[Educationforall] spam con huevos labor news, views and concerns, 2.09.12-1

Sun Feb 12 03:38:17 UTC 2012

American Labor Activist Just Does It for Indonesia Workers‏ ALEC's Tentacles Wrap Around Ohio Lawmakers‏ “Everything goes up but our paychecks": Talking to Real People Who Live on the Minimum Wage  How Rich Executives Extract Concessions From Workers -- While Playing the Good Guy in Public  Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion Walker, ALEC take war on workers national‏ Unemployment Insurance on the Chopping Block‏Tell Congress: Renew Jobless Help with No Strings Attached‏Join Us: AlterNet Expands its Coverage of Labor and Workers' Rights   FNS News: Mexican Workers Pulverized‏ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
American Labor Activist Just Does It for Indonesia
Workers
By Ulma Haryanto
The Jakarta Globe
February 06, 2012
http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/american-labor-activist-just-does-it-for-the-workers/496258

A towering blond, 40-year old Jim Keady's presence is a
stark contrast to the group he has fervently defended
for the past decade.

Thousands of workers from a Nike plant in Serang,
Banten province, have Keady to thank for a victory
against their employer, who withheld overtime pay worth
nearly $1 million.

Nikomas, a supplier for athletic wear giant Nike, has
also promised to create a reporting mechanism for
labor-related complaints in coordination with the
National Workers Union (SPN).

To Keady, who operates a nongovernmental organization
called Team Sweat, this was not the first victory, but
it was certainly the most symbolic since Nike had more
than 30 suppliers in the country for its footwear and
apparel, employing at least 140,000 workers.

When Nike's sweatshop issues went public in the 1990s,
Keady was a semi-professional footballer and coach at
St. John University in New York. He was also pursuing a
graduate degree in theology.

"In my first class, I started writing a paper about
Nike's labor practices and my professor urged me to
find a topic dealing with moral theology and sports,"
Keady said. "I started hearing the stories about Nike
sweatshop issues in newspapers, so I started doing some
research and learned about how Nike was exploiting the
poor workers in places like Indonesia, Vietnam, China."

At about the same time, his university's athletic
department started negotiating a $3.5 million
sponsorship contract with Nike.

Believing that Nike's corporate practices were far from
his Catholic religious ideals, he lobbied school
officials to reject the contract until he was
eventually given an ultimatum: "Wear Nike and drop the
issue or get out."

He said he became the first athlete in the world to say
no to Nike because of the sweatshop issue.

In 2000, he moved to a village in Tangerang to live
with factory workers for a month and try to survive on
the wage that they were paid.

"I slept a thin mat on the floor like workers do, with
rats stampeding over my ceiling at night and
cockroaches crawling over me," he said.

After a month of living on what he called a "Nike
sweatshop wage," Keady said he lost 11 kilograms.

"I came to understand, in the most rudimentary of ways,
the reality the workers face every day," he said.
"Everything from making decisions, 'Do I buy a razor
and shaving cream or do I eat. If I have a headache, do
I buy aspirin or do I buy dinner?'

"And I was just taking care of myself on that wage.
When you add kids into the mix [the questions became],
'Do I send my child to school or do I get an extra
kilogram of rice from the market so that we could have
a better meal?'

"These are the horrific choices that our workers have
to make and they continue to wallow in abject poverty
while Nike's profit has soared."

And so what Keady initially thought was going to be a
few months of advocacy work for employees at Nike
plants in Indonesia has turned into a full-time job for
the past 12 years.

"I promised the workers that I met, the women and men
that are producing the real wealth for Nike, I said,
'I'm going to go home and tell your stories and I'll
try to advocate for you and see if we can get some
changes made.' "

Part of what motivated him, he said, was the fact that
top Nike executives have seven-figure salaries.

In 2011, Forbes listed Nike chief executive Mark Parker
as having an annual compensation of $14.53 million or
$43.83 million over five years, making him the 97th
highest-paid CEO in the world. Keady said Parker's
compensation package went up 80 percent about a year
ago.

"When I think if the CEO is able to have that kind of
increase, I think the workers deserve an increase as
well. Without them, nobody at Nike is making any
money," he said. "I've returned to Indonesia year in
and year out to continue to help organize workers and
help them to develop their voice so that they can speak
up for themselves."

