The lockout is corporate bullying

Locked out workers protest in Freehold.
(Photo from Democratic press release)

Workers at a New Jersey Shore beer distributor have been locked out — a tactic growing more frequent as corporate managers around the country attempt to gut union protections, slow wage growth and slash health and retirement costs.

As The Nation reported last year, lockouts are growing in frequency. It is the management version of the strike — except that the strike is a tool designed to level the playing field between workers and management, who usually hold most of the cars. The lockout also stops work, but it makes use of management’s unequal power — as a rule, they hold all the cards — to force workers to grant concessions. As Michelle Chen writes,

The lockout is, essentially, a work stoppage initiated by the employer: the boss applies pressure to workers in a labor dispute by suspending operations. The power dynamics of blocking workers from their jobs, however, play out differently than a worker-led uprising. The Century Foundation (TCF) analyzed trends in labor lockouts and concluded that firms inherently wield dramatically more leverage over workers—that is, that lockouts are more damaging to workers than strikes are to employers—due to sheer volume of political and economic clout, beyond the bargaining table.

This may seem to fly in the face of current thinking. There are many who view unions as too strong, their workplace rules as an impediment to business. But unions are at their weakest point in decades, perhaps since they first popped up in the United States. The percentage of unionized workers in the private sector has dropped into the single digits, while public employee unions are battling just to maintain their limited power (see Wisconsin). Pro-management, pro-corporate politicians have drafted and passed so-called “right-to-work” laws, laws that allow workers to opt out of joining unions or paying dues for services unions provide.

The Shore Point lockout occurs within this climate. The North Brunswick-based company locked out 113 workers on April 30, “in an attempt to force them to give up their pension, agree to a three-year wage freeze, and agree to give the company permission to change their health insurance plan and healthcare costs at any time,” according to a press release from Teamsters Local 701.

Workers are fighting back by protesting at Shore-area festivals and by convincing local restaurants and bars to stop serving MillerCoors products until the lockout ends — at least according to the Teamsters. Three Democratic state legislators — Senate President Steve Sweeney and Assembly members Joann Downey and Eric Houghtaling — joined a protest in Freehold yesterday and announced legislation designed to help workers during lockouts. The bill, if approved, would “help workers cover the cost of health care during a lockout” by offering “funding assistance to pay for COBRA health benefits.” The chances of such a bill getting through the Legislature are unclear, but it is unlikely that, if it makes it to his desk, Gov. Chris Christie would sign it.

The bill would be an improvement on current law, which forces locked out workers to pay their own and their employers share of health coverage costs, but it does not go far enough. Current law tilts the playing field toward management, making it easier for companies to use the lockout as a negotiating threat. Employers lose potential revenue when they initiate a work stoppage, but they also avoid paying out salaries and benefit costs, limiting their exposure during a lockout, and they control the lockout’s duration. When workers strike, however, they control duration, but they give up everything — a sacrifice they make willingly. Employers should have to put more on the line when they lock out workers, including covering both their portion of benefit costs and those of their workers. They also should have to pay something into union strike funds, if not be forced to continue meeting their payroll.

I don’t expect changes of this magnitude to occur anytime soon — workers are too fragmented and the labor movement is too weak. The threats of outsourcing and company relocation remain strong, and labor has yet to develop a national and international mindset to address these issues. And rebuilding the labor movement during the age of Trump is likely to prove difficult, given his empty promises on jobs, and the Democrats’ lack of attention to union issues.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Trump cuts the deepest

(Updated) The Trump budget unveiled today — a $4.1 trillion plan for fiscal year 2018 — will have devastating affects on all but the richest Americans, cutting programs that aid the poor while increasing spending on security and cutting taxes for the rich.

As The New York Times reports, the budget “calls for an increase in military spending of 10 percent and spending more than $2.6 billion for border security — including $1.6 billion to begin work on a wall on the border with Mexico — as well as huge tax reductions and an improbable promise of 3 percent economic growth.”

