At noon today students and workers demonstrated at the Wells Fargo Bank on South Russell with a message aimed at the U.S. Congress.
One sign put it this way: "It's time for an economy that works for everyone."
The event was one of about 100 actions in 35 states held today and involving a total of about 10,000 people. The Missoula group gathered because they were frustrated with an economy weakened by years of corporate excess.
The Wells Fargo branch on Russell may seem innocuous enough, but the bank is part of the problem. Despite profits of about $95.8 billion over the last decade, the median wage of a Wells Fargo bank teller is only $10.21 per hour or only about $21,000 a year.
Since last fall, Wells Fargo has collected $25 billion in federal bailout funds. During that time, the bank has used some of that money -- taxpayer money -- to lobby against banking reforms, like the $690,000 spent in just three months to fight the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, the Foreclosure Prevention Act, the Consumer Overdraft Protection Fair Practices Act, the Credit Card Fair Fee Act and legislation that would let judges modify mortgages to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.
Lately, Wells Fargo has continued its fight against the Employee Free Choice Act. The measure would make it easier for workers to bargain with employers for better wages, benefits, and working conditions by ensuring they can exercise a free choice to join together in a union without management interference or intimidation.
"Americans have had enough of an era of unchecked corporate excess," said Andy Stern, president of the 2-million member SEIU, the Service Employees International Union. "Congress needs to fix the underlying problems by ensuring workers can have a voice, health care, and a financial system that works for people, not lavish corporate lifestyles."
The nationwide protests challenge Congress to take immediate steps to rebuild an economy that works for everyone by passing:
• The Employee Free Choice Act so workers have the freedom to form unions for a voice to share in the economic progress they help create.
• Affordable, quality health care for all where everyone, including big corporations, does their share and Americans no longer have to go without quality health care or face health costs that sink a family's budget.
• Strong banking reform to make sure the financial services industry can never again bring our economy down by prioritizing huge profits and executive pay over responsible lending, or by preying on consumers, gambling with families' hard-earned money, and hiding their dealings.
(Robert Struckman writes for Montana Change That Works, a project of the Service Employees International Union.)
The Montana Chamber keeps it going. Repeat the misinformation often enough and people just might believe it.
The Missoulian owes its readers a correction for printing this op-ed.
Here's just a few incorrect facts and misleading statements:
They do this by taking away secret ballot elections in union campaigns and replacing it with a system called "card check."
False. Nowhere in the Employee Free Choice Act are secret ballot elections taken away. The meaningful difference is simply that majority sign-up, also known as "card check," no longer needs employer approval to be used as the mechanism for unionizing at work. Webb Brown's statement here is flat-out untrue.
Also, as I've pointed out before, under the Employee Free Choice Act, employees retain the ability to request secret ballot decertification elections if they wish to no longer be unionized.
Under this system, union organizers would be able to approach workers and ask them to sign a card saying they want a union. This form of organizing leaves employees vulnerable to labor union strong-arm tactics and peer pressure.
Highly Misleading. Under the current election system, union organizers already are able to "approach workers and ask them to sign a card saying they want a union." In fact, they already have to do that to form a union. In this situation, nothing changes. In fact, the ability of union organizers to talk to other people -- or of employees to talk to their co-workers -- is and should be a protected First Amendment right. Webb Brown is grandstanding here.
Employers would be forced to reach a deal on collective bargaining agreements within 90 days of a successful union election. If no agreement is made, government arbitrators will come and make the decisions.
This isn't actually false or misleading, it is simply hilarious how opposed to binding arbitration the Chamber is in this one instance. Binding arbitration provisions of contracts are quite common as they require people to negotiate in good faith.
As an example, a family member of mine was part of a workforce that organized and unionized under current NLRB law. They waited three years for a first union contract as management dragged their feet indefinitely. Memo to Chamber: no one goes to binding arbitration provided you're being a good employer and a good corporate citizen.
One other quick note: binding arbitration also applies to any foot dragging by the union. In other words, both sides of the table have to negotiate. This isn't a one-sided thing. So I guess this is misleading, too. My bad.
In addition, employers will be subjected to higher penalties when they speak out against the union.