The hard work is paying off.

Though the Rp 8.1 billion ($907,000) in back wages they
won for the 4,437 Serang workers doesn't sound like
much for nearly a year of negotiations, Keady said it
was significant.

"It is almost two months of wages. That may not seem
significant to Americans or someone living in Jakarta,
but for workers that have been living on the edge every
month just trying to make ends meet, it's a big deal,"
he said.

"It's also about moving forward. This jam molor issue
[forced overtime] is not going to happen anymore.
There's a new mechanism in place to report it."

The Associated Press has reported that after years of
controversy, Nike in 2005 admitted finding "abusive
treatment," either physical or verbal, in many of its
plants. The complaints ranged from work weeks that
exceeded 60 hours to being forbidden to go to the
restroom.

Keady said that when he first came here, a law that
guaranteed two paid off days every month for female
workers during menstruation was hardly implemented.

"Back in 2000, for a Nike factory worker to get those
days off, they had to go to the factory clinic, pull
down their pants and show blood on their underwear to
prove they were menstruating. That doesn't happen
anymore," he said.

"Back then, three different workers from Nikomas were
threatened at gunpoint, one threatened at knifepoint
and one who was a chairman was beaten in the head with
a machete and left to die in the gutter. That level of
physical intimidation at factory workers doesn't happen
anymore."

Keady is currently working on a book and a script for a
documentary based on his experience advocating for
workers' rights in Indonesia.
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Feb. 7, 2012
Teaching and research assistants from New York University call on the National Labor Relations Board to restore their right to form unions.The ties between the extreme conservative, corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and Ohio lawmakers like Gov. John Kasich (R) run deep, according to a new report. Legislation that attacks workers’ rights and turns over government services to corporations are mirror images of ALEC’s “model” bills.
Got comments? Post them at blog.aflcio.org. Teaching and Research Assistants Call on NLRB to Issue Decision Laborers Train Society’s ‘Left Behind’ for Green Jobs; Launch Green Local It’s on in Arizona After Two Decades of Darkness, a Daybreak in Burma?Read more important news of the day on the issues working families care about.Follow the AFL-CIO:
            Take the next step. Become a mobile activist
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Text NEWS to AFLCIO (235246) to receive action alerts and more.
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To find out more about the AFL-CIO, please visit our website at www.aflcio.org.Click here to unsubscribe.
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“Everything goes up but our paychecks": Talking to Real People Who Live on the Minimum WageBy Sarah Jaffe | AlterNet

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-How Rich Executives Extract Concessions From Workers -- While Playing the Good Guy in PublicThat's what's on the rise: Management attempting to exercise control over their workers -- in a brutal display of power. Give in to us or lose your paycheck right now.READ MOREBy Laura Clawson / Daily Kos
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Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: Stories of Crime, Love and Rebellion"Nickles and Dimes" Begin P 17Review:Editorial Review - Publishers Weekly vol. 258 iss. 48 p (c) 11/28/2011The 18 mostly original stories in this thought-provoking crime anthology offer gritty testament to the violence, cunning, and resilience of people pushed to the brink. Phillips and Gibbons showcase some major talent, notably Sara Paretsky (“Poster Child”), but less well-known authors also make solid contributions. In John A Imani’s moving “Nickels and Dimes,” a black observer of a confrontation between police and protestors in 1972 Los Angeles becomes a reluctant participant and de facto leader. Gibbons’s “The El Rey Bar” brilliantly conveys the chaos, the hopelessness, and the despair engendered during an L.A. riot. SF ace Kim Stanley Robinson’s exotic “The Lunatics” explores the issue of forced labor amid an attempted slave revolt on the moon. On the down side, Michael Moorcock’s lengthy “Gold Diggers of 1977,” first published in 1980, will be incomprehensible to those unfamilia with the story of the Sex Pistols. (Jan.) http://books.google.com/books?id=oKzPegYMAVUC&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=%22john+a+imani%22&source=bl&ots=i9eK1UnEh_&sig=41k8tUo3AtXefB47gzUJpp-gn0A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZhgzT-7dHpHTiAKzy8XVCg&ved=0CCUQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=%22john%20a%20imani%22&f=false
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Walker, ALEC take war on workers national
JOHN NICHOLS | Cap Times associate editor |
jnichols at madison.com 
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/john_nichols/john-nichols-walker-alec-take-war-on-workers-national/article_c73b91a0-11a1-5280-8979-08c7d444157a.html

