Walmart Tops State Assistance Rolls in Ohio

Free enterprise isn't really free enterprise when American taxpayers are subsidizing corporations.

But in Ohio, responsible employers are being undercut by irresponsible big businesses who rely on the state to make up for the wages or health care they don’t provide to their workers.

And no surprise to regular readers of this blog--Walmart is at the top of the list.

A new report released by Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, and promoted by the Ohio UFCW locals shows that Walmart has more employees on any kind of state assistance than any other employer. In fact, about 28% of Walmart's employees are on Medicaid alone! That's not counting Walmart workers on food stamps, CHIP, or other numerous taxpayer-funded program.

The truth of the matter, is that Walmart's "competitive" business model can't compete without taxpayer subsidies. All of us have to bear the burden for their irresponsible corporate behavior--and that's unfair to responsible corporate citizens who compete with Walmart AND provide affordable, quality health care to their employees.

So Walmart must change its ways. And as we look at health care reform, we need to make sure any reform includes strong employer responsibility provisions.

We need to make sure that Walmart and other companies can't shirk their responsibilities and force responsible companies into an unfair situation.

Holy *#%&! 53.4% of Youth Unemployed!

This weekend I got together with a group of friend who I'd gone to school with. We'd all finished up full-time course work in May and wrapped up with night classes over the summer. We had our degrees now, and had been looking for full time work for the last six months.

In past years, most of the people who'd finished our particular program landed jobs right away. But as we went around the room, the story started to sound the same:

"I have an unpaid internship and I don't think they're going to give me a job," "I’m on a temporary contract," "I’ve lowered by standards and I’m still looking," "I've started doing web design on the side to make ends meet while I look," "There's a hiring freeze at half the places I've looked," and "I'm living with my grandmother now, in the suburbs, while I look for work in the city."

This isn't isolated to my friends and our peers. This is a massive trend among our over-all demographic. The Department of Labor has just reported that the employment rate is 46.6% for young adults, persons aged 16-24.

An article in today's New York Post flips that number on its head. 53.4%. Unemployed. This is the largest percentage of young people unemployed since World War II.

Before you start saying "well some of those people are in high school or college," think back. I had jobs when I was in high school and college. So did most of my friends. Back then, if you were a teenager and wanted to work, you could.

And when you look at these facts next to the recent report by the AFL-CIO on young workers, suitably titled "Young Workers: A Lost Decade," a really sad picture immerges.

A generation of people who are simply not going to have the ability to buy homes, to be comfortable enough to start families, to be productive citizens who are able to contribute back to the communities that they are a part of. The American Dream, that if you work hard you’ll be able to do better for yourself than previous generations, is failing us miserable. This generation is going to continue to be pushed out of the way for the jobs that previous generations had access to.

Certainly the high paying jobs aren't available. The Baby Boomers who have them aren't retiring. Sadly many of them simply can't retire, because their savings have been wiped out by the myriad economic catastrophes of the last dozen years (the dot com bust, the economic crash that followed 9/11, the 2008-09 economic collapse, not to mention the rising price of health care).

It’s not just “high paying” job, it’s the “pays well enough to get by” jobs that we just can’t even seem to get a hold of, and part of this is because union membership is down.

It seems to me that, for the most part, my generation has bought the BS about unions. That unions hurt business, that since we’re individuals we don’t need to bargain collectively, that the companies that we work for are on our side.

But unions are good for business. By giving workers a say in the workplace we have a larger sense of ownership of the product and feel more pride in the work we do. We stay around longer and develop institutional knowledge. We create a middle class that can spend money in our communities, especially the other small businesses that, in turn, employ more workers.

Unions give individuals a voice in their workplace. Management will give you platitudes like “there’s no I in team” when they need you to work with others on the job but say “you’re your own man” when it comes to wages. We should know better.

Some of us might even be suckered into believing this kind of hooey, like Mike Duke saying that Walmart is “the largest family in the world.”

I don’t have an answer for the large load that our generation has been handed. Stronger voices in the jobs we are able to get would be a good start. We are capable and hardworking; it’s just finding that opportunity that’s the hard part.

Whole Foods CEO Protest--Big Brass Band Style

Always wondered how to make protests and rallies more fun? Check out this awesome video of the Brass Liberation Orchestra "performing" a little number dedicated to Whole Foods CEO John Mackey and his opposition to health care reform, and wonder no more:

Watch CNBC's Special Report On WalMart

The CNBC Special Report highlights Walmart's growth at the price of low wages and high turn-over for its workers and its efforts to push an anti-worker model through its complete supply chain. If you missed it last night, you can still watch it just about any day this next week.

Click here for show times and more info.

Friday Afternoon Links

• Paul Krugman ponders an important question: How bad does a bill have to be to make it too bad to vote for?
  
  
• Yesterday, attendees who heard Obama speaking about health care at UMD cheered the public option--and booed the Baucus bill.
  
  
• A top economist explains why the Baucus bill could be a "winner's curse" for insurance companies.
  
  
• And in News of the Awesome: Michael Moore premiered his new movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," in Pittsburgh this week, to coincide with the AFL-CIO's 26th Convention.
  

HCAN on the Colbert Report!

In case you missed it, here's HCAN Director Richard Kirsch on the Colbert Report the other night:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a Lobby - Health Care for America Now
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Protests

Why the Baucus Bill is No Good for Working Americans

Senator Baucus's health care bill is the talk of the town in Washington, D.C. today, and around the country as Americans wonder what this bill would mean for them. UFCW members should know that in the UFCW's opinion, this is not a good bill.

In a statement released today, we stated that:

Rather than advancing the goals of making health care more affordable for working Americans and controlling the spiraling costs of insurance, the bill by Senator Max Baucus aggravates an already dire situation.