At the same time, the paper reports that the budget will be balanced on the backs of the nation’s neediest citizens — with massive cuts to Medicaid and the various nutrition and welfare programs. (The Times wrongly refers to these as entitlement programs, a term that should be reserved only for programs like Social Security whose recipients are entitled to benefits because they paid into the programs. Programs for the poor are means based and often include a variety of other qualifiers that limit participation.)

Over the next decade, it calls for slashing more than $800 billion from Medicaid, the federal health program for the poor, while slicing $192 billion from nutritional assistance and $272 billion over all from welfare programs. And domestic programs outside of military and homeland security whose budgets are determined annually by Congress would also take a hit, their funding falling by $57 billion, or 10.6 percent.

The plan would cut by more than $72 billion the disability benefits upon which millions of Americans rely. It would eliminate loan programs that subsidize college education for the poor and those who take jobs in government or nonprofit organizations.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney says the budget will return the nation’s economy to a time of more robust growth. He calls it a

“Taxpayer First Budget,” and he said they worked to jettison any spending that they felt they could not defend. In total, this meant roughly $3.6 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years.

These cuts, White House officials said, would usher in a sustained period of strong economic growth that would grow wealth, create more jobs, and reduce poverty.

“I think what Trumponomics is and what this budget is a part of is an effort to get to sustained 3 percent economic growth in this country again,” Mulvaney said in a briefing with reporters.

This is magical thinking at its finest. Most economists think we are long past the days of 3 percent or better growth, and they view these kinds of projections as overly rosy and potentially dangerous. Assuming growth targets beyond our reach will only inflate our deficits — and it will do so without any discernible economic benefits.

Budgets are priority statements — former N.J. Gov. Christie Whitman famously said they are the place where politicians “put their money where their mouth is.” Budgets tell us what policy makers think is most important, and what they view as unimportant. Trump, in this budget, is underscoring his commitment to security — something I think is overblown — while also highlighting the nastier aspects of his message. His cuts are to programs that assist people in need and, while he claims these are failed programs, he offers no evidence of this. And he makes no real effort to offset his cuts, leaving many to fend for themselves.

Mulvaney said as much, as The Washington Post reported:

Mulvaney said too many of these programs spend other people’s money. He said the government should show “compassion” for low-income Americans but it should “also…have compassion for folks who are paying [for] it.”

“Other people’s money” implies that taxes are illegitimate — a taking of other’s wealth. It also obscures the real issue here, which is that the rich have found ways to pay less and less in recent years, pushing the cost of government onto the backs of the middle class at exactly the same moment that the word taxpayer has replaced citizen as a signifiers of civic connection. Taxpayer in the popular imagination means middle class, which allows people like Mulvaney to claim to be protecting the broad swath of Americans from the poor shiftless folks at the bottom. (There is a racial component to this, but I’ll leave that for another day.)

Trump’s focus on security, especially border security and his targeting of immigrants, is actually of a piece with his proposed gutting of the social safety net. Taken as a whole, the new spending on security and cuts to programs for the poor indicate that those in need are not priorities, that those who have been victimized by capitalism both here and abroad are of no concern.

Trump’s budget, however, is not about “compassion” for the middle class. It is about redistribution upward — and the “folks who are paying” will still get shafted.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Breeders, welfare and race — an Instagram essay

I posted this the other day on my Instagram account as an Instagram essay. The original (corrected) Instagram version is followed by the text of the essay.

