EVEN WITH THIS NATION’S STAGGERING UNEMPLOYMENT, OBAMA’S ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKERS WILL CONTINUE WITH HIS NUMEROUS NON-TRANSPARENT AND DISGUISED FORMS OF AMNESTY FOR THE 38 MILLION ILLEGALS IN THIS COUNTRY AND OUR JOBS!
“On the same day as his visit to the Chrysler plant the Commerce Department reported that American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter—the highest figure since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago.”
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“The central aim of the administration is not providing skills or decent-paying jobs, but closing the gap between the wages of US workers and their brutally exploited counter-parts in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In this they have the full support of the UAW.”
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At Indiana Chrysler plant Obama hails revival of auto industry profits
By Jerry White
24 November 2010
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden made a joint appearance at a Chrysler transmission factory in Kokomo, Indiana Tuesday afternoon to promote last year’s bailout of General Motors and Chrysler.
Facing popular anger over his administration’s indifference to the victims of mass unemployment and foreclosures, the president’s handlers no doubt hoped the event would help Obama “reconnect with the people,” particularly after the Democrats’ debacle in the mid-term elections.
Instead, the event underscored the chasm between an administration that has done everything to defend the banks and corporations, and the working class, which has faced an unrelenting attack on jobs and living standards beginning with the forced bankruptcy and restructuring of GM and Chrysler.
On the same day as his visit to the Chrysler plant the Commerce Department reported that American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter—the highest figure since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago.
As always, the audience of “workers” was a carefully vetted group guaranteed to raise no criticism. These included UAW officials in Obama T-shirts, supervisors and state and local politicians who gave the president and vice president a standing ovation as they entered and applauded on cue during the speeches.
Before speaking, Obama welcomed Chrysler/Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne. According to a recently published account, during the auto bailout Marchionne declared that auto workers needed to accept a “culture of poverty” rather than a “culture of entitlement,” attacking, among other things, retiree health care benefits.
The president also gave a warm welcome to UAW President Bob King. The White House awarded the UAW a majority ownership stake in Chrysler in exchange for its collaboration in the destruction of the jobs, living standards and working conditions of workers at the third largest US automaker. Last week King celebrated the launching of the General Motors’ IPO—a stock sale that netted more than $3 billion for the UAW executives—by joining GM CEO Dan Akerson for the opening bell ceremony at the New York Stock Exchange.
Finally, there was the Democratic Party congressional delegation from Indiana. This included Congressman Andre Carson, who recently demanded that workers at GM’s Indianapolis metal stamping plant accept a 50 percent wage cut in order to attract a new buyer for the factory.
In his introductory remarks, Biden said the administration came into office amidst the worst economic crisis in generations and had outlined an economic plan to “help communities, save and create jobs and lay the foundations for a sustained growth of the US economy.”
But the vice president made it clear that the foundation for this growth was a drastic and permanent reduction in the wages and benefits of industrial workers. Before bailing out the auto companies, he said, the White House insisted they “had to change things, get leaner, tougher competitively.” The auto industry was in a “new era,” he said, and was “hiring again.”
In fact, new auto workers throughout the industry are being hired at $14 an hour, half the wages traditionally paid to auto workers. This and other attacks on health care, pensions and working conditions was the precondition set by the White House to bail out GM and Chrysler.
Biden boasted that the auto and auto parts industry had created 75,000 jobs over the last year—a figure that pales in comparison to the more than a quarter of a million jobs Detroit automakers alone have wiped out over the last seven years.
The situation in Indiana is particularly dire. Over 100,000 industrial jobs have been wiped out in Indiana since the recession began. The Indianapolis Star reported Tuesday that 560,000 state workers—18.1 percent of the workforce—was drawing unemployment, had fallen out of the labor force, or was being forced to work part-time.
In his remarks, Obama asserted that the economy was heading in the right direction. He said he was happy that “after a couple of tough years the plant is running at full capacity.” This evoked a delayed applause, perhaps because—as one worker at the plant told the WSWS—there are now only 3,000 workers employed at the transmission and casting complex in Kokomo, down from 6,000.
The president acknowledged that success at one plant “does not mean that people in Kokomo are not still hurting” and that throughout the country “millions are still looking for work.” As a sign of progress, he said, the city’s unemployment rate had fallen from 20 percent to 12 percent—an indication of what the administration apparently considers the new normal.
In a brief review of events leading up to the bailout Obama indicated that his administration was concerned over the potential economic and social upheaval that would have resulted from the outright liquidation of GM and Chrysler. “We knew millions of jobs were in the balance and that the collapse of the auto industry would lead to a deeper collapse of the economy,” he said.
