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Archive for March, 2010

Medical Marijuana and Job Loss

(CNN) — When a rare form of cancer invaded Joseph Casias’ nasal cavity and his brain, his doctor prescribed marijuana to help alleviate the daily pain.

Casias lives in Michigan, where medical marijuana is legal.

But his employer, Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer, fired him in November 2009 after he failed a drug test.

Casias, 29, says he never came to work high. He’s got a medical marijuana card to prove he’s allowed to smoke legally in the state.

“I was angry they did this to me because I always tried my best,” said Casias, who was employed at Wal-Mart for five years. He earned an Associate of the Year award in 2008. “I want my job back. I thought I was part of the Wal-Mart family.”

To date, 14 states have laws allowing the use of medical marijuana, which shield legal users from criminalization but don’t protect them from them penalties enforced by their employers. As more people are being prescribed marijuana across the nation, they are wrestling with a caveat: They could be fired.

Michigan is an at-will employment state, which means employers can terminate a worker for any reason except for being in a federally protected class such as race, gender and religion.

But medical marijuana users are not considered a protected group. If a company has zero-tolerance drug policies, then they can fire someone who uses medical marijuana, attorneys say. Labor law experts say most states operate this way, unless the employee has a specific employment contract that makes exceptions for medical marijuana use.

In 2008, the California Supreme Court backed up employers, ruling a private company could fire an Air Force veteran whose doctor prescribed him marijuana for his chronic and disabling back pain. The veteran was hired by a telecommunications company but fired several weeks after he tested positive for marijuana. The landmark case has many medical marijuana users fretting about their employment prospects, legal experts say.

But Michigan may be an exception to most states. Part of Michigan’s law, passed in 2008, does address employers, saying a patient carrying a medical marijuana card cannot be “denied any right or privilege” by a “business or occupational or professional licensing board.”

Some attorneys say Michigan’s law could be fertile grounds for a discrimination suit. Casias hasn’t decided whether he will pursue a lawsuit.

Blue Collar Workers Hanging By a Thread

They arrive for work at 7:25 a.m. and many of their cars are rusting buckets of crud. Except for the boss’s. He drives a Volvo.

Walk in the door at Schaefer Screw Products and there is the enemy — the clock. The oil vapors and solvents are overwhelming. The yellow light is dispiriting. The workers don’t want to be here. The liquor bottles in the weedy lot out back tell part of the story. The graffiti in the bathroom — profanely denouncing “hard workers” — tells the rest.

The workers punch the clock at precisely 7:30 a.m., not a minute later since they would be docked 14 minutes and nobody in America works 14 minutes for free. A quiet resignation settles over them as the roar of the screw grinding machines rev up. Want it or not, they need to be here. After this place, there is no place. Not in today’s America.

This machine shop may be the next wobbling domino in the collapse of the American manufacturing sector and the struggles of its blue-collar workers. There are at least seven shops nearby that are available for lease.

NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, created a free trade block beginning in 1994. But that is only part of the story. The World Trade Organization (WTO) began quietly in 1995, encouraging a sort of worldwide NAFTA that all but eliminated international trade barriers. China was admitted in November 2001 and since then Michigan has lost nearly 400,000 manufacturing jobs or nearly 50 percent of its industrial work force.

For workers here, their boss is the closest they will come to THE MAN. And by THE MAN they mean the bozos in Washington, D.C., who voted for the trade agreements and the bank deregulations that let the jobs slip away and money disappear into thin air.

When they say THE MAN, they mean the wolves on Wall Street who amplified the housing bubble and nearly took the world economy down. Instead of paying the price and going out of business and collecting their own unemployment checks, the Wall Street wizards got a multibillion-dollar bailout and bonuses.

Goldman Sachs, which was a heartbeat away from failure in 2008 and received $40 billion in federal aid, paid out $16 billion in bonuses and compensation in 2009 — an average of nearly $500,000 per employee. The bank paid just $14 million in taxes.

At the same time, Deutsche Bank forecasts that a quarter of homeowners are underwater and RealtyTrac.com reported 315,000 foreclosures in January, the most for that month on record. Many economists are predicting a bleak year in the housing market if wages and unemployment don’t improve.

