty and into the middle class. While we were able to make some important progress, we still have much work to do. We saw just how pervasive poverty is when we saw the images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on our television sets. “One of the great disgraces of our country is that a vast new impoverished population has developed in our midst. These are the Americans who work—in fact, they labor at the heart of the industries that drive our economy—yet they still are unable to make ends meet, even as they work at two or three jobs.”
UNITE HERE is the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union.
LA Labor Leader Martin Ludlow Pleads Guilty
Los Angeles labor leader Martin Ludlow resigned his post and pleaded guilty to a felony charge that he conspired with the head of a school workers union to illegally funnel union funds into his 2003 Los Angeles City Council campaign, writes Patrick McGreevy in The Los Angeles Times.
Under the terms of a plea bargain, Ludlow will pay $40,000 in fines and court costs and accept a four-year ban on holding elected office and three years probation. He agreed to cooperate with the district attorney’s office as it prosecutes Janett Humphries, the former president of the Service Employees International Union Local 99.
Ludlow, 41, left the Los Angeles City Council last year to become head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, a position he resigned from in February to accept the plea bargain in the criminal case against him. The federation is an umbrella group of 357 unions with about 825,000 members.
Maria Elena Durazo was named as interim leader of the LA County Federation of Labor in March. She was the logical and sentimental choice of union members. Durazo is the widow of former federation leader Miguel Contreras, who died suddenly last May. Having led LA’s dynamic hotel workers union, she can help reunify the unions that broke away from the AFL-CIO last year with those who stayed. And, as the widow of the popular Contreras, she can help the city’s labor movement retain its considerable political clout.
LAEDC Projects Drop in Entertainment Jobs in 2006
The state’s job market in entertainment will see a 4 percent decline this year, with 8,100 fewer slots, to cut the total to 174,100, according to a study by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation. Employment will edge down next year by 0.8 percent, with 1,400 fewer jobs in 2007. The industry peaked with 209,000 jobs in 1999, according to LAEDC figures.
Jack Kyser, LAEDC chief economist, cited high levels of TV production as a positive factor for the industry, while pointing to an array of developments with negative impact, including poor box office performance, slowing DVD sales, runaway production, reduction in the number of films produced, a lack of state government incentives for film producers and the emergence of more confrontational leaders at the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America, according to an article in Variety by Dave McNary.
US Labor Rights Criticized by International Body
Serious violations of labor rights in the United States are on the increase, according to a new report issued in March by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. The report, which coincides with a World Trade Organization review of US trade policies, details a catalogue of breaches of international standards concerning freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining and child labor, and shows a clear trend towards lower standards under the Bush Administration.
“The credibility of the US, which takes a strong international stand on human rights issues, is severely damaged by the lack of protection for working people, especially the most vulnerable, within its own borders,” says Guy Ryder, ICFTU General Secretary, adding, “This only encourages other governments to seek competitive advantage in global markets by violating fundamental workers’ rights.”
Who Backs the ‘Center for Union Facts?’
A former US Chamber of Commerce official launched an anti-union ad drive with full-page displays in The Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, calling unions outmoded, greedy and worse. The ads, which cost approximately $240,000, were attributed to the “Center for Union Facts,” established by Rick Berman, the chamber’s former labor law director. The center did not identify its backers in the ads, or at a February 13 made-for-TV photo opportunity—complete with a dinosaur— outside of AFL-CIO headquarters, according to the International Labor Communications Association.
As noted in news stories the day after the ad appeared, Berman “has represented the big tobacco lobby against antismoking efforts, claiming there is a ‘lack of evidence that second-hand smoke causes cancer’; the alcohol industry in fighting against Mothers Against Drunk Driving’s effort to hold the line on bloodalcohol levels; and cheap bosses in fighting increases to minimum wage laws, to mention a few,” writes Fred Glass, Communications Director for the California Federation of Teachers/AFT.
‘The Entire Country Is on an Acid Trip’
“Consumers deeper in debt and fresh from their first negative savings rate since the Great Depression show high consumer confidence. It is as if the entire country is on an acid trip,” writes Paul Craig Roberts in CounterPunch. Roberts was the assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration and was associate editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.
“How can the upbeat views be reconciled with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ payroll jobs data, the extraordinary red ink and exploding trade deficit?” Craig writes. “Perhaps the answer is that every economic development, no matter how detrimental, is spun as if it were good news. For example, the worsening US trade deficit is spun as evidence of the fast growth of the US economy—the economy is growing so fast it can’t meet its needs and must rely on imports.
“Occasionally, real information escapes the spin machine,” Craig continues. “The National Association of Manufacturers, one of outsourcing’s greatest boosters, has just released a report, ‘US Manufacturing Innovation at Risk,’ by economists Joel Popkin and Kathryn Kobe. The economists find that US industry’s investment in research and development is not languishing after all. It just appears to be languishing, because it is rapidly being shifted overseas: “Funds provided for foreign-performed research and development (R&D) have grown by almost 73 percent between 1999 and 2003, with a 36 percent increase in the number of firms funding foreign R&D.” US industry is still investing in R&D after all; it is just not hiring Americans to do the R&D.
Happy Meals, Unhappy Workers
 Copyrights of Khalil Bendib, www.bendib.com, all rights reserved. |
Vietnamese workers who make plastic toys given away in McDonald’s Happy Meals work 12 hours a day without overtime and earn less than $2 a day, write Aaron Glantz and Ngoc Nguyen in the online Corporate Watch. In December and January, many of these workers joined 40,000 of their peers to form a massive wave of wildcat strikes protesting their low pay and poor working conditions in southern Vietnam’s growing export processing zones and industrial parks. They demanded the government increase the minimum wage.
Before the strikes, the federally set minimum wage had been stagnant for six years while Vietnam’s currency, the dong, lost almost 15 percent of its value against the US dollar and inflation hit 28 percent. Few foreign companies pay workers more than the law requires.
“The government was caught by surprise at how angry the employees were over their low wages,” says Thuyen Nguyen, who directs Vietnam Labor Watch, a San Francisco-based activist group. “But these are people who will not stand for exploitation.”
After the strikes, the government increased the minimum wage in foreign invested factories by nearly 40 percent.
Jeff Burman represents Sound Editors on the Guild's Board of Directors. He can be reached at jeffrey.burman@nbcuni.com.