All posts by carldavidson

Immigrant Rights, Organizing, trade unions, Youth and students

McDonald’s ‘Guest Workers’ in Harrisburg Area Stage Surprise Strike

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McDonald’s Workers in NYC

By Josh Eidelson
Beaver County Blue via The Nation

March 6, 2013 – Alleging unpaid wages and repeated retaliation, McDonald’s workers in central Pennsylvania launched a surprise strike at 11 this morning. The strikers are student guest workers from Latin America and Asia, brought to the United States under the controversial J-1 cultural exchange visa program. Their employer is one of the thousands of McDonald’s franchisees with whom the company contracts to run its ubiquitous stores.

“We are afraid,” striker Jorge Victor Rios told The Nation prior to the work stoppage. “But we are trying to overcome our fear.”

The McDonald’s corporation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The J-1 visa program is officially intended to promote educational and cultural exchange. But advocates allege that J-1, like the other guest worker programs that collectively bring hundreds of thousands of workers in and out of the United States each year, is rife with abuse. The National Guestworker Alliance (NGA), the organization spearheading today’s strike, charges that such programs—whose future is intimately tied up with the fate of comprehensive immigration reform—offer ample opportunities for employers to intimidate workers, suppress organizing and drive down labor standards.

“McDonald’s is just the latest in a long line of corporations that have hijacked the US guest worker program to get cheap, exploitable labor, and that’s what the students are,” NGA Executive Director Saket Soni told The Nation. “The conditions are horrific, but have become the norm for guest workers.”

The workers are striking over what they charge are rampant abuses at their stores in Harrisburg and nearby Lemoyne and Camp Hill. According to NGA, the visiting students each paid $3,000 or more for the chance to come and work, and were promised full-time employment; most received only a handful of hours a week, while others worked shifts as long as twenty-five hours straight, without being paid overtime. “Their employer is also their landlord,” said Soni. “They’re earning sub-minimum wages, and then paying it back in rent” to share a room with up to seven co-workers. “Their weekly net pay is actually sometimes brought as low as zero.”

Continue reading McDonald’s ‘Guest Workers’ in Harrisburg Area Stage Surprise Strike →

Economy, GOP, Poverty, safety net

GOP Worships the ‘Hand,’ Disrespects Those Who Work With Them

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By Leo Gerard
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost

March 4, 2013 – The invisible hand of the market, which the GOP worships as an infallible god, is curled into a fist and is pounding America’s lowest-paid workers.

Those workers have complained about the grinding poverty level of minimum wage. Wal-Mart warehouse workers and New York fast food workers recently demonstrated. They’re fed up. Well, they would be if they could afford enough to eat. President Obama responded, asking Congress to raise the minimum wage, which was last increased to $7.25 an hour in 2009.

Republicans, the party of NO, replied to Obama’s request with a surly, "No way!" Respect the hand, they said, referring to their beloved spectral regulator of the market. Government, Republicans said, must not tell business what to do, must not "burden" business by requiring it to pay a little more. Republicans never mention the burden under which 18 million minimum wage workers struggle, working full-time for $15,080 a year, barely enough to feed, clothe and house themselves. That’s because Republicans revere non-humans — corporations and invisible hands — while denigrating and disrespecting humans who work with their hands to serve food, care for the elderly and stock shelves.

The disrespect could be heard in Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s voice as he derided 47 percent of all Americans as "takers." That huge number Romney despises includes minimum wage workers – 84 percent of whom are 20 or older — whose children receive immunizations and antibiotics through Medicaid because employers paying minimum wage virtually never provide health insurance.

Continue reading GOP Worships the ‘Hand,’ Disrespects Those Who Work With Them →

fair trade, Organizing, trade unions, Youth and students

Pitt Students in Solidarity with Garment Workers

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University of Pittsburgh heats up over sweatshops

By Alex Zimmerman

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Feb. 24, 2013 – When Joe Thomas dropped off a letter signed by 25 student organizations at University of Pittsburgh chancellor Mark Nordenberg’s office, he thought he’d get a response.

When he didn’t get one, he helped persuade 24 more student organizations — including Pitt’s student government board — to drop off letters themselves.

"We were dropping off letters just about every day," Mr. Thomas said.

The letters ask Pitt to affiliate with the Worker Rights Consortium, an independent monitoring organization that works with 180 universities across the country to investigate factories where university-licensed apparel is manufactured.

Continue reading Pitt Students in Solidarity with Garment Workers →

labor, Obama, Poverty, safety net

The Minimum Wage Would Be $21.72 An Hour If It Rose With Productivity Since 1968

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From boldprogressives.org

Activists are mobilizing around President Obama’s call to raise the minimum wage to $9.00, and polling shows that Americans across the political spectrum agree with such a policy.

