100,000 PAGES OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY SECRETS GATHERED DUST IN AN OREGON BARN FOR DECADES — UNTIL NOW

July 26 2017, 7:43 a.m.

Sharon Lerner

Sharon Lerner covers health and the environment for The Intercept and is a reporting fellow at the Investigative Fund. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and The Washington Post, among other publications, and has received awards from The Society for Environmental Journalists, The American Public Health Association, the Women and Politics Institute, and The Newswoman’s        
Club of New York. Her series, The Teflon Toxin, was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. 



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Twitter @fastlerner.

FOR DECADES, SOME of the dirtiest, darkest secrets of the chemical industry have been kept in Carol Van Strum’s barn. Creaky, damp, and prowled by the occasional black bear, the listing, 80-year-old structure in rural Oregon housed more than 100,000 pages of documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others.

As of today, those documents and others that have been collected by environmental activists will be publicly available through a project called the Poison Papers. Together, the library contains more than 200,000 pages of information and “lays out a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” said Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who along with the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project helped put the collection online.

Van Strum didn’t set out to be the repository for the people’s pushback against the chemical industry. She moved to a house in the Siuslaw National Forest in 1974 to live a simple life. But soon after she arrived, she realized the Forest Service was spraying her area with an herbicide called 2,4,5-T — on one occasion, directly dousing her four children with it as they fished by the river.

The chemical was one of two active ingredients in Agent Orange, which the U.S. military had stopped using in Vietnam after public outcry about the fact that it caused cancer, birth defects, and serious harms to people, animals, and the environment. But in the U.S., the Forest Service continued to use both 2,4,5-T and the other herbicide in Agent Orange, 2,4-D, to kill weeds. (Timber was — and in some places still is — harvested from the national forest and sold.) Between 1972 and 1977, the Forest Service sprayed 20,000 pounds of 2,4,5-T in the 1,600-square-mile area that included Van Strum’s house and the nearby town of Alsea.

As in Vietnam, the chemicals hurt people and animals in Oregon, as well as the plants that were their target. Immediately after they were sprayed, Van Strum’s children developed nosebleeds, bloody diarrhea, and headaches, and many of their neighbors fell sick, too. Several women who lived in the area had miscarriages shortly after incidents of spraying. Locals described finding animals that had died or had bizarre deformities — ducks with backward-facing feet, birds with misshapen beaks, and blinded elk; cats and dogs that had been exposed began bleeding from their eyes and ears. At a community meeting, residents decided to write to the Forest Service detailing the effects of the spraying they had witnessed.

“We thought that if they knew what had happened to us, they wouldn’t do it anymore,” Van Strum said recently, before erupting into one of the many bursts of laughter that punctuate her conversation. We were sitting not far from the river where her children played more than 40 years ago, and her property remained much as it was back when the Forest Service first sprayed them with the herbicide. A mountain covered with alder and maple trees rose up across from her home, just as it did then, and the same monkey puzzle tree that was there when she moved in still shaded her dirt driveway.

But Van Strum, now 76, is much changed from the young woman who politely asked that the federal agency stop spraying many years ago. After the Forest Service refused their request to stop using the herbicides, she and her neighbors filed a suit that led to a temporary ban on 2,4,5-T in their area in 1977 and, ultimately, to a total stop to the use of the chemical in 1983.

For Van Strum, the suit was also the beginning of lifetime of battling the chemical industry. The lawyer who had taken their case offered a reduced fee in exchange for Van Strum’s unpaid research assistance. And she found she had a knack for poring over and parsing documents and keeping track of huge volumes of information. Van Strum provided guidance to others filing suit over spraying in national forests and helped filed another case that pointed out that the EPA’s registration of 2,4-D and other pesticides was based on fraudulent data from a company called Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories. That case led to a decision, in 1983, to stop all aerial herbicide spraying by the Forest Service.

“We didn’t think of ourselves as environmentalists, that wasn’t even a word back then,” Van Strum said. “We just didn’t want to be poisoned.”

Still, Van Strum soon found herself helping with a string of suits filed by people who had been hurt by pesticides and other chemicals. “People would call up and say, ‘Do you have such and such?’ And I’d go clawing through my boxes,” said Van Strum, who often wound up acquiring new documents through these requests — and storing those, too, in her barn.

