On Labor Day were supposed to celebrate the economic and social contributions of workers, not just mark the end of Summer. But since the pendulum has swung from labor to corporations, bidness owners, and the one percent, we don’t talk much about workers on Labor Day anymore.
Just ahead of Labor Day, the president of the AFL-CIO, a coalition of 57 labor unions, said Thursday that it will target Texas “like never before” in the coming elections. It also will seek to boost union ranks in the famously pro-employer Lone Star State.
Richard Trumka told reporters at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor that immigration and worker safety are key issues that make Texas an important battleground for progressive groups like his.
He stopped short of saying the group, which represents some 12 million union workers, would specifically support state Sen.Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, whose national profile has risen since leading filibuster in the Texas Senate earlier this summer.
Trumka suggested boasts by Texas leaders about the fast-growing economy there ring hollow when examined more closely. The state’s insistence on keeping at bay regulators of all stripes has hurt the state, despite a job boom often touted by Gov,. Rick Perry and others.
“If you look at the quality of those jobs, if you look at the quality of the education, and look at a number of things, that hasn’t been true,” he said. “Also, if you leave employers to their own devices I know work sites can get pretty nasty. So the lack of regulation works to the detriment of a lot of people.”
“We are also very, very dismayed that there is only one state in the nation that doesn’t have a fire code, and that there is only one state in the country that prohibits its counties to have a fire codes. That would be state of Texas.
“One of my first roles in organized labor,” he said, “was to serve on the health and safety committee. The fact that there are no fire codes jeopardized worker safety.” (The Dallas Morning News has reported that state law prevents 70 percent of its counties from having a fire code.)
This is certainly great news. Getting labor unions seriously engaged in Texas, along with Battleground Texas can only help as we head into 2014. And no state’s workers need more help getting organized then those in Texas. There are several other areas where they can focus, raising the minimum wage and wage theft just to name a couple. But the lack or regulation and worker protections is also a major issue, as the explosion in West showed. What is more troubling is that our current crop of legislators appear to be unable and unwilling to fix the problem, Texas lawmakers hesitant to add new regulations in wake of West explosion.
Texas lawmakers following up on the deadly April explosion in West hesitated Monday to support new regulations for storing, moving and insuring ammonium nitrate in the state.
The reluctance came amid testimony about concrete examples of how companies are allowed to rebuff state agencies, keeping officials and residents in the dark about potential threats.
Ammonium nitrate is a common ingredient in agricultural fertilizer. It fueled the April 17 explosion in West that killed 15 people, injured more than 300 and did an estimated $135 million worth of damage to private and public property. Officials said Monday that more than 140 facilities in the state have the chemical on hand.
Texas House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee members were told that five companies that have the hazardous fertilizer ingredient wouldn’t let the state fire marshal inspect their facilities.
They were also told that one railroad declined to share data about the dangerous chemicals it moves through Texas. The railroad told the state emergency department it already shares the information with the state Department of Transportation. Another railroad hasn’t responded to state requests for information.
Officials said Union Pacific, which runs the line by the West Fertilizer Co. plant, provided information.
West Fertilizer’s $1 million in insurance coverage won’t begin to cover the property, medical and emotional damage caused by the explosion.
Since the blast, the Texas Department of Insurance has asked 95 fertilizer companies and 32 insurers about the level of coverage for other facilities with the dangerous chemical. Ten fertilizer companies and four insurers responded.
Insurance Commissioner Julia Rathgeber testified that some facilities with ammonium nitrate are uninsured because their policies were canceled after the West explosion. Texas law doesn’t mandate the terms for an insurance company to offer policies to plants like the one in West.
But state Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Canton, said lawmakers should not add new layers of regulation and oversight as a knee-jerk reaction to the deadly West blast.
“If we’re not careful, we could get like the federal government putting diapers on cows,” he said.
State Rep. Kenneth Sheets, R-Dallas, a committee member, said burdening companies with more operating costs could affect Texans’ finances.
“It’s a very serious implication,” he said.
The Legislature’s next regular session isn’t until January 2015, so the committee can’t recommend any bills. Gov. Rick Perry did not allow lawmakers to debate chemical safety or oversight in any of the three special sessions he called since the West explosion.
Flynn and Sheets understand that there’s no reason to burden business, aka their campaign contributors, with the price of protecting workers and communities, when they know if something bad happens the taxpayers will pick up the tab.
Until those of us who earn a paycheck for a living start to organize, vote, and make our government hold corporations, bidness owners, and the one percent accountable, none of this will change. The Cheap Labor Conservatives must go. And that is what all of us workers must remember this year on Labor Day.
