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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.

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.

Occupy Wall St. Draws Largest Crowds to Date

NEW YORK — In its biggest day yet, thousands of anti-Wall Street protesters rallied in Times Square on Saturday, buoyed by a global day of demonstrations backing their month-long campaign against economic inequality.

“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out!” protesters chanted from within police barricades. Police, some in riot gear and mounted on horses, tried to push them out of the square and onto the sidewalks in an attempt to funnel the crowds away.

“It’s not every day that you get to be at the most significant uprising in a generation,” Occupy Wall Street said on its Facebook page. Protesters said they did not have any police permits for the New York demonstrations.

Police were directing protesters to stay on the sidewalk, saying they would arrest anyone who did not keep moving.

The march came a day after protesters at the heart of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement in New York exulted Friday after beating back a plan they said was intended to clear them from the privately owned park where they have slept, eaten and protested for the past month. They said their victory will embolden the movement across the U.S. and abroad.