Along the way, she amassed disturbing evidence about the dangers of industrial chemicals — and the practices of the companies that make them. Two documents, for instance, detailed experiments that Dow contracted a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist to conduct on prisoners in the 1960s to show the effects of TCDD, a particularly toxic contaminant found in 2,4,5-T. Another document, from 1985, showed that Monsanto had sold a chemical that was tainted with TCDD to the makers of Lysol, who, apparently unaware of its toxicity, used it as an ingredient in their disinfectant spray for 23 years. Yet another, from 1990, detailed the EPA policy of allowing the use of hazardous waste as inert ingredients in pesticides and other products under certain circumstances.

There were limits to what Van Strum could prove through her persistent data collection. The EPA had undertaken a study of the relationship between herbicide exposure and miscarriages and had taken tissue samples from water, animals, a miscarried fetus, and a baby born without a brain in the area. The EPA never released the full results of the “Alsea study,” as it was called, and insisted it had lost many of them. But a lab chemist provided Van Strum with what he said was the analysis of the test results he had been hired to do for the EPA, which showed the samples from water, various animals, and “products of conception” were significantly contaminated with TCDD.

When confronted, the EPA claimed there had been a mix-up and that the samples were from another area. Van Strum filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the results and, for years, battled in court to get to the bottom of what happened. Though the EPA provided more than 34,000 pages in response to her request (which Van Strum carefully numbered and stored in her barn), the agency never released all the results of the study or fully explained what had happened to them or where the contaminated samples had been taken. And eventually, Van Strum gave up. The EPA declined to comment for this story.

She had to make peace with not fully understanding a personal tragedy, too. In 1977, her house burned to the ground and her four children died in the fire. Firefighters who came to the scene said the fact that the whole house had burned so quickly pointed to the possibility of arson. But an investigation of the causes of the fire was never completed.

Van Strum suspected some of her opponents might have set the fire. It was a time of intense conflict between local activists and employees of timber companies, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies over the spraying of herbicides. A group of angry residents in the area near Van Strum’s home had destroyed a Forest Service helicopter that had been used for spraying. And, on one occasion, Van Strum had come home to find some of the defenders of the herbicides she was attacking in court on her property.

“I’ve accepted that I’ll never really know” what happened, said Van Strum, who never rebuilt her house and now lives in an outbuilding next to the cleared site where it once stood.

But her commitment to the battle against toxic chemicals survived the ordeal. “If it was intentional, it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “After that, there was nothing that could make me stop.”

Still, after all these years, Van Strum felt it was time to pass on her collection of documents, some of which pertain to battles that are still being waged, so “others can take up the fight.” And the seeds of many of the fights over chemicals going on today can be tied to the documents that sat in her barn. The Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories scandal is central in litigation over the carcinogenicity of Monsanto’s Roundup, for instance. And 2,4-D, the other active ingredient in Agent Orange, is still in use.

Meanwhile, private timber companies continue to use both 2,4-D and Roundup widely, though not in the national forest. Van Strum has been part of an effort to ban aerial pesticide spraying in the county, and is speaking on behalf of the local ecosystem in a related lawsuit.

“I get to play the Lorax,” Van Strum said. “It’s going to be fun.”

July 26: A DAY OF SOLIDARITY WITH CUBA

How D.C. Grocery Workers Got Their Groove Back

Members of UFCW Local 400 reversed concessionary bargaining in the industry
for the first time in a generation through an escalating contract campaign.
 Photo: UFCW Local 400

July 25, 2017 / Alan Hanson, UFCW LOCAL 400

Grocery workers in the Washington, D.C., area have reversed concessionary bargaining in the industry for the first time in a generation. Last November 17,000 workers at Giant Food and Safeway stores ratified a contract that:

• substantially increased starting pay
• cut in half the time it takes for part-timers to reach top pay
• protected health benefits with no cost increases
• strengthened pension funding

Members of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400 won these gains with an escalating contract campaign, ultimately demonstrating that they were willing to strike during the all-important Thanksgiving week.