Two days after Ohio voters overwhelmingly rejected Gov.
John Kasich's anti-labor agenda by 61 percent to 39
percent in a referendum, the nation's primary proponent
of the war on worker rights opened a new front.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker jetted to Arizona, where he
huddled with policymakers at the Phoenician Resort in
Scottsdale. After a series of closed-door sessions, he
briefed a thousand Arizona conservatives on how they
could attack "the big-government union bosses."
"We need to make big, fundamental, permanent structural
changes. It's why we did what we did in Wisconsin,"
declared Walker, who at the annual dinner of the
right-wing Goldwater Institute said that compromising
with unions was "bogus."
Comparing governors who have been attacking the
collective bargaining rights of public employees with
the founders of the American experiment -- "just like
that group that gathered in Philadelphia" -- Walker told
his listeners: "We need to have leaders not just in
Wisconsin but here in Arizona ..."
If anyone missed the point, Walker said: "Tonight, you
might say I'm preaching to the choir with a bunch of
fellow conservatives. ... I preach to the choir because I
want the choir to sing. So tonight I'm asking you to
sing. Tell the message in Arizona and all across America
that we can do things better."
The crowd was listening.
Last week Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer -- fresh from pointing
her finger in the face of President Obama -- and her
allies in the Republican-controlled legislature
announced that they would try to outdo the anti-labor
initiatives of Walker and Wisconsin's Republican
legislators.
And they did so in conjunction with the very people
Walker had consulted with, spoken to and urged on in
November: the Goldwater Institute.
Indeed, as Arizona's anti-labor initiative was launched,
the Goldwater Institute's website featured an image of
2011 protests at the state Capitol in Madison and a
headline speculating on whether Arizona's fight over
labor rights would be: "Bigger Than Wisconsin?"
Documents linked to the "Bigger Than Wisconsin?"
headline outlined plans to "(ban) government sector
unions from collective bargaining and entering into
collectively bargained contracts." Indeed, they
suggested, "Statistical analysis shows that if states
prohibited all forms of collective bargaining, they
could reap a total of nearly $50 billion in savings for
state and local taxpayers across the country."
Even if the argument were valid, its totalitarian
premise raises the question: How much more money could
be saved by taking away other human rights?
Urged on by Walker, Arizona Republicans are putting
questions aside and racing to implement a militant
anti-labor agenda modeled on legislation enacted last
year in Wisconsin -- and promoted by national groups such
as the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council.
ALEC's model legislation, revealed by the joint
Nation/Center for Media and Democracy project "ALEC
Exposed," provides conservative legislators in the
states with preapproved bills for attacks on collective
bargaining in particular and organized labor in general.
And the group has worked closely with Brewer and many
Arizona legislators, including recently ousted Arizona
Senate President Russell Pearce.
Indeed, Brewer began outlining the Arizona plan at an
ALEC meeting in December, when she declared her
intention to "reform the state's personnel system" in
order to make it easier to hire and fire public
employees.
That inspired speculation about Brewer wanting to be
"the Scott Walker of the West."
In fact, Brewer and her allies are, as the Goldwater
Institute suggests, going even further than Walker did.
The legislation introduced by the governor's allies in
the state Senate would, according to an Arizona Republic
blog:
"* Make it illegal for government bodies to collectively
bargain with employee groups. Public safety unions would
be included in the ban.
"* End the practice of automatic payroll deductions for
union dues.
"* Ban compensation of public employees for union work.
"Wisconsin's collective bargaining law enacted last year
made unions effectively irrelevant by limiting issues
that could be bargained by a government and an employee
group. Arizona's bills would do away with collective
bargaining entirely and also go beyond Wisconsin law by
including public safety unions.
"Coupled with Gov. Jan Brewer's plan to do away with
civil service protections for state employees, the new
legislation could make Arizona ground zero for union
protests during this election year."
The Goldwater Institute's Nick Dranias is expecting
success.
"In Arizona, we believe that the political will exists
to do even more comprehensive reform," Dranias said.
"The environment, the climate that we face in Arizona is
much more receptive to these kinds of reforms than
Wisconsin is."
Arizona is a so-called "right to work" state, where
protections for private sector workers are weaker, and
Republican legislative majorities in Arizona are bigger.
Both those factors may make Brewer's work easier than
Walker's in Wisconsin.
But, for all the talk of how Arizona is "more receptive"
to assaults on collective bargaining rights than
Wisconsin, the states have one thing in common.
Like Wisconsin, Arizona allows for the recall of the
governor and members of the legislature. Indeed,
Arizonans recently used that power to vote out Pearce,
the architect of the state's draconian anti-immigrant
legislation.
In Wisconsin, more than 1 million voters have signed
petitions supporting the recall of Walker.
Just as Walker guided Arizona conservatives toward a
more militantly anti-labor agenda than that of
Wisconsin, so the coalition of labor, farm and community
activists that has formed the Wisconsin recall movement
can guide their Arizona compatriots toward a proper
response. If Brewer and her allies persist in trying to
out-Walker Scott Walker, then Arizona progressives may
find that they too will spell relief R-E-C-A-L-L.
John Nichols is the associate editor of The Capital
Times. Follow Nichols on Twitter @NicholsUprising.
jnichols at madison.com