Texas leads the nation in the percentage of residents who lack health insurance, with more than 1 in 4 people younger than 65 without coverage of any kind, according to new census data released Thursday.
More than 5.7 million people, 26 percent of Texans younger than 65, were uninsured in 2011. The uninsured rate was higher — 31 percent — for working-age adults ages 18 to 64, the data show.
Tea Party groups have begun directing their fire in recent weeks at a counterintuitive target: Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).
On paper, the Republican minority whip is an unusual target for Tea Party guns. Cornyn has been one of the most conservative members of the Senate since he was first elected to the chamber in 2002. National Journal ranks Cornyn the second most conservative member of the Senate. He has an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association, has won multiple awards from the anti-tax group Americans for Tax Reform, has a 0 percent rating from the pro-choice NARAL and a 100 percent rating from the National Right To Life Committee.
That’s not good enough for some Tea Partiers now.
Tea Party groups’ ire centers on Cornyn’s decision in late July to remove his signature from a letter by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) expressing strong support to defund Obamacare in any debt limit or government funding bill. Cornyn was one of a number of senators who had originally signed the letter a few days before he changed his mind and removed his signature.
At the time, Cornyn’s office said the senator supports defunding Obamacare but not at the risk of a government shutdown. Cornyn’s office maintains that he has been fighting “tooth and nail” against Obamacare. Cornyn spokesman Drew Brandewie noted that the senator was one of the original cosponsors of Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) original bill to defund Obamacare.
But that’s not enough for the tea party crowd.
I wish I could say I felt sorry for these guys. But they used the tea party when it benefitted them, and now that they don’t want to shutdown the government, (which would likely hurt their investment portfolios), they don’t know how to get rid of them. For Cornyn’s part, at this time, he doesn’t appear to have a scary primary opponent like David Dewhurst did.
While home for the August recess Rep. John Carter (R-Round Rock) paid a visit to a Walmart, Congressman tours local Walmart.
Walmart employees greeted Congressman John Carter as he walked through the Killeen store’s aisles Tuesday.
“We have to find work for the people who need work. I’m all about the people in the 31st District having jobs,” said Carter, R-Round Rock. “Walmart is a job-generating company and they have a track record second-to-none.”
Carter said cities across the nation are passing living-wages laws that require the chain stores to increase their pay up to $4 more an hour than minimum wage. Carter said he hopes Killeen doesn’t change its pay structure for local stores if that means new stores can’t be built.
“The unions are so in control over Washington, D.C., that they are depriving a very needy community of a good store,” Carter said. “That was a dumb decision.”
Walmart’s wages and benefits are so low that many of its employees are forced to turn to the government for aid, costing taxpayers between $900,000 and $1.75 million per store, according to a report released last week by congressional Democrats.
Walmart’s history of suppressing local wages and busting fledgling union efforts is common knowledge. But the Democrats’ new reportused data from Wisconsin’s Medicaid program to quantify Walmart’s cost to taxpayers. The report cites a confluence of trends that have forced more workers to rely on safety-net programs: the depressed bargaining power of labor in a still struggling economy; a 97 year low in union enrollment; and the fact that the middle-wage jobs lost during the recession have been replaced by low-wage jobs. The problem of minimum-wage work isn’t confined to Walmart. But as the country’s largest low-wage employer, with about 1.4 million employees in the US—roughly 10 percent of the American retail workforce—Walmart’s policies are a driving force in keeping wages low. The company also happens to elegantly epitomize the divide between the top and bottom in America: the collective wealth of the six Waltons equals the combined wealth of 48.8 million families on the other end of the economic spectrum. The average Walmart worker making $8.81 per hour would have to work for 7 million years to acquire the Walton family’s current wealth.
Nyankale has tried working more. When the kids were very young, she juggled two part-time waitressing jobs, routinely getting off at 1 or 2 a.m. To find cheap child care at that hour, she went on Craigslist, but the women offering to watch kids in their homes were hit or miss.
“You’d show up at the door and they’re not home,” Nyankale says. “And then if you’re trying to potty train [the children, the sitter's] not doing anything, or you pick up your child and your hand’s soaked because their diaper hasn’t been changed.”
Nyankale tears up thinking about it. “You know, there were times where I just went to work just to pay for my babysitter,” she says.
In fact, some restaurant workers say they pay more than one-third of their income for child care, says Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and co-director of the worker advocacy group the Restaurant Opportunities Center.