DECADES OF BACKSLIDING

In 1983, newly hired grocery workers in D.C. earned $6.95 an hour—more than twice the federal minimum wage at the time, and worth nearly $17 in today’s dollars. It took just two years to reach top pay of $10.44 an hour, worth $25.45 today.

“Back then you had to know someone to get hired at Safeway,” said Jibril Wallace, a Safeway file maintenance clerk in D.C. “My sister was my ticket to getting a job.”

But beginning in 1996, Local 400 agreed to create new tiers featuring lower pay and benefits in four of its next five contracts. By 2013, starting wages had plummeted to $7.60 an hour—a mere 35 cents above the federal minimum wage, and only 65 cents more than starting pay 30 years earlier.

By then the union had also given up its pay progression based on months of service. Instead workers progressed up the scale based on hours worked. Most part-time workers would not see the top rate of $14.50 for 10 years or longer.

This decline was hardly unique to Local 400. UFCW has done a poor job organizing regional nonunion competitors such as Food Lion and Harris Teeter and national ones such as Walmart and Whole Foods. We also failed to line up contracts across locals as our employers grew from regional chains to national and multinational corporations. And members weren’t active participants in contract fights.

The result has been a hollowing out of the union. Fewer and fewer members regarded grocery jobs as careers. By last year, fewer than 600 of the 17,000 members at Giant and Safeway were on the top tier. Almost 40 percent had been hired since the last contract negotiations.

MINIMUM WAGE GROUNDWORK

But the union has begun to change direction since a new president took the helm in 2012.

To gain back the wages and benefits our predecessors bargained away, we will need to restore union density in the grocery industry. In the meantime, after stopping the bleeding with the 2013 contract, Local 400 leaders began to identify ways to blunt the impact of declining density before our next contract campaign.

One obvious way was to use our political power. The Giant-Safeway master agreement covers workers in higher-wage, closed-shop Maryland and D.C. as well as low-wage, right-to-work Virginia. A Republican legislative majority and state preemption law prevented us from raising the minimum wage in Virginia, so we decided to focus on D.C. and the Maryland counties that border it: Montgomery and Prince George’s.

Between 2014 and 2016, we partnered with union, community, and faith allies to win minimum wage increases in all three jurisdictions, along with paid sick days in D.C. and Montgomery County. Now a Safeway worker making $7.60 an hour in Alexandria, Virginia, could hop on a Metro train, ride one stop, and make $11.50 an hour at a store in D.C.

We believed this huge disparity created hiring and retention problems for Safeway and Giant. Our plan going into negotiations was to use those problems as leverage to lift wages higher in Virginia, too.

MEMBERS KICK IT OFF

Our contract mobilization kicked off in summer 2016 with conferences that brought together nearly 300 Safeway and Giant stewards. They were tasked with turning out members for 12 big meetings held around the region, since traffic here is notorious.

More than 1,500 members attended the area meetings—the largest turnout of Giant and Safeway workers our local had ever recorded, outside of a contract ratification vote. They signed up for text-message alerts and took flyers to sign up their co-workers. These text alerts proved highly effective at cutting down on rumors and getting contract updates out.

“The mobilization meetings, as we called them, were really instrumental in setting the tone for the entire campaign,” said Beverly McFarland, a floral manager at Giant in Silver Spring, Maryland. “We reviewed Safeway and Giant’s financials and discussed bargaining demands. We left the meeting feeling united and ready for the fight.”

Union reps recruited 12 Giant and Safeway members to serve on the bargaining committee and 24 more for the contract action team (CAT). These members were released from work and paid by the union one day per week, but were also expected to volunteer additional time.

To communicate across this geographically dispersed team, we created a private Facebook group for members of the CAT and bargaining committee. The page quickly filled up with solidarity selfies and pictures of actions from stores around the region. With permission we shared the best photos on our public Local 400 page.

ENFORCING WHAT WE HAD

We launched the campaign with action to enforce our contract. One commonly violated provision required management to post the following week’s schedule every Friday by noon.

On a single day, CAT members, reps, and stewards executed simultaneous schedule checks in nearly half the Safeway and Giant stores in the region. More than half reported violations.

