Wednesday, October 17, 2018

ASSAULT ON THE AMERICAN WORKER - THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND THEIR CORRUPT UNIONS BRING IT ON..... Again!

"Moreover, all of the seven states (New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, California and Ohio) suffering the worst losses of income, in absolute terms, due to taxpayer out-migration from 2015 to 2016 lack Right to Work laws."




Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and 


Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and 


Union Bosses



BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY

 Editorial Reviews

Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?



Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests” Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses, and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P. Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s Obamanomics.

Bay area hotel workers determined to fight as union, Democrats try to derail strike

By our reporters 
17 October 2018
Strikers on the picket lines at Marriott hotels in San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland have expressed their determination to fight poverty level wages and increased medical costs as they struggle to live in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in America. The 2,700 workers in the Bay Area who walked out on October 4 and 5 are part of nearly 8,000 workers in Boston, Detroit and the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Maui who are striking against the world’s largest hotel chain.
“We’re all overworked,” Alfredo, a 38-year-old cook with Marriott Oakland, told the World Socialist Web Site. “After I come out of the kitchen, I have been working so hard, I’m sweating like I just spent a couple hours in the gym.”
Striking hotel workers in San Francisco
Alfredo continued, “They’re raising the cost of our medical benefits from $25 to $300 a month. You have workers here who have worked with Marriott for over 35 years. They are old, and they gave their life to this company. The main reason they don’t retire is because they’ll lose their medical benefits if they quit, and now Marriott does this. Nobody can afford these costs and still make ends meet on our pay.
“My girlfriend and I have three kids. I get paid $19.25 an hour and we have to pay $2,600 a month just for rent to get a two-bedroom apartment in Hayward. That does not include utilities. Our two older kids share one room, and the baby sleeps with us in the other. My girlfriend has a car, but I don’t so I take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) into work. With the price of housing in the Bay Area, you cannot make ends meet on the amount we’re getting paid.”
The police have parked multiple squad cars in front of the hotels directly opposite the picket lines and multiple officers stand watch over the strikers throughout the day. Diana, a Marriott housekeeper walking the picket line, told the WSWS that the police have been there constantly since October 5, the day the strike began in Oakland.
Alfredo says, “The cops claim they’re here because Marriott called them and said that our noise was ‘an assault.’ A lot of workers are saying that Marriott is paying the cops. Man, this is Oakland. There is something sketchy going on just up the street but the cops stay here and guard Marriott from a peaceful picket line.”
Another worker, Diana, told the WSWS that Marriott keeps increasing the workload for housekeeping. “Many of the rooms get trashed, and it takes time to clean those rooms. When we go to management and tell them that a particular room is trashed, and we need to skip that room to meet our quota on time, management always tells us that the room isn’t a mess and we should clean it up and still meet our quota.”
Marriott is raising the amount that she is expected to contribute for her healthcare as a single person from $10 to $172 a month. “I can’t afford that,” she says. “The only reason I manage to afford rent is because I live in Section 8 housing.”
Far from mobilizing the broad support hotel workers have to shut down the hotel industry, the UNITE HERE union has limited picketing to symbolic levels, allowing Marriott to continue operations with strikebreakers. At the same time, it has left workers on starvation level strike benefits of $60 a day even though the union has assets worth more than $150 million and pays its union president, Donald Taylor, a salary of $362,034.
“The union should be giving us more for strike pay,” Julio, a steward at the Oakland Marriott for 23 years, told the WSWS. “We have to picket 30 hours per week to get $300, but that’s not enough. We can’t continue to support our families without our job.”
Hotel strikers on the picket line
Referring to the company, Julio said, “I gave them the best years of my life for nothing. It’s not right. The company doesn’t want to pay enough for us to survive. They won’t pay for health insurance or retirement. We’re not asking for so much, just a small raise and healthcare coverage.”
The raise the union is calling for is $5 total—$2 the first year, then $1/year for the next three years. Julio’s current wage is $16/hour, near the minimum wage in Oakland which is $13.23.
Julio has two kids, ages 15 and 18, and has to work multiple jobs to support them. “Almost everyone that works here has to have two or three jobs in order to live in the Bay Area because the rent is too high. In addition to working here, I have to work part-time at a supermarket near where I live.”
When asked for his thoughts on the role of the big business parties, Julio replied, “The Democrats and Republicans don’t give a crap about us. We suffer. We have to have multiple jobs just to survive. The politicians work for their own, they’re big fishes that eat it all and leave nothing for the little people.”
While isolating the striking workers, the UNITE HERE union has given the Democratic Party a platform to posture as their saviors and hustle for workers’ votes in the run up to the November 6 election. Last week, the union staged a civil disobedience protest in conjunction with the Democrats in downtown San Francisco. Anand Singh, the head of UNITE HERE Local 2, and Wei-Ling Huber, president of East Bay’s Local 2850, were among dozens who were arrested.
The same day, San Francisco city supervisors Hillary Ronen, Ahsha Safai and Vallie Brown endorsed the strike and urged Mayor London Breed to do the same. The mayor responded by offering to meet with leaders of UNITE HERE Local 2 union this week, stating, “As a longtime supporter of organized labor, I support the rights of workers to organize, collectively bargain, and advocate for better wages and benefits.”
Kevin De Leon, the Democratic Party’s nominee to replace the hated US Senator Dianne Feinstein, made a token visit to the Marriott picket lines, as did local San Francisco Democrats Sandra Lee Fewer and Aaron Peskin.
Far from speaking for workers, the Democrats, no less than the Republicans, have overseen more than a decade of declining worker living standards even as they handed over trillions of dollars to bailout the Wall Street banks. In Illinois, the unions are backing billionaire gubernatorial candidate JB Pritzker, one of the heirs to the Hyatt Hotel fortune. The Chicago-based Pritzkers—who played a prominent role in Obama’s rise to the White House—are notorious for their attacks on hotel workers.
In contrast to the union, workers are determined to fight. To take this battle forward, hotel workers need to form rank-and-file committees, independent of the union, to fight for the shutdown of the entire hotel industry. These committees should reach out to other sections of workers—at UPS, Amazon, teachers in Los Angeles and other cities—and fight to develop a common struggle against the corporate giants and the two big business parties that defend them.