She says most restaurant workers are part time, which means no paid time off. So when a child gets sick, “it creates a real crisis. Basically, lose your job and go get your child,” Jayaraman says. “Or, scramble to try to find some informal care that might be able to go get your child for you.”
Jayaraman supports a bill to raise the minimum wage to just over $10. So far, there’s not enough congressional support to pass that, let alone the $15 per hour that fast-food workers are striking for.
We stand for a living wage.
Wages are subnormal if they fail to provide a living for those who devote their time and energy to industrial occupations.
The monetary equivalent of a living wage varies according to local conditions, but must include:
enough to secure the elements of a normal standard of living– a standard high enough to make morality possible,[Emphasis added]
to provide for education and recreation,
to care for immature members of the family,
to maintain the family during periods of sickness,
and to permit of reasonable saving for old age.”
It’s not just about a job, we must have jobs that pay a living wage. No matter how “dumb” Rep. Carter may believe that to is.
As civil rights organizations and leaders marched on Aug. 24 from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., a “Let Freedom Ring” rally took place on the south steps of the Williamson County Courthouse in Georgetown in commemoration of the 1963 march that was a key moment in the struggle for civil rights in the United States.
About 200 residents from various cities in Williamson County, including Hutto and Taylor, attended the event that focused on social equality and service to one’s community.
The rally included several inspirational hymns such as ‘We Shall Overcome,’ a touching reading of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech by Taylor Rev. Wendell Hosey and closing remarks by Jose Orta, one of the event organizers, NAACP and LULUC representative and Taylor resident.
Orta, Hosey and others who spoke at the event reminded Williamson County residents that there is still work to be done in order to continue the fight for jobs, justice and freedom.
The Williamson County Commissioners Court on Tuesday adopted a $236 million budget that calls for hiring 14 new staffers, distributing up to $1.9 million in merit-based civilian-employee raises of up to 4 percent and purchasing 22 new EKG machines for county ambulances.
Additionally, about 200 law enforcement personnel will receive raises averaging $10,000 to $20,000, based on a recent salary study a private agency conducted for the county.
The fiscal year 2014 budget, which takes effect Oct. 1, is about 11 percent more than the $216 million budget commissioners adopted last year at this time. Population growth and the staffing needs that go along with it are driving the increase, Williamson County Budget Officer Ashlie Koenig said.
“For the last few years with the downturn in the economy the court has been very conscientious of taxpayer dollars,” she said. “I think they recognized the needs but the funding wasn’t there. This was the year to come back and look at those items that had been on the back-burner.”
The tax rate is still not settled. There are two public hearings coming up on the budgtet.
Commissioners on Tuesday delayed adopting a tax rate. County Judge Dan Gattis said he favors setting the tax rate at the “effective rate” of 48.1 cents per $100 assessed valuation. The effective tax rate is the rate that would raise the same amount of money in the year ahead, as was raised in the year that’s ending, taking new property values into account. When property values go up — as they have — the effective rate comes in at a figure lower than the actual rate for the current year. This year’s county tax rate is 48.9 cents per $100 assessed valuation.
Because of those higher property values, Gattis said adoption of the 48.1 cent effective rate would raise county taxes by $21 for the average homeowner.
However, the other four members of the Commissioners Court favor setting the tax rate at the current rate, citing increased county spending.
Koenig said setting the tax rate at the effective rate would require taking $3.8 million from the county’s reserve fund, which is like a saving account. Assistant County Auditor Julie Kiley said the county anticipates having $73.8 million in reserves when the current fiscal year ends Sept. 30.
Leaving the tax rate at the current rate — which is what a majority of the Commissioner Court intends to do — will only require drawing $1.3 million from reserves in order to balance the budget, Koenig said.
However, since commissioners intend to set the tax rate at a rate higher than the effective rate, the county must hold a pair of public hearings Sept. 10 and 17 at the county courthouse in downtown Georgetown. Both hearings are scheduled for 10 a.m.
It would be much more fair and open if the commissioners would have one meeting in the evening. That way working people in Williamson County could have a chance to attend one of the public hearings.
According to the Alley’s House webpage for the event scheduled for Sept. 26, Davis is slated to share her story about being a teen mother and “meeting challenges to build a strong future for her daughters and for future generations of Texas women.” Alley’s House has served 800 girls since it opened in 1997. The agency offers case management, job training and GED classes.
For now the problem seems solved, but WilCo’s population is exploding. It’s grown nearly 70 percent percent since 2000. That growth is expected to continue which means the Sheriff’s Office may eventually be back at the Williamson County Commissioners Court asking for more help.