The online reporting form we set up for this (ufcw400.org/1pm) was so popular that we expanded it to allow members to report a variety of schedule violations. In fact, we still regularly receive submissions from grocery workers represented by other locals who stumble across it online.

The enforcement campaign gave members a huge morale boost. Many happily reported that their managers were now scrambling to make sure schedules were posted—and even informing stewards that they had the schedule up early!

Next came a series of actions to build solidarity. Workers joined group huddles to hear the latest contract updates, then marched on their bosses to deliver a petition supporting our contract demands. Members at different stores vied to see who could hold the largest in-store meeting.

And since many Local 400 members have longstanding relationships with their customers, they asked customers to sign cards supporting their fight. More than 5,000 signed.

CROSS-EMPLOYER SOLIDARITY

Our efforts were aided by corporate disunity. For the first time anyone can remember, Giant and Safeway did not bargain together. We were able to play both sides off each other, while members stayed united across employers. Each CAT member’s turf included both companies.

The master contract expired on October 29. We agreed to extend it briefly, but not beyond Thanksgiving. This was something we had heard loud and clear during mobilization meetings. Members know how important Thanksgiving is to their employers, and correctly believed that the threat of disruption leading into the holiday would create a powerful incentive to settle.

During the extension we maintained our picketing but added a wrinkle: we took the picket line inside. A long line of workers and community allies snaked around the stores, chanting. Members who were working at the time loved it. Some even thought we were on strike and began shutting down their departments to join the “walkout.”

We also scheduled a vote on November 16, a week before Thanksgiving. Our message was simple: we would be voting on either a contract or a strike. We started circulating a public strike petition that surpassed 1,000 signatures on its first day.

On November 13, Safeway became the first company to settle. The next day bargaining committee member John Ruiz, a Safeway night crew captain, went to his store and took pictures of members holding handwritten signs expressing solidarity with Giant members, which we then shared on Facebook. Inspired by Ruiz, stewards from other Safeway stores began posting their own solidarity messages, lifting morale for the final push at Giant.

On November 15 we marched in and out of a shiny new Giant store in a rapidly gentrifying D.C. neighborhood. Our chants were echoing off the walls of the surrounding luxury condos, reporters were on their way, and rush-hour traffic was starting to snarl when Giant capitulated.

REAL PROGRESS

Members’ hard work paid off in a contract that replaced raises based on hours worked with raises every six months. Virginia members saw the largest gains: starting pay for a Safeway food clerk moved from $7.60 to $9.25 an hour, and $10 after completing a 90-day probation. Giant food clerks’ starting pay moved to $8.75, then to $9.25 on April 30, 2017, and $10 after six months on the job.

As proud as we are of our victories, there’s more to do. Legislative efforts can mask declining union density, but not solve it. We couldn’t improve the ratio of part-time to full-time workers. Although we eliminated two wage tiers, new hires still have far less generous health care and retirement benefits than top-tier members.

And management still has far too much control over staffing and scheduling. In the same jurisdictions that passed minimum wage increases and paid sick days, we’re exploring legislation for fairer hours.

We’re also looking to build campaigns to enforce our existing hours and scheduling language. Organizing and mobilizing cannot stop when a contract fight ends, and the leaders of our local are committed to making it a central part of our daily work.

Alan Hanson is the director of mobilization at UFCW Local 400 in Washington, D.C.

A version of this article appeared in Labor Notes #461, August 2017. 

BREAKING NEWS Today in Abuja Nigeria:The 3rd Panafrican Conference of the WFTU has started its works – July 25th, 2017

25 Jul 2017 AFRICA

The heart of the militant working class of Africa beats in Abuja, Nigeria. From today until july 27, 2017 more than 200 national and international delegates meet to debate on the challenges of the African Workers.

Delegates from 41 out of 47 countries of Africa, [engish, french, arab and portuguese] with entusiasm and militancy have declared present to this important Conference, hosted by the WFTU AFFILIATED trade unions in Nigeria and frendly organisations.

The Conference has started with the Nigerian National Anthem and the Anthem of the WFTU.