Completely False. This is just a load of crap. The government can't penalize businesses for free speech. The penalties that Webb Brown is upset about are penalties for intimidating employees and firing them for being pro-union -- essentially interfering with workers' right to association. I'd love to see where penalties for giving anti-union speech exist anywhere in federal law.
Labor unions cite employer intimidation as a reason to pass card check. Employers counter that labor unions often use deceit and threats in union campaigns, not to mention the many cases of union corruption. But the truth is that under the current system of private elections, workers are protected with the secret ballot that prevents their employer and the labor union from knowing how they voted.
Both false and misleading. Whoever wrote this needs to star in the sequel to Thank You for Smoking because it is a veritable artwork of smoke and mirrors. I'm honestly impressed by the deceitfulness. The idea that intimidation of employees by management and unions is any way equivalent is incredible and without evidence. By comparison, a poll of employees who worked in workplaces that had gone through unionizing campaigns found that employees reported that management was far more likely to intimidate them than the union. In elections, for example, 46% said they were intimidated by management v. only 14% of employees saying the felt intimidated by union organizers during a majority sign-up effort.
Long story short: management intimidates workers way more than unions do.
Hint: this explains why the Chamber also opposes increasing penalties for intimidating employees during union campaigns.
Montana Sen. Max Baucus has started talking of new legislation to prevent America's wealthiest citizens from illegally hiding money in off-shore accounts, and so away from the prying eyes of the Internal Revenue Service.
You'd think such measures would be no-brainers. After all, stashing money like that is criminal. These tax dodges are like the worst leeches. They use our country, our infrastructure, our laws and resources to make their millions, but, unlike the rest of us, they refuse to pitch in their fair share. We're living in a country where every door has been left open for the wealthiest. And those gold-plated thieves ha've made off with piles of our money. Estimates have these off-shore accounts costing our nation more than $100 billion in lost tax revenues. Click here to see a New York Times column on the subject.
America needs that stolen money to help us restart our economy, rebuild our infrastructure and pay for health care for all.
And Americans need to realize that it's this same class of modern robber barons who are bankrolling the campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act.
Email Rep. Denny Rehberg and tell him to stop tax cheats and help rebuild Montana's working families. Email Sen. Jon Tester to keep up the good work by voicing his support of the Employee Free Choice Act. Tell Sen. Max Baucus to close the door on those tax cheats and stand up for Montana.
The Montana Chamber of Commerce says that I'm drinking Kool-Aid on the Employee Free Choice Act. That's fine, cause they're mixing the stuff up and handing it out.
The Chamber's rhetoric on this issue is repeatedly been one of concern for employees. That's funny because the Chamber doesn't represent workers. It represents management. And, as Jon Bennion admits in comments, they oppose all of the Employee Free Choice Act, even the provisions that heighten penalties for things like intimidating employees.
So -- the Chamber claims that they want to prevent workers from being intimidated. They do that by opposing meaningful penalties for intimidating employees...
Strange. Here's what I know -- pro-union employees get fired in 26% of union organizing drives. If the Chamber of Commerce wants to have an honest conversation about employee rights, we can start with that statistic.
This is the other "side" of the story that the Chamber is fighting to ensure that employees get a chance to hear. I don't know what the Chamber is smoking, but union organizing -- organizing of any sort -- is not an easy undertaking.
Union organizers don't waltz into workplaces and find huge crowds of happy employees clamoring for union representation. Usually, unions only start talking to people because they get approached by someone with a grievance. People aren't stupid. They don't want to pay union dues if they don't have concerns about their workplace. And they form unions because they don't trust their management to address the issues without a common voice.
Anyways, the Chamber accuses me of misleading and then jumps headlong into obfuscation with claims like this:
Therefore, even if a number of workers in a bargaining unit wanted an NLRB election, once union organizers convinced a bare majority of their colleagues to sign cards, all workers would be prohibited from having a secret ballot election.
Two things:
It wouldn't make sense to only have a "secret ballot election" with some workers.
Under the Employee Free Choice Act, employees can file a decert petition if they choose -- and have a secret ballot election. Details here.
Jon also, rightly, points out that the Montana Chamber also represents a lot of small businesses. So he got me on that one. Hell, Forward Montana pays Chamber dues to get health insurance.