“You feel the whole thing’s a swindle,” says Cindi Borbi, the 59-year-old account manager behind a desk in a cloud of cigarette smoke. Her husband took his life last year after being let go from his auto supply firm. He left his wife a broken heart, a mound of debt and a house she can’t pay for. “I’m looking for a basement if you’ve got one.”

Money Fueled Evil in Detroit

In the end, it’s all about the money and getting more of it.

Money is the reason Monica Conyers, the former City Council president, is headed for 37 months in a federal prison, convicted of taking bribes from Synagro Technologies Inc. in exchange for her vote. She wanted more of it, her “loot.”

Money is the reason that Detroit’s disgraced former mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, is furiously trying to keep from going back to jail for violating probation, chiefly for hiding money he could have used to repay $1 million in restitution to the city he claims to love. His ardor has limits when weighed against the prospect of losing the good life and being indicted by the feds.

Like so much else in the rotten political culture that helped lead Detroit to the brink of collapse, it was all about them. It was about enriching them, about power for them, about perks and prestige for them, as watching Conyers preside over a council budget hearing could attest.

Seldom if ever was it about the people who elected them to represent the public, a quaint notion largely out of fashion in modern politics. The deepening plight of their city, or the fiscal wreck, or the structural rot, or the unpredictability of it all to business leaders and regional political players? Not so much, even though both of them, in their own ways, helped to foster it all.

The falls of Conyers and Kilpatrick, each endowed with powerful names in Detroit political circles, are only just beginning to reverberate. But if they pave the way for more responsible, more competent, leadership, they each will have performed at least one valuable public service.

Credit Card Payment More Important Than House Payment?

In an unprecedented shift, for some consumers having a credit card in good standing appears to have taken priority over having a roof over one’s head, experts said.

While overall consumer debt rose unexpectedly in January, consumers continued to pay off their credit cards that month — a record 16th straight month of lower credit-card debt — with such debt dropping about $1.7 billion to $864.4 billion, according to the Federal Reserve on Friday.

But a small slice of those consumers are paying down credit cards to the detriment of their mortgage loan. The number of consumers delinquent on their mortgages but current on their credit cards rose to 6.6% in the third quarter of 2009 from 4.3% in the first quarter of 2008, according to a TransUnion study of 27 million anonymous consumer records pulled randomly from its database. Meanwhile, the portion of those who fell behind on credit-card payments but paid their mortgage dropped to 3.6% from 4.1%.

The trend is more common among consumers with the lowest credit scores. The percentage of consumers with low scores who paid credit cards rather than home loans shot up to 29% in the third quarter of 2009 from 19.1% in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to TransUnion. And in that low-credit-score group, consumers falling behind on credit cards but keeping pace with mortgage payments declined to 14.5% in 2009 from 18.1% in the first quarter of 2008.

Let’s Rethink How We Punish

Patricia Caruso, head of the state Corrections Department, offered one of my all-time favorite quotes when she said a few years ago of Michigan’s swelling prison population: “We need to decide who we’re afraid of and who we’re mad at.”

We’re running out of time to make that decision. Michigan is releasing about 2,000 additional prisoners this year to trim the Corrections budget. Among their ranks are killers, assaulters, robbers and an assortment of other despicable characters who have served their minimum sentences, but could be held longer under Michigan law.

Next year, the stream becomes a flood, if the Legislature approves Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s budget. The governor wants to free 7,500 more inmates by rewriting sentencing guidelines.

It’s a budget move, and one I support. Michigan is broke and getting broker. It doesn’t have the luxury of being as harsh on crime as perhaps it would like.

This issue isn’t going away. Michigan must commit to a smaller inmate population for the long haul. So, going back to Caruso’s quote, we ought to use this opportunity to radically rethink how we punish.

Nonviolent offenders should not be behind bars, unless they present a habitual threat to property. Nor should those who have lived an otherwise law-abiding life but through a lapse of judgment took a one-time swerve from the straight and narrow.

We’ve got to reserve our prison cells for the really scary guys and find alternative ways to punish everyone else.