HallSlug.com

Author Archive

Indiana Pushing Hard for ‘Right to Work’

INDIANAPOLIS — Nearly a year after legislatures in Wisconsin and several other Republican-dominated states curbed the power of public sector unions, lawmakers are now turning their sights toward private sector unions, setting up what is sure to be another political storm.

The thunderclouds are gathering first here in Indiana. The leaders of the Republican-controlled Legislature say that when the legislative session opens on Wednesday, their No. 1 priority will be to push through a business-friendly piece of legislation known as a right-to-work law.

If Indiana enacts such a law — and its sponsors say they have the votes — it will give new momentum to those who have previously pushed such legislation in Maine, Michigan, Missouri and other states. New Hampshire’s Republican-controlled Legislature was the last to pass a right-to-work bill in 2011, but it narrowly failed to muster the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto by the Democratic governor; an Indiana law would re-energize that effort.

Right-to-work is also a potent political symbol that carries serious financial consequences for unions. Corporations view such laws as an important sign that a state has policies friendly to business. Labor leaders say that allowing workers to opt out of paying any money to the union that represents them weakens unions’ finances, bargaining clout and political power.

John Sampson, president of the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership, an economic development group, said companies were attracted to right-to-work states not because of lower wages but because the weakened role of unions means that companies get greater operating flexibility, which lowers their costs.

“Some people will say this is about bashing organized labor,” Mr. Sampson added. “From my point of view, there’s nothing better for labor than to create increased demand for jobs.”

Unemployment Claims at Nine Month Low?

WASHINGTON – The number of people applying for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level in nine months, that latest evidence that the job market is improving.

The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly applications dropped by 23,000 to a seasonally adjusted 381,000. That’s the lowest number of applications since late February.

The four-week average, a less volatile measure, fell for the ninth time in 11 weeks to 393,250. That’s the lowest average since early April. Applications that drop below 375,000 — consistently — tend to correlate with a steady decline in the unemployment rate.

“There have been numerous indications that the labor market is healing and today’s jobless claims report only reinforces that view,” Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG, a trading firm.

The unemployment rate fell to 8.6% in November, the government said last week, down from 9% the previous month. That’s the lowest rate in two and a half years.

Still, the unemployment rate dropped last month in part because more people gave up looking for work. Once the unemployed stop looking for jobs and drop out of the work force, they are no longer counted as unemployed.

WTF?  What are they counted as then?

Ohio Vote Shows Unions Still a Political Force

WASHINGTON (AP) — Labor unions are celebrating one of their biggest victories in decades after turning back an Ohio law that curbed collective bargaining rights for the state’s public workers. The vote showed unions are still a potent political force that can’t be ignored.

The question for many is whether to interpret Tuesday’s Ohio referendum as simply a rejection of Republican overreach in a heavily unionized state or more broadly as a barometer of a battleground state that could resonate with voters nationwide.

Union leaders say they hope it brings about a resurgence for a labor movement long in decline and sends a strong message to other states where lawmakers are thinking about restricting union rights. But they also want to use the outcome as a spark to help re-elect President Barack Obama and put more Democrats in office next year.

“I think the outcome is an absolute momentum-shifting victory for the labor movement,” said Harold Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Firefighters.

If unions succeed next year in recalling Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a top target after he pushed through similar legislation limiting union rights in his state, Schaitberger predicted “tremendous impact across the country.”

By a nearly 2-1 margin, Ohio voters repealed a new law that would have severely limited the bargaining rights of more than 350,000 teachers, firefighters, police officers and other state employees.

The law signed in late March by Republican Gov. John Kasich would have banned public employee strikes, scrapped binding arbitration, and denied public workers the ability to negotiate pensions and health care benefits.

Thousands Wait in Line for $12.50 an hour Nissan Jobs in Tennessee

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. (AP) – An estimated 5,000 people waited in line in Murfreesboro Wednesday, hoping to get one of 1,600 jobs at Nissan as the automaker ramps up hiring for a new battery plant at its Smyrna complex.

Yates Services, a maintenance contractor at the plant, held a job fair Wednesday for part-sorting, production line and forklift jobs and the response was the largest turnout for any Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce job fair.