Read more:
http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/
john_nichols/john-nichols-walker-alec-take-war-on-
workers-national/article_c73b91a0-11a1-5280-8979-
08c7d444157a.html#ixzz1lqQZgvfd

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  OUTRAGE
Tea Party legislators are trying to punish andhumiliate people who are out of work—they’re even threatening to take away unemployment insurance from some people completely.

If you think Congress should be focusing on jobs instead of punishing and even humiliating people who are out of work through no fault of their own, take action now.     Dear Carlos,

Unemployment insurance as we know it is on the chopping block. 

Tea Party Republicans are leading the charge to reduce coverage and throw up barriers to benefits like GED requirements. And they’re even threatening to force people who are jobless—through no fault of their own—to endure humiliating drug tests just to get survival aid. 

Tell Congress: It’s time to pass a clean, yearlong extension of unemployment aid now.

It’s great news that the economy added jobs last month. But for working America, the economy still is in the gutter. We’re climbing out of a deep, deep hole. Unemployment remains sky high, and it’s projected to stay there through the next year and beyond.

But Tea Party politicians are holding America’s jobless hostage to their extremist agenda.

Urge Congress to act now to extend unemployment benefits for a full year—with no strings attached, no barriers to benefits and no brutal humiliation.

We have to force Congress to renew unemployment insurance benefits again—and this time, the stakes are higher than ever before. Tea Party politicians are pushing plans to:Slash federal unemployment funding by more than half in the states with the highest unemployment.
 Let states whose governments have been taken over by the Tea Party divert premium money away from unemployment insurance as we know it—and use it to experiment with right-wing social engineering programs (like “workfare,” where people are forced to work for free to get unemployment benefits.)
 Mandate drug-testing requirements. Politicians are ready to humiliate people who are out of work—by making them urinate in a cup to get benefits they paid for and are entitled to.

Make jobless workers pay for their re-employment services. People who are out of work through no fault of their own and have paid into the system aren’t asking for a handout—but a helping hand. Now, the radical lawmakers want to make them pay for the privilege.
 Deny benefits to people who never got their high school diploma—they’d have unemployment insurance taken out of their paycheck, but would get nothing should they lose their job. Shame!
 Cut federal employee pensions—or freeze wages for yet another year. Federal workers already have done more than their fair share to balance the budget—while the richest 1% of Americans have been asked to do absolutely nothing.Outraged? You aren’t alone. Demand Congress extend unemployment insurance for a full year—with no barriers, no strings attached and no brutal humiliation.

Let’s make this happen.