Striking hotel workers starved on meager or no strike pay

The multi-billion-dollar business of American trade unions

16 October 2018

More than 7,000 workers are currently on strike at Marriott International hotels in eight US cities. The housekeepers, servers, cooks, doormen and other hotel workers, many of whom earn $11 an hour or less, are fighting for improved wages, medical benefits and working conditions at the world’s largest hotel chain.
The workers walking the picket lines have been put on starvation strike rations by UNITE HERE, which is working to isolate and help defeat the separate struggles. After a week, workers qualify for a meager $300 per week strike benefits, or $60 a day—though only if they have put in at least 30 hours on the picket lines.
The UNITE HERE Local 5 web page in Hawaii advises impoverished workers that it is time “to work out a bare-bones budget and ways to pay for essentials” and to “look to family and friends for emotional and/or financial support.” They add that workers should try to “raise money by selling something or eliminate expenses that don’t seem essential,” and the union provides a sample letter that workers can send to creditors to try to forestall utility shutoffs or the loss of their cars or homes.
This sage council on the virtues of being frugal comes from an organization that controls massive investments, run by individuals with incomes that put them in the top five percent of the population—or higher. According to the 2017 filing with the US Labor Department, UNITE HERE President Donald R. Taylor took home $362,034 last year. This places him in the top one percent of individual income earners in the US, according to a calculator created by the Wall Street Journal.
The secretary treasurer, Gwendolyn Mills, made $194,762 (top 2 percent), and the union’s 50 executive and international vice presidents made up to $188,337 (top 3 percent).
These executives oversee large business enterprises. In 2016, UNITE HERE controlled assets worth over $150 million, including marketable securities and other investments of $77.2 million.
Its cash disbursements for the year are even more revealing. It spent $95.5 million in 2016. This included:
·         $30 million for “representational activities”
·         $15 million for “union administration”
·         $10 million for benefits to union officials
·         $10 million for the purchase of investments and fixed assets, including $7 million for building improvements to its lower Manhattan headquarters, valued at over $20 million.
In comparison, its expense for strike benefits was $772,000, or 0.8 percent of its total expenditures for the year.
And this is only the national headquarters. UNITE HERE Local 11 (Los Angeles), for example, spent $18.8 million in 2016 ($0 in strike benefits). UNITE HERE Local 24 (Detroit) spent $3.8 million ($0 in strike benefits).
From the standpoint of the officials that control these organizations, and their army of lawyers and accountants, any strike is a drain on resources. It is an intolerable expense, no matter how minor, that must be subtracted from their bottom line and, ultimately, their own pockets.
And UNITE HERE is hardly unique. There are 189,217 union officers and staff employees with a reported total compensation of $3.6 billion. Workers pay $8.5 billion in annual dues, often deducted automatically from their paychecks, for the privilege of being sold out by these organizations.
The number of workers in unions has fallen steadily to 14.8 million, including 7.6 million in the private sector (only 6.6 percent of the workforce). The assets of the unions and the income of the executives, however, have gone in the opposite direction.
For example, the American Federation of Teachers, which along with the National Education Association has worked to isolate and suppress teachers strikes this year, has $129 million in assets, not including its control of $1trillion in retirement funds, which are invested in hedge funds and the stock market.
The AFT spent $341 million in 2017, including:
·         $76 million for “representational activities”
·         $25 million for “general overhead”
·         $10 million for “union administration”
·         $20 million for benefits and …
·         $0 in strike benefits.
Top-paid executives of the AFT are:
·         President Randi Weingarten, $514,144
·         Executive Vice President Mary Cathryn Ricker, $332,463
·         Secretary Treasurer Lorretta Johnson, $395,291.
All three are in the top one percent of income earners. The AFT and its locals have on staff almost 30 people making more than $200,000 a year, and well over 200 making more than $100,000 a year. Meanwhile, teachers are taking on second jobs as Uber drivers to make ends meet.
The Teamsters, which recently declared that its concessions contract with UPS was ratified despite a majority “no” vote, has assets of some $270 million. In 2015, it spent $190 million, including less than $1 million on strike benefits. Its top-paid officials include President James P. Hoffa, $387,244; Secretary Treasurer Richard Hall, $281,845; and International Vice President Sean O’Brien, $302,442. Hoffa is in the top one percent, while Hall and O’Brien are “only” in the top two percent of income earners.
Pay at some of the less prominent unions is even higher. Terrence O’Sullivan, general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America, has an income of $772,105. In the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, President Newton Jones had an income of $692,279 in 2017, and the next six officers made between $456,707 and $572,710.
In addition, the unions run mortgage, credit card, housing investment, construction and other businesses. The union managers derive lucrative income and investment opportunities from these businesses and have a direct stake in the continued inflation of the stock market, which has risen in inverse proportion to the decades-long decline in workers’ wages and living standards that has been overseen by these very same organizations.
After years, if not decades in these positions, these business managers and their counterparts in the United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers, AFSCME, etc., have no doubt become millionaires and multi-millionaires.
It used to be said that the unions were run by a “labor bureaucracy.” To use this term to describe the current situation is to conceal reality. These executives do not constitute a “bureaucracy” that has some relationship, however distorted, to the conditions of the workers they claim to represent. Rather, they are corporate managers and executives, running cheap-labor contractors and an industrial police force.
Likewise, the term “union” is something of a historical anachronism. These organizations are not involved in “uniting” workers. Rather, they serve to divide workers from each other and prevent a struggle against the dictatorship of corporate management. Over the past four decades, they have worked to virtually eliminate the elementary expression of working-class resistance—the strike. They have a vested interest in preventing the class struggle and, above all, a revolutionary challenge from the working class against the capitalist system.
Those who insist that the unions remain “defensive organizations of the working class” want to subordinate the interests of workers to the needs of the upper middle class and ruling class. Their appeals to workers to “reform” the unions are inevitably bound up with the hope that such “reforms” will elevate themselves into lucrative positions within the management apparatus.
The working class in the US and around the world is entering into struggle against the massive inequality and social crisis that these organizations helped to create. The organization of this struggle, and its development into a common offensive against the capitalist system, requires the formation of new organizations, including rank-and-file factory and workplace committees. Millions of workers are beginning to draw this conclusion.
Jerry White