In fact, the administration and the Wall Street investors it put in charge of the Auto Task Force decided to exploit the crisis to push through a historic rollback in the wages and conditions of auto workers. This succeeded in making the auto industry an attractive investment for the same financial speculators who precipitated the economic meltdown in 2008.
“We decided to stand behind the auto industry if the CEOs did what was necessary to be competitive and if they had the cooperation of the workers taking pride in what they made. Today we know that was the right decision,” Obama said, pointing to increased profits and “stock investors” who “expressed their confidence” in the GM IPO last week.
In remarks that won loud applause from the UAW officials, Obama played the “Buy American” nationalist card. “The most important contest we face is not between Democrats and Republicans but between America and our economic competitors,” Obama said. “We don’t want to cede anything to China—we want to make sure workers have the skills to compete.”
The central aim of the administration is not providing skills or decent-paying jobs, but closing the gap between the wages of US workers and their brutally exploited counter-parts in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In this they have the full support of the UAW.
Obama concluded by announcing that Chrysler had decided to invest another $800 million in the Kokomo facility, without mentioning what concessions the UAW had granted in return or what other plants would be shuttered or face layoffs instead.
“There’s always a price to be paid,” Chris, a Kokomo transmission worker, told the WSWS. “We would like to know what the UAW gave up. They are already hiring temporary workers whose top wage is $16 an hour and outside contractors who only make $14.
“The union is more interested in profits than in people. They measure success in profitability, not how many workers are employed or the wages and benefits they receive. That has all been taken away with a stroke of a pen. The $28 an hour wage is gone forever. With all that Bob King has said about ‘partnership’ it’s just a matter of time when we all see wage cuts—we expect that in the next contract.”
As for the claims that things were getting better in Kokomo, Chris, who was born and raised in the city, told the WSWS, “Kokomo used to be booming with industry and was called little Detroit because of the iron, steel, canning and printing industry. Now all of that is non-existent. Delphi has less than 1,000 workers and there is no work other than a bunch of restaurants. Throughout my life I’ve seen the deindustrialization of the city.”
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“A union-free America. Growth down a little, employment down a lot. Profits and productivity up, wages flat. Health-care costs up for workers, down for employers. The return of a thriving middle class? Dream on.”
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Hard times for workers on Labor Day 2010
By Harold Meyerson
Monday, September 6, 2010; A15
On Labor Day 2010, the state of America's workers is appalling.
Millions have lost their jobs. Millions have had their lives put on hold or thrown into reverse.
Granted, it's a global recession. The state of the world's workers -- at least in the advanced democracies -- should be equivalently appalling. But it's not. The Great Recession has taken a far greater toll on our nation's workers than on workers in similar countries, even those whose economies have dipped more steeply than ours.
Consider: As of this year, U.S. gross domestic product is about 1 percent beneath its 2008 peak, compared to a drop of roughly 2 percent in France and Germany and 5 percent in Britain and Japan. But U.S. unemployment has increased roughly 5 percentage points since 2007, compared to just 1 point in France and Japan and 2 in Britain. In Germany, unemployment has actually dropped a point since the recession began.
No wonder Christina Romer confessed bewilderment at the scope of American job losses in her valedictory speech as head of the president's Council of Economic Advisers last week. American employers have responded to recession with far more layoffs than their counterparts in comparable or even worse situations in other nations.
One reason for this anomaly is that productivity has surged in the United States, enabling employers to maintain output with far fewer workers. For those workers still on the job, though, this story seemingly should have a happy ending: Sustained production with fewer workers should equal higher wages, should it not?
It should, but it hasn't. As Andrew Sum and Joseph McLaughlin of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies have documented, pretax corporate profits increased $388 billion from the low point of the current recession, the second quarter of 2009, to the third quarter thereafter, while wages increased just $68 billion. At a comparable point in the 1981-82 recession, corporate profits came to just 10 percent of the combined uptick in profits and wages. This time around, they amount to 85 percent.
If you've wondered how big banks' profits have rebounded to pre-crisis levels and how American corporations have come to be sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash -- even as unemployment remains well above 9 percent -- wonder no more. They have pocketed their revenue, neither resuming lending (if they're banks), nor rehiring laid-off workers nor giving raises to those who have continued to work for them.
A similar tale can be told about employers and health insurance, the costs of which have continued to rise. It's not the employers, however, who have borne those increases. A survey, released Thursday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust, shows that employee premiums rose 13.7 percent over last year, while the amount that employers contributed dropped -- dropped! -- 0.9 percent.