But here’s an interesting fact about what the minimum wage could be instead. The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s John Dewitt looked at what the minimum wage would be if it simply rose with productivity — that is, if workers were actually paid for the increasing amount of output — since 1968, and found that it would be almost 3 times what it is now:

Since 1968, however, productivity growth has far outpaced the minimum wage. If the minimum wage had continued to move with average productivity after1968, it would have reached $21.72 per hour in 2012 – a rate well above the average production worker wage. If minimum-wage workers received only half of the productivity gains over the period, the federal minimum would be $15.34.

Even Obama’s modest plan to raise the minimum wage is expected to face intense opposition from Big Business and its lobbyists.

Economy, health care, Poverty, safety net, Seniors, social security, unemployment

US Capitalism Redistributing Wealth ‘Upward’

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Nine Economic Facts That Will Make Your Head Spin

By Lynn Stuart Parramore
Beaver County Blue via Alternet.org

Feb 18, 2013  |  How much will you need for medical expenses in retirement? What does it cost to keep 2.5 million Americans behind bars? Here are a few facts and figures that might surprise you.

1. Recovery for the rich, recession for the rest.

Economic recovery is in rather limited supply, it seems. Research by economist Emmanuel Saez shows that the top 1 percent has enjoyed income growth of over 11 percent [3] since the official end of the recession. The other 99 percent hasn’t fared so well, seeing a 0.4 percent decline in income.

The top 10 percent of earners hauled in 46.5 percent of all income in 2011, the highest proportion since 1917 – and that doesn’t even include money earned from investments. The wealthy have benefitted from favorable tax status and the rise in stock prices, while the rest have been hit with a continuing unemployment crisis that has kept wages down. Saez believes this trend will continue in 2013.

2. Half of us are poor or barely scraping by.

The latest Census Bureau data shows that one in two Americans currently falls into either the “low income” category or is living in poverty. Low-income is defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level. Adjusted for inflation, the earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have dropped from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000. Earnings for the next 20 percent have been stuck at $37,000.

States in the South and West had the highest proportion of low-income families, including Arizona, New Mexico and South Carolina, where politicians are eagerly shredding the social safety net.

Continue reading US Capitalism Redistributing Wealth ‘Upward’ →

Banks, Democrats, Economy, PDA

Why We Like Elizabeth Warren!

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Elizabeth Warren Grills Banking Regulators at First Hearing

By Rachel Rose Hatman

Yahoo News

Democrats eager to see consumer champion Elizabeth Warren take Wall Street’s biggest banks to task got their wish on Thursday when the newly elected Democratic senator made her debut at a Senate Banking Committee hearing.

"What I’d like to know is tell me a little bit about the last few times you’ve taken the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street all the way to a trial," the Massachusetts lawmaker said to applause, speaking to the federal regulators gathered for a hearing on Wall Street reform.

No witnesses spoke up.

Warren raised her eyebrows. "Anybody?" she asked.

Thomas Curry, head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, spoke up: "We’ve actually had a fair number of consent orders. We do not have to bring people to a trial…"

"I appreciate that you say you don’t have to bring them to trial," Warren said. "My question is, when did you bring them to trial?"

"We have not had to do it as a practical matter to achieve our supervisory goals," Curry said.

Warren moved on to the rest of the panel, knowing full well that none of the regulators present have brought a Wall Street bank to trial.

"I’m really concerned that ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial,’" Warren later said.

Warren ousted Republican Sen. Scott Brown in November in a hard-fought campaign. She was President Barack Obama’s first pick in 2011 to head up the government’s newly established Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an entity the former Harvard University law professor and attorney helped create. But Republicans in Washington essentially killed her nomination, citing her record of taking on big banks and Wall Street. That opposition helped boost Warren’s reputation and led Democrats nationwide to embrace her decision to run for U.S. Senate.

Community, Green Jobs, Infrastructure, labor

Street Heat over Mass Transit in the Harrisburg Statehouse

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Transit supporters rally for more state funding

By Mark Shade

Beaver county Blue via Phillyburbs.com

HARRISBURG, Feb 12 — Gov. Tom Corbett is talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in new transportation spending in his proposed 2013-14 budget, but transit proponents don’t like what they’re hearing and many of them took the bus to tell him about it Monday.

Molly Nichols, a volunteer with Pittsburghers for Public Transit, told about 200 transit operators and customers from her city, Philadelphia, Harrisburg and elsewhere that people have a right to public transit.