In Solidarity,

Manny Herrmann
Online Mobilization Coordinator, AFL-CIOTo find out more about the AFL-CIO, please visit our website at www.aflcio.org.
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Feb. 8, 2012
Noted economist Jared Bernstein makes the case for raising the minimum wage to restore its value.Unemployment insurance (UI) for jobless workers expires Feb. 29, and Republican lawmakers want to slash federal benefits and impose harsh new restrictions. Clickhere to tell Congress it needs to renew UI benefits for a full year, with no cuts, no barriers to benefits and no strings attached.
Got comments? Post them atblog.aflcio.org. The Minimum Wage: Time to Start Working on the Next Increase AFL-CIO Joins Re-Enactment of 1965 Selma to Montgomery March Arizona Update: Public and Private Workers in Solidarity RTW Still Wrong for New Hampshire Berman Back with New Lies About UnionsRead more important news of the day on the issues working families care about.Follow the AFL-CIO:
            Take the next step. Become a mobile activist
by joining the AFL-CIO Rapid Action Text Team.
Text NEWS to AFLCIO (235246) to receive action alerts and more.
(Message and data rates may apply.)
To find out more about the AFL-CIO, please visit our website at www.aflcio.org.
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-Join Us: AlterNet Expands its Coverage of Labor and Workers' RightsConservatives' anti-worker crusade will not go unchallenged. We're ratcheting up our worker coverage by establishing a unique Labor special coverage area. READ MOREBy Don Hazen / AlterNet
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February 9, 2012

Labor News 

Mexican Workers Pulverized in the 21st century

A new study reconfirms what many people know from first-hand experience: Mexican workers' purchasing power has plummeted since the turn of the century. 

In a just-released report, the economics department of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) documented the number of hours the lowest-paid workers need to labor in order purchase a basic basket of goods made up of rice, cooking oil, beans, milk, sugar, coffee, and other routinely consumed products. According to the analysis, Mexican workers earning the daily minimum wage had to toil 11.38 hours in December 2011 to buy a basic basket of commodities, compared with the 9.55 hours of work necessary to buy the same group of products in December 2001. 

The UNAM study also compared Mexican workers' purchasing power with their counterparts in five other Latin American nations. While Costa Rican and Peruvian workers also witnessed a drop in their purchasing power between 2001 and 2011, low-income workers in Guatemala, Uruguay and Brazil actually experienced significant jumps in the buying value of their wages during the same decade. 

In view of the deterioration in the purchasing power of Mexican wages vis a vis those in the other Latin American countries examined, David Lozano, UNAM economist, called the study's findings "alarming." Of the six nations studied by UNAM researchers, Mexico ranked Numero Uno in the devaluation of the purchasing power of minimum wage workers. The study reported that the daily minimum wage in Mexico lost 24.42 percent of its consumer punch in the ten year period analyzed. 

While only 9.2 percent of Mexican workers earn the daily minimum salary of about five bucks, the UNAM report gives a general idea of the pressures facing much bigger slices of the working class. A large group of workers, or 26.3 percent, earns between two and three minimum salaries daily, while another nearly-as-large segment, or 26.1 percent, makes between two and three minimum salaries every day. In sum, more than 60 percent of Mexican workers struggle to get by on wages that hover between $5 and $15 each day. 

In 2012, a new round of price hikes bodes further ills for workers' purchasing power. 

In the southern state of Guerrero, for instance, the cost of a kilo of the staple corn tortilla has now reached 16 pesos- well above a dollar- in the small neighborhood outlets Mexicans are accustomed to shopping. By the end of last year, tortilla prices reportedly hit 18 pesos a kilo in some places in the northern border state of Chihuahua. In Guerrero tortillas can be purchased for significantly lower prices at large commercial supermarket chains like Walmart's Bodega Aurrera (7.90 pesos) or Comercial Mexicana (9.90 pesos), which process huge amounts of corn flour and operate on economies of scale the mom-and-pop stores are unable to match.

Yet even the going prices at the big box stores are well above the average tortilla price of about six pesos in 2006, the year when the outgoing Calderon administration assumed office. 

In a broad economic context, the Mexican economy during 2001-2011 was characterized by the signing of numerous free trade agreements, macro-economic stability, infusions and contractions of foreign capital investments, two recessions linked to international economic crises spawned in the United States, spikes and plunges in migrant remittances, and declines in international tourism. 

Other trends included the weakening of unions, the increased outsourcing of workers and booms in the illicit economy. Especially during the last five years, millions of young Mexicans came of working age at a time when the historic safety valve of migration to the United States was largely slammed shut. 

Sources: El Sur/Agencia Reforma, February 6, 2012. La Jornada, December 19, 2011. Article by Susana Gonzalez G. 

Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University 
Las Cruces, New Mexico

For a free electronic subscription 
email:fnsnews at nmsu.edu 
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