Forced-Unionism States Face 

$200B Income Loss as Taxpayers 

Flee Slow-Growth States


Stan Greer
 By Stan Greer | 


Right to Work demonstrators hold signs that read "Stand With Workers" outside the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. (Screenshot)
For decades, hardworking taxpayers have been fleeing the slow-growth states that permit the firing of employees for refusal to bankroll an unwanted union (now 23 in number) and relocating in faster-growth Right to Work states, where such firings are prohibited.  And thanks to data furnished by the Statistics of Income (SOI) division of the IRS, it is possible to calculate the sum total of wages, salaries, and other income taxpayers take with them when they flee.
The SOI division records the number of personal income tax filers who move (typically with their dependents, if they have any) across state lines, based on address changes in their tax returns.  The SOI data are arranged according to the year taxes are filed.
The most recent available data, for the Tax Filing Year 2016, show that a total of 1.78 million tax filers were residing that year in a Right to Work state after residing somewhere else in the U.S. the previous year.  (Since the ban on forced union dues now in effect in Kentucky, the most recent state to implement a Right to Work law, took effect only last year, it is regarded as a forced-unionism state in this analysis.  West Virginia, which adopted a Right to Work law in 2016, is excluded.)
Meanwhile, roughly 1.60 million tax filers were residing in a Right to Work state in 2015, but filed from somewhere else in the U.S. in 2016.  That means a net total of nearly 180,000 tax filers moved from a forced-unionism state to a Right to Work state between 2015 and 2016.
The SOI division also calculates and makes public the aggregate adjusted gross incomes for tax filers as reported in the year immediately following their move from one state to another.
Personal income tax filers moving out of a forced-unionism state between 2015 and 2016, reported a total of  $128.8 billion in income in 2016, or $75,958 per filer.  Tax filers moving into a forced-unionism state reported a total of $104.5 billion in income, or $68,763 per filer.
Both because of their substantial taxpayer losses due to net domestic out-migration, and because the tax filers they gained reported nearly $7,200 less income apiece than the tax filers they lost, forced-unionism states lost a total of $24.3 billion in adjusted gross income in a single year.
Moreover, all of the seven states (New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, California and Ohio) suffering the worst losses of income, in absolute terms, due to taxpayer out-migration from 2015 to 2016 lack Right to Work laws.
The 2015-2016 SOI state migration data do not represent a temporary problem for forced-unionism states.  Over the past five years for which SOI data are available, these Big Labor-dominated states collectively lost a total of $96.3 billion (2017 dollars) in adjusted gross income.
States without Right to Work laws are now on track to lose roughly $200 billion in income to domestic out-migration over the course of this decade, or 30 percent more (in constant dollars) than they lost during the first decade of the millennium.
What will it take to convince elected officials in forced-unionism states that are economically torpid or unaffordable for middle-class Americans, or both, that their current policies governing labor relations aren’t working and need to be changed?
Eventually, shrinking revenue bases may finally shake the complacency of Big Labor politicians who don’t seem to mind if far more taxpayers are leaving their state than are moving in.
It shouldn’t require fiscal catastrophes to persuade state elected officials to stop hurting the vast majority of their constituents just so the special privileges of a relative handful of union bosses can be perpetuated and even expanded.  But state insolvency may well arrive before Big Labor politicians in states like New York, Illinois, and New Jersey acknowledge that monopolistic unionism has to be rolled back.
Stan Greer is senior research associate at the National Institute for Labor Relations Research. NILRR’s website is www.nilrr.org. He is also editor of the National Right to Work Committee’s newsletter.