“Our jail population grows larger, our registered sex offender population grows larger, our fugitives from justice grow larger,” explained Mike Gleason. That means greater demand on a department that responds to every single call.
“We have 9 year olds who won’t eat their mashed potatoes their mom calls and we have that call too, a cat stuck in a tree, animals in your house — we go to every call,” he says.
The question is, when those calls go up will the county answer by opening its wallet again? As of right now there is not a clear answer.
“They do recognize the growth and they have commented that this is something that we need to stay on top of,” Gleason says.
“The duty of the corporation is to make money for shareholders,” Anderson said. “Every penny that a corporation can save on royalties is a penny of profit for shareholders, so why shouldn’t they try to save every penny that they can on payments to royalty owners?”
That pretty much says everything we need to know about why corporations should not be treated as a person. Because at least some people have morals, corporations don’t.
Yesterday I did a deeper dive into what happened when a country that thought like that, pictured thousands of angry black people massing in Washington, DC. The answer was: violent chaos.
The first news stories about, as the first Associated Press story put it, “Police intelligence reports that 100,000 Negroes might march on Capital Hill,” came on June 23. Some context: that May had begun the escalating confrontation between the forces of Martin Luther King Jr. and the forces of Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama. By Memorial Day, civil rights protests spread to half a dozen cities, including Columbus, Ohio, where two men chained themselves to the furniture in the capitol building. On June 11, registration day for new students at the University of Alabama, the state’s new governor George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” in Tuscaloosa to make sure no blacks were among them. His supporters included the editorialists of the Winona (Kansas) Leader, who wrote, “The very people who have the greatest stake in preserving the Constitution”—black people—“are doing the most to destroy it” with their meddlesome protesting. The same night as George Wallace’s stand, one of those meddlesome protesters, NAACP voter registration coordinator Medgar Evers, returned home from a day’s work past midnight and was shot dead in his own driveway. That evening, President Kennedy had given a brave, bold speech announcing his support for a civil rights bill to outlaw segregation in public accommodations—“a moral issue…as old as the scriptures…as clear as the American Constitution.” On June 19, the president presented his legislation in a special message to Congress. It included this admonition: “There have been increasing public demonstrations of resentment directed against this kind of discrimination—demonstrations which too often breed tension and violence. Only the federal government, it is clear, can make these demonstrations unnecessary by providing peaceful remedies for the grievances which set them off.” He repeated the point at the end of the speech: “I want to caution against demonstrations which can lead to violence.”
I explained Kennedy’s strange logic, which was all but universal among whites and even among plenty of timorous blacks, in Before the Storm: “In their conclusions the White House betrayed a constellation of unspoken assumptions about race relations—about social relations—in the United States: introduce bold legislation and the troublemakers would quit, like kidnappers who had been paid their ransom.”
But the troublemakers did not quit. And that freaked people the hell out.
The Associated Press: “It was learned from a top informant that Washington and Capitol police officials have expressed strong doubts that incidents could be avoided if 100,000 demonstrators, or even fewer thousands, began milling about Capitol buildings or grounds, or attempted to stage ‘sit-ins’ in or around the offices of any filibustering senators.”
Ooooh! “Milling” integrationists: scary, kids!
Martin Luther King, bless his soul, understood the game: don’t back down. He joined a group of leaders who met with the president. “Dr. King had told a banquet group just the before that ‘if they start filibustering, by the hundreds and the thousands and by the hundreds of thousands white people and black people ought to march on Washington.”
Damn, he spoke well. That sentence is poetry, pure pulsating rhythm: “by the hundreds and the thousands and the hundreds of thousands.” He also strategized well: he understood how the popular fear of violence advantaged the marchers. It was, as we’ll see, a sort of bargaining chip. And he would not trade it away lightly. The opposite, you might say, of Barack Obama, who keeps a bust of King in the Oval Office, and will no doubt have sonorous words on tap this Wednesday lionizing King—whose thought I don’t really think he understands at all.
Obama should actually keep a bust of Roy Wilkins, the head of the NAACP, because that is more who he is like. “I have never proposed sit-ins at the Capitol,” Wilkins said, according toThe New York Times. “I have said that any demonstrations, in Washington or elsewhere, should have specific, not general, objectives…I am not involved in the present moment.” Five days later he warned against what he termed a “whoopin’ and a hollerin’ operation.” I suppose he had reason to fear. For what the marchers were proposing to do might well be illegal. Explained the AP: “Federal laws specifically forbid demonstrations at the Capitol, Capitol buildings, or Capitol grounds without permission granted specifically by the vice president and the speaker of the House, acting jointly…. The blocking of roads and streets leading to the Capitol, and unauthorized ‘harangues’ also are forbidden in the Capitol area.”