The president of the Trade union Congress of Nigeria and the President of the Nigeria Labour Congress have delivered short speeches.

The program of the congress continues with the speech of Success Leke, member of WFTU Presidential Council, the speech of WFTU President and the WFTU General Secretary.

Turkey: WFTU in solidarity with trade unionists of Nakliyat-İş and residents of Kirazpınar, Gebze

20 Jul 2017 TURKEY

The World Federation of Trade Unions, on the behalf of its 92 million members in 126 countries all over the world, expresses its firm solidarity and support to the 16 residents who have been taken into custody in Kirazpınar, Gebze including Erdal Kopal, head of organization department of Nakliyat-İş trade union.
The residents living in Kirazpınar have been resisting against the unlawful demolition of their houses for months. The resistants, some of whom are Nakliyat-İş members, say they struggle against unjust and unlawful pillage and destruction of their houses.
In spite of the counter decisions made by two different administrative courts, the district governorship of Gebze insists on demolishing the houses inhabited by workers and poor people in Kirazpınar.
Today, the district governorship of Gebze attempted to demolish the houses and the residents were attacked by the riot police forces with atni-riot water cannon vehicles and tear gas. Some of the resistants were injured and 16 residents were taken into custody including Erdal Kopal. We protest against this arbitrariness and custody implemented by the district governorship of Gebze.
Erdal Kopal and the other residents should be released at once!
As class oriented world trade union movement, we firmly support the right of workers for modern and proper housing. Moreover, we strongly condemn the police oppression against the poor workers in Kirazpınar.

THE SECRETARIAT

Palestine: WFTU Solidarity with the people of Palestine against the new Israeli aggression

23 Jul 2017 MIDDLE EAST, PALESTINE

The World Federation of Trade Unions, on the behalf of its 92 million members in 126 countries all over the world, strongly denounces the new escalation of Israeli aggressiveness against the people of Palestine.

Over the last days, the Israeli government has restricted access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem on the pretext of security measures and this decision was followed by violent repression and new victims from the Palestinian people by the Israeli army.

These restrictions and bans constitute a flagrant violation of the Palestinian people’s fundamental rights, in order to change the status of historical-religious sites, while at the same time the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are increasing.

The world class oriented trade union movement extends its internationalist solidarity with the people of Palestine and demands the immediate stop of this new aggression, expansion of settlements, illegal detention and murders of the struggling Palestinian workers.

STOP TO THE ISRAELI AGGRESSION AND OCCUPATION! RECOGNITION OF THE INDEPENTENT PALESTINIAN STATE WITHIN 1967 BORDERS WITH EAST JERUSALEM AS ITS CAPITAL!

THE SECRETARIAT

President Trump, AFL-CIO to battle over National Labor Relations Board appointments

GINGER ADAMS OTIS 

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Thursday, July 20, 2017, 5:00 AM

Another big battle is brewing between President Trump and organized labor — this time over his picks for the National Labor Relations Board.

On Wednesday, a Senate committee gave the greenlight to Republicans Marvin Kaplan and William Emanuel — Trump’s appointees for two vacant spots on the NLRB.

Both lawyers have a proven track record of fighting against unions — and the AFL-CIO has already voiced its opposition to their nominations.

If approved by the full Senate, Kaplan and Emanuel will change the five-person NLRB majority from Democrat to Republican.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee voted 12-11 along party lines to send Kaplan and Emanuel to the floor for a full vote.

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) said in a statement after the vote that the NLRB had been too favorable to unions under President Obama.

“By returning the composition of the National Labor Relations Board from a partisan operation to one that will look out for both hardworking Americans and job creators, we are taking another step toward helping restore America’s economy,” Isakson said in a statement.

Kaplan is now the chief counsel for the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.

Emanuel is an attorney in California with Littler Mendelson, and works on labor and employment matters. He’s represented clients before the NLRB.

He’s also represented business groups that want to change California state law because they say they allow unions to trespass on their property.

If approved, Kaplan and Emanuel will join existing NLRB members Philip Miscimarra, a Republican and the chairman, and Democrats Mark Gaston Pearce and Lauren McFerran.