Only a purblind ideologue could miss the pattern here. American employers -- more than employers in other nations and more than American employers in earlier downturns -- have imposed the costs of the recession and, increasingly, the costs of doing business, on their workers, and kept for themselves damn near all the proceeds from doing business.
What gives? Are American employers meaner than their European counterparts and American forebears? I doubt it. The difference is that American workers have markedly less power than their European counterparts and their American forebears.
That's partly because unemployment remains so high here. More fundamentally, though, the U.S. private sector is almost entirely -- 93 percent -- nonunion. Unlike European workers, unlike their own parents and grandparents who lived in a much more heavily unionized America, U.S. workers are now powerless to stop their employers from pocketing all the change.
The source of this problem is outlined in two reports scheduled for release Monday from two very different organizations, the liberal Human Rights Watch, and Freedom House, an organization with a staunch Lane-Kirkland-esque antipathy toward authoritarian regimes left and right: Through the weakness of our labor laws, the reports say, private-sector American workers can no longer form unions. Human Rights Watch documents how corporations that are model (and highly profitable) employers in Europe and frequently collaborate with unions there descend to American employer norms -- denying workers the right to join unions -- when they come over here. Freedom House, citing the near-impossibility of forming unions in this country, laments that the United States cannot be classed among the 41 nations that afford their workers full freedoms.
A union-free America. Growth down a little, employment down a lot. Profits and productivity up, wages flat. Health-care costs up for workers, down for employers. The return of a thriving middle class? Dream on.
And a happy Labor Day, one and all.
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Michelle Malkin
The U.S. Department of Illegal Alien Labor
President Obama's Labor Secretary Hilda Solis is supposed to represent American workers. What you need to know is that this longtime open-borders sympathizer has always had a rather radical definition of "American." At a Latino voter registration project conference in Los Angeles many years ago, Solis asserted to thunderous applause, "We are all Americans, whether you are legalized or not."
That's right. The woman in charge of enforcing our employment laws doesn't give a hoot about our immigration laws -- or about the fundamental distinction between those who followed the rules in pursuit of the American dream and those who didn't.
While in Congress, she opposed strengthening the border fence, supported expansion of illegal alien benefits (including driver's licenses and in-state tuition discounts), embraced sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate with federal homeland security officials to enforce immigration laws, and aggressively championed a mass amnesty. Solis was steeped in the pro-illegal alien worker organizing movement in Southern California and was buoyed by amnesty-supporting Big Labor groups led by the Service Employees International Union. She has now caused a Capitol Hill firestorm over her new taxpayer-funded advertising and outreach campaign to illegal aliens regarding fair wages:
"I'm here to tell you that your president, your secretary of labor and this department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay -- especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours," Solis says in the video pitch. "We can help, and we will help. If you work in this country, you are protected by our laws. And you can count on the U.S. Department of Labor to see to it that those protections work for you."
To be sure, no one should be scammed out of "fair wages." Employers that hire and exploit illegal immigrant workers deserve full sanctions and punishment. But it's the timing, tone-deafness and underlying blanket amnesty agenda of Solis' illegal alien outreach that has so many American workers and their representatives on Capitol Hill rightly upset.
With double-digit unemployment and a growing nationwide revolt over Washington's border security failures, why has Solis chosen now to hire 250 new government field investigators to bolster her illegal alien workers' rights campaign? (Hint: Leftists unhappy with Obama's lack of progress on "comprehensive immigration reform" need appeasing. This is a quick bone to distract them.)
Unfortunately, the federal government is not alone in lavishing attention and resources on workers who shouldn't be here in the first place. As of 2008, California, Florida, Nevada, New York, Texas and Utah all expressly included illegal aliens in their state workers' compensation plans -- and more than a dozen other states implicitly cover them.
Solis' public service announcement comes on the heels of little-noticed but far more troubling comments encouraging illegal alien workers in the Gulf Coast. Earlier this month, in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, according to Spanish language publication El Diario La Prensa, Solis signaled that her department was going out of its way to shield illegal immigrant laborers involved in cleanup efforts. "My purpose is to assist the workers with respect to safety and protection," she said. "We're protecting all workers regardless of migration status because that's the federal law." She told reporters that her department was in talks with local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials who had visited coastal worksites to try to verify that workers were legal.
No word yet on whether she gave ICE her "we are all Americans, whether you are legalized or not" lecture. But it's a safe bet.
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MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
From the above blog, email articles to those concerned about Obama’s endless push for amnesty.
FAIRUS.org
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