And these two videos from Up with Steve Kornacki over the weekend say much more about the King’s legacy:
The Texas Progressive Alliance wishes everyone a happy new school year as it brings you this week’s roundup.
Off the Kuff shows how the city of Pasadena and Galveston County are trying to take advantage of the SCOTUS ruling on the Voting Rights Act to push through politically motivated redistricting plans.
Olivia at Texpatriate laments living in a world where the Lieutenant Governor can attempt to manipulate the law with little to no consequences.
David Dewhurst put his ailing political career out of its misery with one phone call to the Allen Police Department, and it fell to PDiddie at Brains and Eggs to write the obituary.
Republicans have figured out the best way bring back “states rights”. It’s to rule over the country from the states, where they hold much more power. WCNews at Eye on Williamson calls it Neutering the federal government .
Make way for the Bushes!! Specifically, George P. Bush. Many people have already crowned him as an “heir apparent” for the statewide office of Land Commissioner, but Texas Leftist thinks that if Democrats work hard, they can turn that heir apparent into an apparently NOT.
Neil at All People Have Value wrote about the taxpayer financed life boats on the Bolivar Ferry that runs across Galveston Bay. here seems little difference between state-purchased life boats and Texas Legislature support of Obamacare that will help so many people get health insurance coverage. All People Have Value is part of NeilAquino.com. Please check out the full NeilAquino.com site if so inclined.
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And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.
Walkable DFW draws a lesson in traffic management from the rail systems in Houston and Dallas.
The Observer profiles Jessica Luthor, the Janie-on-the-spot organizer during the rallies against anti-choice bills in the legislative special sessions.
And along those lines, Jessica Luther informs us of a new crowdfunding effort to create an educational online game about abortion and access in Texas.
I Love Beer is looking for a few volunteers for the 2013 Texas Craft Brewers Festival.
Nonsequiteuse wonders why we don’t regulate bounce houses more, given the Legislature’s oft-stated obsession with the health of women and children.
Juanita points out that if Greg Abbott can’t read all the way to the end of a tweet, his interpretation of anything longer than that cannot be trusted.
Concerned Citizens calls on San Antonio council member Elise Chan to resign.
Grits For Breakfast documents the rise of futuristic technology in police work.
Former Texan Roy Edroso gives retiring blogger TBogg an appropriate sendoff.
Via the City of Georgetown, MLK, Jr. ‘Dream’ Speech Commemoration On Saturday.
An event to mark the 50th anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. will be held at the Williamson County Courthouse on Saturday. The public commemoration begins at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, August 24. The event will be on the east steps of the Courthouse at 710 S. Main Street in Georgetown.
A reading of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is planned as part of the program for the event. The public is welcome to attend and participate.
The Georgetown event will coincide with a daylong program on Saturday in Washington to mark the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington and King’s “Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. The speech was a key moment in the history of civil rights in the U.S.
The event at the Williamson County Courthouse is co-sponsored by LULAC District VII, the Methodist Federation for Social Action, and the Central Texas NAACP.
The Cato Institute recently released a wildly misleading report by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes, which essentially claims that what low-wage workers and their families can expect to receive from “welfare” dwarfs the wages they can expect from working.
[...]
So what makes this so misleading?
For one, Tanner and Hughes make the assumption that these families receive simultaneous assistance from all of the following programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, Housing Assistance Payments, Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC), and The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). It is this simultaneous assistance from multiple sources that lets the entire “welfare benefits package” identified by Cato add up to serious money. But it’s absurd to assume that someone would receive every one of these benefits, simultaneously.
What’s more, their report carries the clear implication that welfare is (or should be expected to be) pulling low-wage workers out of the labor market by making life on welfare so attractive. In actuality, many low-income working families receive assistance through these programs.
And we know what happens when someone assumes. One glaring part is that when looking at the charts in the study, Texas is not one of the states that is even close to generous to welfare recipients. But EPI wraps up their debunking this way.
Tanner and Hughes are not telling a realistic story about the lives of low income Americans and the income provided to them by transfer programs. Where they have a point is how poorly work pays for too many American families, particularly low-wage workers. If they want to insure that work pays well for single mothers with two kids, it would seem more worthwhile to push for increases in the minimum wage and affordable child care. Cato’s view instead seems to be that since work alone is failing to provide secure living standards for many Americans, we should take away other sources of income from them, too.