In coming months the NLRB is expected to weigh-in on several issues of importance to workers and unions — and possibly overturn some key Obama-era decisions.

The decisions that could be rolled back include a ruling that gave graduate students at private universities the right to join a union; a ruling that helped small groups of workers form a union within a larger company; a ruling that made it easier to hold companies responsible for labor violations committed by its contractors and a rule that sped-up the timetable for unionization votes. Business groups oppose the faster election process, arguing it denies employers time to make their case against joining a union.

The AFL-CIO on Tuesday sent a letter to the Senate outlining its objections to having Kaplan and Emanuel on the NLRB.

“After reviewing their records and statements at their confirmation hearing, the AFL-CIO has concluded that we must oppose these nominees and urge the Senate to reject these nominations,” the letter said.

Neither Kaplan or Emanuel in the past or in their presentations to the Senate committee demonstrated a willingness to uphold the NLRB’s basic mission of protecting workers rights, the AFL-CIO wrote.

The letter cited Emanuel’s track record of only representing employers — and the union-busting history of the law firm where works — as well as his admission at his confirmation hearing that he has never once taken on the case of a worker or a union.

For Kaplan, the letter detailed his lack of labor law experience, noting that his only background is in drafting policies to weaken worker protections in the National Labor Relations Act.

“In recent years, some in Congress and in the business community have launched relentless attacks on the NLRB and sought to get key NLRB decisions and actions overturned. Kaplan and Emanuel have been part of these attacks, and they said nothing at the confirmation hearing to distance themselves from these attacks or suggest that they would bring a less hostile, and more pro-NLRA view to their work,” the AFL-CIO letter added.

“Nor did either nominee make adequate commitments to recuse from cases and issues where there is real concern, based on their prior work and writings, that they have prejudged the issue and would not approach it with an open, unbiased mind,” it concluded.

Adilson Araújo: One day Senate rips CLT, in the other, first labor president is condemned

The sentence passed by Judge Sergio Moro, who condemns President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at 9 years of age, is a scandal, either because of the lack of evidence or because of the circus that Moro has set up to discredit the country's greatest political leadership. The precedents opened by Moro are dangerous. The blow of capital against labor follows its course, since in one day the Senate tears the CLT and in the other we see the first worker president to be condemned. This is not by chance. We have to wonder why money bags, murder threats and links are not evidence of crime, but enough "conviction" to condemn someone. What we witness today - withdrawal of rights, repression of civil society and attack of freedoms - is a total state of exception. We extend our solidarity with Comrade Lula and we will continue in the fight in defense of democracy, sovereignty and freedom. And conscious of our role in history, we stand firm in resisting the challenges posed at this stage of Brazilian life.                                                                                                                                                                   Adilson Araújo,                                                                                                                                                                 national president of CTBs of our role in history, we stand firm i

Positive Jurisprudential Updates Related to our Ongoing Struggle Against MSC/Medlog Logistic in Turkey.

Dear Comrades,
As we informed you before, we opened lots of reinstatement cases at different courts about the unlawful dismissals in MSC/Medlog Logistic in Turkey on behalf of 168 workers who were dismissed unjustly due to the fact that they organized in our union. 

One of the legal cases ended yesterday. The court in Izmir ruled that the dismissals were because of union activities carried out by the dismissed workers. MSC/Medlog

The company has been convicted to pay indemnity in the amount of dismissed workers’ gross salary for 16 months. The court also ruled for the reinstatement of the workers. This decision made by the court is very important because it will be a test case for the other ongoing legal cases.

We also would like to inform you that we made an allegation in the criminal court claiming that MSC/Medlog employers blocked the union organization in the company which is a right of workers guaranteed by Constitution and several international agreements.

About this case, the prosecutor accepted our claims and started an investigation according to Turkish Criminal Law article 118. In the 118th article it is stated in brief that if a person prevents another person from using his/her union rights, he/she receives imprisonment between 6 months and 2 years. It is another important gain for our struggle against MSC/Medlog Logistic.

After these two important legal decisions, some new workers in MSC/Medlog restarted to organize in our union.