But the big business is lighting up on this. The U.S. Chamber is pledging $200 million on this fight. We're going to see a lot of ruckus being made by folks like CitiGroup to kill this bill, even as they take in billions in taxpayer money.
Man, looks like they've started cranking. The Montana Chamber of Commerce is shedding crocodile tears for the workers who will be "hurt" by the Employee Free Choice Act.
I've got a question pending in their comments as to whether they support the binding arbitration and anti-intimidation provisions of the Free Choice Act. No comment on that yet.
What is more remarkable is that they continue to claim that the bill removes workers' right to a secret ballot, when it does no such thing. It simply gives workers' an alternate organizing method: majority sign-up. NLRB elections can still be held, but at the workers' discretion, not the employers.
Hell - if we're going to mandate secret ballot elections, I say we also require that managers face secret ballot elections held by their employees. Because it makes complete sense that employees get to dictate to management who represents management -- right?
We're about to see a whole hell of a lot of dishonesty from corporate executives who make, on average, 350+ times the wage of their working-class employees. We're going to witness an entire movement of contemporary conservatives who fight the right to vote in public elections demanding it in the workplace -- and fighting to protect it with the anti-democratic filibuster.
It's irony wrapped in a cynical tortilla of desperation. Paid for with the money that in a just country would be going to workers.
One of the hallmarks of modern life is a constant sense of astonishment over the disconnected-but-seamless rhetoric from the cynical far-right.
It's the same story on the Employee Free Choice Act.
The Big Business, anti-union contingent avoids a real discussion of the act by spewing a verbal loop of nonsense that the bill somehow restricts the rights of workers to the secret ballot.
Remember, this is Republican opposite land, where everything means the opposite of what they say it does. Of course, the bill does nothing to the secret ballot. Nothing at all. Yet the far-right has been able to spread this message throughout the media simply by endlessly repeating it. Check out this Web page from MediaMatters. It's insane.
And then yesterday a Politico reporter offered us all a glimpse into the ridiculously well-funded Republican machine that manufacturers this baloney.
The (anti-)ECFA campaign began in earnest in 2005, when Mike Murphy and John McLaughlin began polling aspects of the bill and settled on the worker sign-up provision as the most vulnerable.
"We developed a framing that it was really a privacy issue," said Murphy, describing what became a campaign against taking away a "secret ballot" for workers.
But such deceitful tactics have a fatal flaw. Eventually, we get wise to the deceit. That's what happened in the last election. That's what's happening now. The far-right is spending millions pushing their anti-hope, anti-change message. (Remember: they like the economy like this and won't stop, even when the rest of us live in tarpaper shacks and pay for the privilege of working.)
And yet the popularity of the Employee Free Choice Act is rising. Every week more legislators sign on as co-sponsors. The Employee Free Choice Act will allow us to get economy get back in balance.
"Labor unions are a big part of the solution" to the nation's economic crisis, said President Barack Obama to the leaders of the AFL-CIO earlier this week.
Obama addressed the issue of unions as part of his continued support of the Employee Free Choice Act in a meeting with the nation's top labor leaders on Tuesday this week.
Obama's central points: labor unions will help rebuild the American middle class and will always have a seat at the table.
More words from Obama below:
"I do not view the labor movement as part of the problem. To me, and to my administration, labor unions are a big part of the solution. We need to level the playing field for workers and the unions that represent their interests - because we cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement....And as we confront this crisis and work to provide health care to every American, rebuild our nation's infrastructure, move toward a clean energy economy, and pass the Employee Free Choice Act, I want you to know that you will always have a seat at the table."
Yesterday, vice-president Joe Biden echoed Obama's remarks and added context. For instance, Biden said, worker productivity has increased almost 20 percent from 2000 to 2007, but wages fell by $2,000.
"If our basic bargain had been intact, if paychecks rose with productivity growth, as they did from World War II to the early '70s, families would have gained $10,000 over that period, instead of losing $2,000," Biden said. "This is all going to be difficult, and one of the most difficult things will be to reinstitute that basic bargain. I think the way to do that is the Employee Free Choice Act."
"If you've got workers who have a decent pay and benefits, they also are customers for your business," Biden said.
He also said the legal playing field on which employees and management contend must be level.
"I have a simple, basic belief," he said. "If a union is what you want, a union you're entitled to have."