Record high income in 2017 for top one percent of wage earners in US

By Gabriel Black 
20 October 2018
In 2017, the top one percent of US wage earners received their highest paychecks ever, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
Based on newly released data from the Social Security Administration, the EPI shows that the top one percent of the population saw their paychecks increase by 3.7 percent in 2017—a rate nearly quadruple the bottom 90 percent of the population. The growth was driven by the top 0.1 percent, which includes many CEOs and corporate executives, whose pay increased eight percent and averaged $2,757,000 last year.
The EPI report is only the latest exposure of the gaping inequality between the vast majority of the population and the modern-day aristocracy that rules over them.
The EPI shows that the bottom 90 percent of wage earners have increased their pay by 22.2 percent between 1979 and 2017. Today, this bottom 90 percent makes an average of just $36,182 a year, which is eaten up by the cost of housing and the growing burden of education, health care, and retirement.
Meanwhile, the top one percent has increased its wages by 157 percent during this same period, a rate seven times faster than the other group. This top segment makes an average of $718,766 a year. Those in-between, the 90th to 99th percentile, have increased their wages by 57.4 percent. They now make an average of $152,476 a year—more than four times the bottom 90 percent.
Graph from the Economic Policy Institute
Decades of decaying capitalism have led to this accelerating divide. While the rich accumulate wealth with no restriction, workers’ wages and benefits have been under increasing attack. In 1979, 90 percent of the population took in 70 percent of the nation’s income. But, by 2017, that fell to only 61 percent.
Even more, while the bottom 90 percent of the population may take in 61 percent of the wages, large sections of the workforce today barely pull in any income at all. For example, Social Security Administration data found that the bottom 54 percent of wage earners in the United States, 89.5 million people, make an average of just $15,100 a year. This 54 percent of the population earns only 17 percent of all wages paid in America.
However unequal, these wage inequalities still do not fully present the divide between rich and poor. The ultra-wealthy derive their wealth not primarily from wages, but from assets and equities—principally from the stock market. While the bottom 90 percent of the population made 61 percent of the wages in 2017, they owned even less, just 27 percent of the wealth (according to the World Inequality Report 2018 by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman).
The massive increase in the value of the stock market, which only a small segment of the population participates in, means that the top 10 percent of the population controls 73 percent of all wealth in the United States. Just three men—Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates—had more wealth than the bottom half of America combined last year.
Wages are so low in the United States that roughly half of the population falls deeper into debt every year. A Reuters report from July found that the pretax net income (that is, income minus expense) of the bottom 40 percent of the population was an average of negative $11,660. Even the middle quintile of the population, the 40th to 60th percentile, breaks even with an average of only $2,836 a year.
As the Social Security Administration numbers show, 67.4 percent of the population made less than the average wage, $48,250 a year in 2017, a sum that is inadequate to support a family in many cities—especially, with high housing costs, health care, education, and retirement factored in.
For the ruling class, though, workers’ wages are already too much. The volatility of the stock market and the deep fear that the current bull market will collapse has made politicians and businessmen anxious of any sign of wage increases.
In August, wages in the US rose just 0.2 percent above the inflation rate, the highest in nine years. Though the increase was tiny, it was enough to encourage the Federal Reserve to increase the interest rate past two percent for the first time since 2008. Raising interest rates helps to depress workers’ wages by lowering borrowing and spending. As the Financial Times noted, stopping wage growth was “central” to the Federal Reserve’s move.
Further analysis of the Social Security Administration data shows that in 2017, 147,754 people reported wages of 1 million dollars or more—roughly, the top 0.05 percent. Their combined total income of $372 billion could pay for the US federal education budget five times over.
These wages, however large, still pale in comparison to the money the ultra-rich acquire from the stock market. For example, share buybacks and dividend payments, a way of funneling money to shareholders, will eclipse $1 trillion this year.
Whatever the immediate source, the wealth of the rich derives from the great mass of people who do the actual work. Across the United States and around the world, workers, young people, and students have entered into struggle this year over pay, education, health care, immigration, war and democratic rights. This growing movement of the working class must set as its aim confiscating the wealth and power of this tiny parasitic oligarchy. Society’s wealth must be democratically controlled by those who produce it.

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