#onbreeders 1/2 The verb “to breed” has several different meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary lists its primary meaning (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/breed ) this way: “(of animals) mate and then produce offspring,” with the following example sentence: “toads are said to return to the pond of their birth to breed.” It then offers five primary uses, the first two re-enforcing this animal connection: “[with object] Cause (an animal) to produce offspring, especially in a controlled and organized way” and “[with object] Develop (a variety of animal or plant) for a particular purpose or quality.” Other meanings — to rear and train, to produce or lead to an outcome (“success had bred a certain arrogance”) — expand the word’s use beyond the animal kingdom, but they are more colloquial, and their meanings remain dubious. The notion of breeding in humans is usually used in two ways, both of which are focused on creating division among us and creating a human hierarchy. When the wealthy or upper classes — or even the professional classes in our meritocratic society — talk about breeding, they do so to claim exceptional genetic material or to point to the elite opportunities they’ve received that set them apart from the rest of us. While it is growing more common for us to think this way — the expectation that DNA research will allow us to choose traits in our children — our fascination shares some common elements with the eugenics movement and its goal of creating a better breed of human. Historically, this has been a race-based desire, though one that makes its claim without talking specifically about race. #instagramessay @newspoet41
A post shared by Hank Kalet (@kaletwrites) on

#onbreeders 2/2 When we use it as this decal does, it flips the elitism script and turns the focus onto so-called lower classes and the social safety net. But it does not do this innocently. Most of us do not describe our parents or ourselves as breeders, do not say “we’re allowed to breed kids because we can feed them.” But we — in the middle class — do not have to subject ourselves to this thinking — either do to our racial privileges, or because we’re not asking the government for help. We do expect help, of course, through tax policy and other goodies that favor whites and the middle-class, but we’ve classed as something else. This allows us to say we are better or more evolved. We’re Americans, but welfare mothers are something else; they are “breeders,” the equivalent of horses or sheep, the decal and the them Ning behind it implies. That welfare mothers, in the popular imagination, are believed to be a) black and/or Hispanic, and b) abusing the system by popping out babies purely to increase the size of their welfare checks, is left unstated but ties directly into the word’s various meanings. These “animalistic” women, the decal implies, are “produc(ing) offspring … in a controlled and organized way” to achieve “a particular purpose.” The decal also is being produced for “a particular purpose” — to play on and foster racist stereotypes, to dehumanized and ultimately to gut the social safety net. It is racist in its intent, if not specifically in its language. I don’t know the guy who owns the truck, but he’s sending everyone a message about who he is. #instagramessay @newspoet41
A post shared by Hank Kalet (@kaletwrites) on

The verb “to breed” has several different meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary lists its primary meaning this way: “(of animals) mate and then produce offspring,” with the following example sentence: “toads are said to return to the pond of their birth to breed.” It then offers five primary uses, the first two re-enforcing this animal connection: “[with object] Cause (an animal) to produce offspring, especially in a controlled and organized way” and “[with object] Develop (a variety of animal or plant) for a particular purpose or quality.” Other meanings — to rear and train, to produce or lead to an outcome (“success had bred a certain arrogance”) — expand the word’s use beyond the animal kingdom, but they are more colloquial, and their meanings remain dubious.

The notion of breeding in humans is usually used in two ways, both of which are focused on creating division among us and creating a human hierarchy. When the wealthy or upper classes — or even the professional classes in our meritocratic society — talk about breeding, they do so to claim exceptional genetic material or to point to the elite opportunities they’ve received that set them apart from the rest of us. While it is growing more common for us to think this way — the expectation that DNA research will allow us to choose traits in our children — our fascination shares some common elements with the eugenics movement and its goal of creating a better breed of human. Historically, this has been a race-based desire, though one that makes its claim without talking specifically about race.

When we use it as this decal does, it flips the elitism script and turns the focus onto so-called lower classes and the social safety net. But it does not do this innocently. Most of us do not describe our parents or ourselves as breeders, do not say “we’re allowed to breed kids because we can feed them.” But we — in the middle class — do not have to subject ourselves to this thinking — either due to our racial privileges, or because we’re not asking the government for help. We do expect help, of course, through tax policy and other goodies that favor whites and the middle-class, but we’ve classed them as something else. This allows us to say we are better or more evolved. We’re Americans, but welfare mothers are something else; they are “breeders,” the equivalent of horses or sheep, the decal and the the thinking behind it implies. That welfare mothers, in the popular imagination, are believed to be a) black and/or Hispanic, and b) abusing the system by popping out babies purely to increase the size of their welfare checks, is left unstated but ties directly into the word’s various meanings. These “animalistic” women, the decal implies, are “produc(ing) offspring … in a controlled and organized way” to achieve “a particular purpose.” The decal also is being produced for “a particular purpose” — to play on and foster racist stereotypes, to dehumanized and ultimately to gut the social safety net. It is racist in its intent, if not specifically in its language.