Prevailing wage, project labor agreements protect living standards for construction workers

Stan Lim, The Press-Enterprise/SCN

A construction worker works on top of a new home being built in the “Fallbrook” development by Richmond American in Riverside on Wednesday, June 21, 2017

By ROBBIE HUNTER |

July 6, 2017 at 12:01 am

In an era of political hyperventilation, it might be a good idea for some critics to take a deep breath before they launch into their attacks on the prevailing wage laws and project labor agreements that protect the living standards of construction workers in California and across the nation.

From Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, anti-union writers in recent weeks have incorrectly branded the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act that wrote the prevailing wage into the law on taxpayer-funded construction projects as born of racism and a rip-off of public funds. The same critics also have falsely characterized project labor agreements as costly to taxpayers and unfair to nonunion construction companies.

Now, for the facts.

Two Republican congressmen, Sen. James Davis of Pennsylvania and U.S. Rep. Roger Bacon of New York, sponsored their legislation 86 years ago to establish a minimum wage on taxpayer-funded construction projects, based on local measures of central tendency in any of the covered construction trades.

The idea behind the prevailing wage is to keep unscrupulous operators from low-bidding the legitimate competition to the detriment of the local workforce. The effect has been to allow blue-collar workers — 400,000 of whom are represented by the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California — to maintain their place in the American middle class.

Of the false charges that have been lodged of late about Davis-Bacon, perhaps the most repugnant is the smear that recirculates every so often that the act originated as an outgrowth of racism. The critics troll through the historic record to quote some congressmen in the debate over Davis-Bacon who supported the law based on their own warped view that it was designed to protect higher-paid white workers in the northeast represented by the authors of the law from “cheap colored labor” that would be imported to their districts from the South. The critics fail, however, to report Congressman Bacon’s reply that imported workers came in white skin as well as black.

They also fail to note the observations of U.S. Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia, later to become one of New York’s most legendary mayors, that in the Long Island hospital project that gave rise to the law, all the workers brought north by the Alabama construction firm, Algernon-Blair, were equals in suffering exploitation at the hands of the contractor.

“I saw with my own eyes the labor that (the contractor) imported there from the South and the conditions under which they were working,” LaGuardia testified from the House floor. “These unfortunate men were huddled in shacks living under the most wretched conditions and being paid wages far below the standard.”

As for the current day, more than half of the $1.32 billion paid out to workers on prevailing wage jobs in California in 2016 went to non-whites. The percentage was considerably higher on projects in the urban core, like the multiple public transportation extensions in Los Angeles.

Well into its ninth decade, the Davis-Bacon Act still makes sure that jobs get finished faster, more efficiently and at a lower cost, thanks to the increased productivity of a streamlined, higher-skilled and better-trained workforce. It saves money on social welfare costs, too.

Davis-Bacon projects, meanwhile, are built to last. Just ask the millions who have visited Hoover Dam, one of the greatest infrastructure projects in American history. Back then, the critics complained about the workers’ ungodly wages — 80 cents an hour. In retrospect, the prevailing wage that covered the construction of the dam looks like the bargain of the century.

In the same breath as Davis-Bacon, anti-union commentators also express displeasure with project labor agreements where labor and management get together to make peace on wages and working conditions before construction ever begins. These agreements are employed on public as well as private projects, such as the 73-story Wilshire Grand project finished recently in downtown Los Angeles.

Nonunion companies are more than welcome to compete for project labor agreements. Some of them, however, may not be able to meet PLA requirements for the higher-quality work that you get from the union workers who have completed four- or five-year state-approved apprenticeship programs.

Without the prevailing wage and project labor agreements, the odds will go way up that low-bid contractors will hire their workers off street corners. Then you can expect cost overruns, shoddy workmanship and delays in construction — all of which are really something to get upset about.

Robbie Hunter is president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California.

http://www.ocregister.com/2017/07/06/prevailing-wage-project-labor-agreements-protect-living-standards-for-construction-workers/

Retirement 'bittersweet' for union boss who challenged Trump

In this Wednesday, June 7, 2017 photo, United Steel Workers local 1999 union president Chuck Jones gestures during an interview in Indianapolis. Jones grabbed headlines in December after he publicly accused then-President-elect Donald Trump of lying about how many jobs he was saving in a deal with furnace and air conditioner maker Carrier Corp. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

By BRIAN SLODYSKO, ASSOCIATED PRESS INDIANAPOLIS — Jul 2, 2017, 11:40 AM ET

When Chuck Jones joined the United Steel Workers, unions flexed their power to strike and crossing a picket line could be met with brute force.