RJ Sheer, an area manager with the labor department, told The Daily News Journal the jobs will pay an average of $12.50 an hour with benefits starting after 90 days.

Sheer said people showed up as early as 4 a.m. for a chance to get their applications in.

Will Solar Energy Become the New Normal?

When Bell Labs developed the first functioning solar cell in the 1950s, the equipment was rather cumbersome, primitive and inefficient. It remained so for the better part of several decades. Innovations such as thin-film, a smaller, cheaper and quicker-to-produce technology, have changed the game. Big players who once stood on the sidelines have jumped in.

“The traditional solar electric technologies seem to be tapped out, and most of the focus now is more towards commercializing and bringing the high-efficiency cells to the commercial outlets,” said solar market analyst M.J. Shiao of GTM Research, an alternative energy analysis firm.

The cost of producing electricity via solar technologies has fallen 60 to 70 percent over the last few years, according to Danielle Merfeld, a solar business leader for General Electric Energy’s Renewable Business. It has averaged an 18 percent drop in price for every doubling in capacity, she added.

In Germany, a feed-in tariff, which is design to accelerate investment in renewable energy, has created a surge in solar installations. So much so that on a bright, sunny day, about one-quarter of all electricity used across the nation comes from solar technology, Kurtz said.

GE Makes A Commitment

Adding to the price decrease is the increase in major players willing, now, to compete within the industry.

General Electric spent years monitoring the solar industry, trying to decipher the right moment to jump in, Merfeld said. On Oct. 13, it announced the buyout of Colorado’s PrimeStar Solar Inc., and will invest $600 million in thin-film solar technology.

“We’ve been looking at solar for over a decade now,” Merfeld said. “First we tried to understand if this is a real industry, then decided that it’s time to invest in it and try to grow.

“The biggest difference: It is much cheaper to manufacture and has the potential to be as efficient. We’re looking at this in the long-haul.”

Iraq War Vet Injured at Occupy Oakland Protest

OAKLAND, Calif. — The clash between Oakland police and Occupy Wall Street protesters left a Marine veteran who completed two Iraq tours in critical condition Wednesday after he was struck by a police projectile, a veterans’ group said.

Scott Olsen, 24, suffered a fractured skull Tuesday as he marched with other protesters toward City Hall, said Dottie Guy, of the Iraq Veterans Against the War. The demonstrators had been making an attempt to re-establish a presence in the area of a disbanded protesters’ camp when they were met by police officers in riot gear.

Paradox of the New Elite

IT’S a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.

At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.

The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

Other nations seem to face the same challenge: either inclusive, or economically just. Europe has maintained much more economic equality but is struggling greatly with inclusiveness and discrimination, and is far less open to minorities than is the United States.

European countries have done a better job of protecting workers’ salaries and rights but have been reluctant to extend the benefits of their generous welfare state to new immigrants who look and act differently from them. Could America’s lost enthusiasm for income redistribution and progressive taxation be in part a reaction to sharing resources with traditionally excluded groups?

“I do think there is a trade-off between inclusion and equality,” said Gary Becker, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a Nobel laureate. “I think if you are a German worker you are better off than your American equivalent, but if you are an immigrant, you are better off in the U.S.”

In the United States, the stratification of wealth followed several decades where economic equality was strong. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed underscored the excesses of the roaring ’20s and ushered in an era in which the political climate favored labor unions, progressive taxation and social programs aimed at reducing poverty.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the income of the less affluent Americans grew more quickly than that of their wealthier neighbors, and the richest 1 percent saw its share of the national income shrink to 8.9 percent in the mid-1970s, from 23.9 percent in 1928. That share is now back up to more than 20 percent, its level before the Depression.

Inequality has traditionally been acceptable to Americans if accompanied by mobility. But most recent studies of economic mobility indicate that it is getting even harder for people to jump from one economic class to another in the United States, harder to join the elite. While Americans are used to considering equal opportunity and equality of condition as separate issues, they may need to reconsider.

In an era in which money translates into political power, there is a growing feeling, on both left and right, that special interests have their way in Washington. There is growing anger, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, that the current system is stacked against ordinary citizens. Suddenly, as in the 1930s, the issue of economic equality is back in play.