Tag Archives: jobs

Fiddling While….

Posted on by
Reply

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seems to be a modern day fiddler. During the…negotiations…with rail unions just concluded, Buttigieg chose to go haring off to Portugal on vacation. He also appears to have told no one of the public he was heading out: previously undisclosed trip, according to the Washington Free Beacon as cited by Fox News.

“The secretary took a long-planned personal trip from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5,” a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation told Fox News. “As usual, while traveling on personal time he remained available and engaged on urgent issues, which in this case meant multiple calls with staff and stakeholders to work on the topic of rail labor negotiations.”

“Long-planned.” Nothing so trivial as a looming transportation strike with national economic implications was to disturb his precious vacation. Phone calls, though. Because there’s no need to meet in person with the players. Vacation.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) noted the irony hypocrisy:

Rail workers just wanted a few days of paid sick leave. President Biden told them to pound sand and his Transportation Secretary vacationed in wine country[.]

And, of course, us taxpayers continued to pay Buttigieg’s his salary—he gets paid vacation, along with his paid sick leave.

In Which Rubio is Mistaken

Posted on by
Reply

The Senate passed a bill mandating a labor agreement agreed by railroad companies, management teams of a dozen rail unions, and the rank-and-file of most of those unions be imposed on all of those unions and railroad companies. The bill also barred a rail union strike.

In a separate vote, the Senate failed to pass a bill imposing a number of paid sick leave days for union employees on the rail companies.

Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) is dismayed.

When workers are treated as little more than line items on a spreadsheet, they become indistinguishable from the freight cars they service….

And

…the measure only granted rail workers one day of paid sick leave all year—a stipulation that Rubio said “underwhelmed and alienated the men and women doing the hard work.”

And

Congress…told rail workers to suck it up and be grateful. We should have worked to meet the demands of the workers instead of appeasing labor leaders and companies.

Most, if not all, of that likely is true.

However.

It doesn’t matter how much any of that might seem like a good idea, or might even be a good idea, over the duration of a contract. It’s not government’s job to set the work compensation parameters for employers and their employees. Most especially, it is not government’s job to meet the demands of the workers. It’s government’s job to set the market conditions within which employers and employees can negotiate those parameters freely.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I, VT) wasn’t far off with his dig at Rubio: I always knew you were a socialist.

Government is a system of men and women, not an entity in itself. What those men and women might think is a good idea will vary over time for those men and women and certainly will vary as different men and women come into government from time to time. We need only see how government “good ideas” vary as Republicans or Progressive-Democrats are in ascendance from one Congress or administration to another.

At most—at most—where a national risk is in play (for instance, a steel worker industry-wide strike or lockout, or a nation-wide rail strike or lockout), government might require the two sides to settle through binding arbitration a disagreement they can’t settle through negotiation. With the arbiters chosen by the two disputants, not by government.

He Can’t Be Serious

Posted on by
Reply

Can he?

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in a speech last Wednesday that the overheated labor market needs to cool more for the Fed to be confident inflation could decrease toward its 2% goal. He said the biggest remaining barrier to taming inflation is a worker shortage, which is driving up wages and, in turn, the cost of goods and services.
“The labor market … shows only tentative signs of rebalancing, and wage growth remains well above levels that would be consistent with 2% inflation,” Powell said. “We want wages to go up strongly, but they’ve got to go up at a level that is consistent with 2% inflation over time.”

How is it business’ fault the Federal government insists, via monetary policy, on paying able-bodied workers not to work with its wealth of welfare payments?

How is it business’ fault the Fed initiated the present high inflation with its own profligate fiscal policy of injecting trillions of dollars into our economy with its artificially suppressed interest rates and its heavy Federal debt funding?

How is it business’ fault that the Federal government and the Fed insist on working at cross purposes in “managing” our economy and fighting inflation instead of letting our erstwhile free market economy—an intrinsically self-correcting economic system—run free and bring that Fed-government-caused inflation under control?

How is it business’ fault that they keep raising wages within their other inflation-caused rising costs so their employees can at least lose inflation-caused value on their wages more slowly?

But What is the Or Else?

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) is right, this time, and so are Congressional politicians (assuming they actually can get anything done on this), to move to block the coming railroad strike.

But. But, but, but.

What is the or else here? What enforcement mechanism can the government use to enforce its no-strike diktat against the railroad workers? Not against the unions, but against the rail workers?

It isn’t union leadership, after all, who have rejected the just-negotiated agreements, it’s the rank-and-file, the folks who actually do the work, who’ve rejected the agreement.

How would the government deal with the rail worker equivalent of the Blue Flu?

How would the government deal with another standard union tactic: working explicitly and exactly to the letter of the relevant regulations and the letter of the law about to be imposed on the railroad businesses and labor unions, with the result of a drastic slowdown in work performance?

How would the government deal with an overt strike, where the workers of one or more of the four unions explicitly walk off the job (and the workers of the other unions walk out in solidarity or at the least refuse to cross the picket lines)?

Mass arrests in the latter case? Where would the government find the replacement workers? The rail lines still would be shut down until those replacement workers could be found and hired, assuming anyone qualified actually would be interested.

Certainly, civil action with civil—financial—penalties could be taken, but how much will those matter if the union workers themselves have already determined they have nothing to lose? Their beef, after all, isn’t about higher wages, it’s about the quality of the work environment and work benefits, canonized by the number of sick days allowed.

I’ve seen no evidence that anyone in the Federal government is thinking about a response to the possibility the workers call government’s…bluff(?).

Anti-Democratic

Posted on by
Reply

Progressive-Democratic President Joe Biden claims he’s worried about anti-democratic forces in play in today’s American politics.

We must vote knowing who we have been and what we’re at risk of becoming. We must vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment—but institutions that have held us together, as we’ve sought a more perfect union, are also at stake.

Here’s one of those democratic institutions that’s at risk even after the just-completed elections—from Biden and his National Labor Relations Board:

[The] National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced it would start the process rescind a 2020 rule implemented to protect workers’ right to vote on removing union representation.

The institution of company employees isn’t to be allowed to exercise—by voting in particular—their right to not join a union or their right to vote to decertify an existing union.

Never mind two central facts.

According to NLRB data, among petitions filed to hold elections to install or remove a union, a unionized private-sector worker was more than twice as likely to attempt to decertify union representation than a nonunion worker was to unionize….

And

[A] pro-union group, The Worker Power Coalition, argues the “surge in worker organizing is the largest in more than 50 years,” and the data shows a 53% increase in union representation petitions….

That’s democracy in the workplace in action. That’s democracy that the Hero of Democracy in the White House wants to destroy.