I don’t know the guy who owns the truck, but he’s sending everyone a message about who he is.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

What NJ Congressmen say about the #ACArepeal vote

The House of Representatives has passed repeal the Affordable Care Act by a 217-213 vote, with all but two New Jersey Congressmen voting “no” on the bill. Overall, all House Democrats and 20 House Republicans voted against the bill.

New Jersey progressives and Democrats are vowing to target the two “yes” votes — Tom MacArthur of the 3rd District and Rodney Frelinghuysen of the 9th.

MacArthur was an expected “yes” — it was his compromise plan on which the final bill was based.

Chris Smith had said beforehand that he planned to vote “no.”

Democrats like Josh Gottheimer and Frank Pallone were united in opposition.

Few New Jersey House districts are competitive, but Leonard Lance is in one that could be.

Bill Pascrell went after the GOP and the repeal bill repeatedly, and with gusto.

This is where Frelinghuysen’s posts would go.

Donald Payne Jr. was just as adamant as Pascrell.

Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

House GOP plans Thursday vote to gut ACA

Tomorrow appears to be D-Day for health care in the U.S. House of Representatives.

As The New York Times reports, Republicans have scheduled a vote Thursday on a bill “to repeal and replace large portions of the Affordable Care Act after adding $8 billion to the measure to help cover insurance costs for people with pre-existing conditions.”

The bill’s outlines are troubling. It does away with protections for pre-existing conditions, allowing states to “apply for waivers allowing insurers to charge higher rates based on a person’s ‘health status.’”

The bill attempts to offset this change, which will result in many losing their coverage, by setting aside $23 billion for the sickest customers and $100 billion to aide states.

Significantly, according to the Times, the bill also rolls back Medicaid expansion — “a major reason the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the original bill would leave 24 million more Americans without health insurance after a decade.” Tomorrow’s vote comes “before C.B.O. can finish a fresh assessment of its cost and impact.”

To put it kindly, the bill is a disaster.

The most vulnerable in our economy will pay the price for the repeal, while those in the broad middle get nothing. And the rich? They’ll be getting a tax cut, if not in this bill, then later on.

As Chris Hayes of MSNBC and The Nation put it in a tweet:

That’s unconscionable, but it seems pretty clear at this point that the right-wing has no conscience.

In any case, the vote is expected to be close — The Guardian (UK) calls it “a nail-biter” — and there are no guarantees.

The party needs at least 216 votes to pass the measure, meaning they can only afford to lose 22 votes if all Democrats oppose the bill as expected. On Wednesday, at least 18 Republicans publicly opposed the bill and as many as two dozen remained undecided, according to counts maintained by news organizations.

U.S. Rep, Kevin McCarthy, in a photo from his website.

Still, the GOP leadership believes it will pass, according to the Times..

“We have enough votes,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said Wednesday night. “It’ll pass.’”

Three of New Jersey’s five Republican Congressmen — Frank LoBiondo, Leonard Lance and Chris Smith — have announced they will vote no on the plan. A fourth, Tom MacArthur, of Ocean County, is a chief architect of the compromise plan. Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, a North Jersey Congressman, opposed the previous repeal, but “refused to talk at all about where he stands on Thursday,” according to The Huffington Post.

If the reports are correct, only four Republicans need to be swayed — and Frelinghuysen could be one. So, if you’re in his district, make your voice heard tomorrow. The Affordable Care Act is far from perfect, but repealing it will leave too many without access to coverage.
Send me an e-mail.

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.