That's now a distant memory, says the retiring president of USW Local 1999, who grabbed headlines in December after he publicly accused then-President-elect Donald Trump of lying about how many jobs he was saving in a deal with furnace and air conditioner maker Carrier Corp.

Like unions across the U.S., the Indianapolis local, which represents workers from Carrier and bearing manufacturer Rexnord Corp., has shed members as factories downsized or shuttered. Many are moving to Mexico, where labor is cheaper.

"You want to leave a job better than you got it. But working-class people in general — we're not doing good," said Jones, 65, whose thick, gray mustache, artful use of profanity and ever-present cigarette wedged between his fingers give him the appearance of union boss straight from central casting.

Jones became a steel worker straight out of high school in 1969 during a high tide of the U.S. labor movement that helped propel a generation of blue-collar workers into the middle class. He says his retirement at the beginning of June was "bittersweet" after decades of declining fortunes for working people.

Elected as the local's vice president in 1985, just before the union went on strike, Jones at one point could command workers to shut down their machines if labor issues weren't resolved. He was made president in 1996, two years after President Bill Clinton finalized the North American Free Trade Agreement, which led to a big increase in trade among the U.S., Mexico and Canada, but also encouraged U.S. manufacturers to relocate operations to Mexico to take advantage of cheap labor there. Jones' union has also been affected by changes in Indiana that made it easier to replace striking workers and by passage of a right-to-work law that made union membership optional.

"I used to have a little bit of power," Jones said. "Now the story is completely different. First off, the guy is going to say, '(Expletive) you, I ain't shutting nothing down.'"

In recent years, contract negotiations have been aimed at trying to give up as few benefits as possible while making sure wages keep pace with inflation. Helplessness has set in, he says.

Last year Carrier, its parent company United Technologies, and Rexnord all announced plans to shut down at least part of their Indiana operations. All told, about 1,700 jobs are expected to be cut, including about 850 union workers at Carrier and Rexnord.

"If they woulda come to us and said, 'Hey, you guys are making too much money, we need you to work with us on being more competitive,' could we have got there? I don't know. But we sure as hell would have tried," said Jones, who feels that people have unjustly blamed unions as uncompetitive. "Neither company came to us."

U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly, the lone Democrat elected statewide in Indiana, agreed that the union isn't to blame.

"What happened with Carrier and what happened with Rexnord and what is happening around the country isn't because the workers didn't keep their end of the deal," Donnelly said. "Chuck and his team, they basically got thrown under the bus."

Rexnord issued a statement standing by the relocation of its Indianapolis operations, saying "difficult decisions are a part of today's business environment."

As for Carrier, the workers' plight drew the attention of Trump, who brokered a deal with the company, setting the stage for a moment of fleeting glory for Jones as he prepared to retire.

During a hyped-up announcement at its Indianapolis factory, Trump inaccurately said that 1,100 jobs would be saved. The number was closer to 800.

Jones wasn't having it and told reporters Trump had lied about the numbers. Trump attacked the union boss on Twitter for doing a "terrible job representing workers" while suggesting that "if United Steelworkers 1999 was any good, they would have kept those jobs in Indiana."

In the frenzy that followed, Jones received flowers as well as hate mail. He still stands behind his words, but allows that he could have "toned it down."

"How (Trump) feels about me, I could care less," Jones said. He went on to add that it's not that he's tough, using another expletive, "because I'm not. I'm an old man. But I've been around here some 30 odd years. I've had people threaten to burn my house down. People threaten to shoot me when I leave."

At his retirement party, gifts included a carton of cigarettes, booze — and a framed image of Trump, featuring his tweets about Jones.

Now Jones plans to spend more time with his 13 grandchildren. He's also contemplating a run for local office, though he won't say which one.

"If I could help people out, especially working people, I'd consider it."