“Bus lines and transit lines are our lifelines,” Nichols said in between the chants she led. “We use them to get to school, to work, to the doctor’s office, to churches, to shops … and current transit service is not efficient or affordable for our residents.”

She said public transportation operators are facing a severe funding crisis that needs more attention from the governor and lawmakers. Continue reading Street Heat over Mass Transit in the Harrisburg Statehouse →

Debt, Economy, unemployment, Wall Street, Youth and students

Usurious Credit and Debt as Our Prison Cages

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Breaking the Chains of Debt Peonage

By Chris Hedges
Truthdig.com

Feb 3, 2013 – The corporate state has made it clear there will be no more Occupy encampments.

The corporate state is seeking through the persistent harassment of activists and the passage of draconian laws such as Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act—and we will be in court next Wednesday to fight the Obama administration’s appeal of the Southern District Court of New York’s ruling declaring Section 1021 unconstitutional—to shut down all legitimate dissent.

The corporate state is counting, most importantly, on its system of debt peonage to keep citizens—especially the 30 million people who make up the working poor—from joining our revolt.

Workers who are unable to meet their debts, who are victimized by constantly rising interest rates that can climb to as high as 30 percent on credit cards, are far more likely to remain submissive and compliant.

Debt peonage is and always has been a form of political control. Native Americans, forced by the U.S. government onto tribal agencies, were required to buy their goods, usually on credit, at agency stores. Coal miners in southern West Virginia and Kentucky were paid in scrip by the coal companies and kept in perpetual debt servitude by the company store. African-Americans in the cotton fields in the South were forced to borrow during the agricultural season from their white landlords for their seed and farm equipment, creating a life of perpetual debt. It soon becomes impossible to escape the mounting interest rates that necessitate new borrowing.

Continue reading Usurious Credit and Debt as Our Prison Cages →

Community, Environment, Marcellus Shale

Everything Goes Somewhere: Toxic Brine Wound Up in the Beaver River, then the Ohio

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Youngstown Residents React to Fracking Wastewater

By Rachel Morgan
Beaver County Blue via Shalereporter.com

Feb 6, 2013 – YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Youngstown-area residents are not just angry over the dumping of an estimated 20,000 gallons of suspected fracking wastewater into a storm sewer that empties into the Mahoning River.

They’re furious that it took five days for anyone to find out.

“I’m outraged,” said Liberty Township Trustees Chairman Jodi Stoyak. “(But) I’m more upset that this occurred last week, and the ordinary public is just hearing about it today.”

Stoyak said she read about the incident — which occurred about 7:30 p.m. Jan. 31 — in the media Wednesday morning.

Other elected officials echoed Stoyak’s sentiments.

State Rep. Bob Hagan of Youngstown, D-60th, said not being notified was one of his biggest issues with the incident.

“I’m an elected official here,” he said. “I think I should have been at least notified as soon as possible. We had a serious, dangerous situation where someone purposely dumped contaminated drilling refuse, and in (that refuse) are toxic chemicals.”

Continue reading Everything Goes Somewhere: Toxic Brine Wound Up in the Beaver River, then the Ohio →

elections, GOP, Voting Rights

Pennsylvania Republicans To Introduce New Election-Rigging Plan

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Republicans in other states are wavering, but not our die-hard right wingers

By Ian Millhiser
ThinkProgress.org

Feb 4, 2013 – Last month, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus called up “states that have been consistently blue that are fully controlled red” to rig future presidential elections by changing the way electoral votes are allocated.

Under Priebus’ proposal, blue states such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania would stop awarding electoral votes to the winner of the state as a whole, and instead would award them one-by-one to the winner of each congressional district. Meanwhile, red states would continue to award 100 percent of their electors to the Republican. This plan appears to have lost steam, however, as several top Republicans in key states announced they will not support it.

Even as Republicans in key states such as Michigan, Ohio, Florida and Virginia came out against this election-rigging plan, however, Pennsylvania Republicans have been eerily quite. We now know why. According to the New Castle News a local paper in western Pennsylvania, Senate Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi (R) will introduce legislation this month that will effectively give away a large chuck of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate, regardless of who wins the state as a whole.

How This Election-Rigging Plan Works

Unlike the plan Priebus backs, the New Republican Plan would not tie electoral votes to congressional districts. Instead, it would award the overwhelming majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes proportionally according to the popular vote, with two additional electoral votes going to the winner of the state as a whole. If the New Republican Plan had been in effect in 2012, Mitt Romney would have received 8 of Pennsylvania’ 20 electoral votes, despite losing the state by a substantial margin.

Continue reading Pennsylvania Republicans To Introduce New Election-Rigging Plan →