This bill encourages large employers to duck responsibility for providing health care to their workers, potentially passes on thousands of dollars in premiums onto hardworking middle class families, and raises taxes on the few who may still have benefits. With no public option to keep insurance companies honest, these premiums will suck up an ever-increasing share of a worker's salary, while reducing benefits in their plan.

As President Hansen said:

There is another more productive, more prudent path. Thanks to the hard work of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee and the U.S. House of Representatives--we know that we can do better. We can have a solution to this health care crisis based on shared responsibility, lower costs for working Americans, and better, more efficient, health care for all.

WalMart: Still Setting Too-Low Standards for the Retail Industry

Over the Labor Day weekend, WakeUpWalmart.com launched a new campaign to change WalMart and encourage the company to be more responsible when it comes to labor practices. The campaign stresses that improving labor standards improves communities, and that when WalMart lowers standards in an area, it hurts those same communities and the working families that live there. Author and UC-Berklely Professor Nelson Lichtenstein, along with other luminaries, spoke at the press conference to launch the new compaign.

So Harold Meyerson's review today of Lichtenstein's new book, "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Remade American Business, Transformed Global Trade, and Put Politics in Every Store," has major import for UFCW members working in retail stores nationwide. Meyerson looks at how, much in the same way unionized auto companies helped shape the industrial labor force, WalMart has done the same with the retail industry. With a difference. Where unionized auto companies helped raise standards for American workers, strongly anti-union WalMart has helped to lower them.

Meyerson recounts this story from Lichtenstein's book:

Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.

Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues didn't exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.

Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.

This is the company that has helped to shape our current working environment. A company that tried to break the law to deny its workers the minimum wage.

And though WalMart has made some slight improvements in regards to health care and environmental practices (improvements no doubt in part made because of ongoing efforts of WakeupWalMart and similar groups, as well as overwhelming consumer pressure), WalMart's identity, says Meyerson, "came from fusing its brilliant use of new technology with its rigorous adherence to the old exploitative Southern labor practices." And because of that, WalMart is thus far unwilling to change too much, particularly in its attitude about unions. As Meyerson says:

With its stock price stagnant for nearly a decade due in part to its failure to expand to blue-state America, and with Democrats now in control in Washington, Wal-Mart is currently undergoing a great cosmetic makeover. It has announced it will develop a green profile for all the products it sells and has even proclaimed its support for an employer mandate in any emerging health-reform package. What it is not willing to relinquish is its die-hard opposition to unions and labor-law reform, its existential commitment to the Southern model of labor relations.

But this is precisely what WalMart must be prepared to relinquish; it must give up that model and embrace a new, consumer, worker, and community-friendly model that will help working families thrive and our communities prosper. Because Walmart is a presence in so many of our communities, because it employs so many, because it affects the lives of working families across the country and around the world, it is uniquely positioned to be a powerful force for change. WalMart can and should join with communities and workers to help create the vibrant workplace, the healthy planet and the thriving community that we all want and are willing and ready to work for.

Obama's Speech "A Clarion Call for Reform"

Missed Obama's speech last night on health care reform? You can check out the whole thing here.

UFCW members and health care reform advocates were reassured to hear the substance of the speech : a reform message and defense of the public option, a reassurance to President Obama's allies on health care, and a rebuke to those who continue to block real reform. Richard Kirsch, National Campaign Manager for Health Care for America Now, on President Obama's speech:

President Obama issued a clarion call for reforms that will guarantee all Americans have good, affordable coverage, directly taking on the insurance industry that wants to protect its profits and his political opponents who are engaging in fear-mongering for partisan purposes. He reaffirmed his support for the reforms that are essential to achieving his goals: assuring that people get good health coverage at work; strict regulation of the insurance industry; competition between private insurers and a new public health insurance option; and shared responsibility between individuals, employers and government in paying for coverage. The President reminded us that those who have opposed government programs like Social Security and Medicare in the past are once again working to deny history.

Teabaggers & Whole Foods: Two Organic Peas in a Pod?

We know politics makes strange bedfellows—but the new Whole Foods/Teabagger alliance is beyond bizarre. The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition has announced a series of events in defense of Whole Foods CEO’s far right agenda.

As you’ve no doubt heard, in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey argued that health care is not a right that all Americans are entitled to, relying on scare tactics to mislead Americans about Obama’s efforts to fix our nation’s health care system. The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition then announced “buycotts” of Whole Foods stores in St. Louis, MO, and Dallas, TX, to show their support for the CEO and his green grocery chain.

Our thought: this new-found alliance brings up some interesting questions about the progressive values Whole Foods claims to espouse. You can tell a lot about people by the company they keep, right?

That’s why we at the UFCW believe that Whole Foods should come forward and clearly articulate if it supports or rejects the politics and the policies of its allies. For example:

• The Teabaggers regularly attack Medicare and Social Security, two of the most popular and successful government programs in American history. Do John Mackey and Whole Foods agree with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey that Medicare is "tyranny"? Does Mr. Mackey agree with Mr. Armey that Social Security is going to need to be phased out?
  
  

• Many Teabaggers have aligned themselves with the “Birther” movement, which raises unfounded questions about President Obama’s citizenship. Does Mr. Mackey agree with the “birthers” about our President? Will he denounce the position of his new allies?
  
  

• Teabaggers asked Texas Governor Rick Perry to follow through on his threat to secede from the United States. As a native Texan, does Mr. Mackey think that Texas should be an independent nation and does Whole Foods support that idea?
  
  

Until Whole Foods clarifies their position on these issues, we have to wonder—what kind of values does the grocery chain stand for? What are customers really paying for when they shop Whole Foods?

cross-posted on Daily Kos

Another Lost Generation? Not With a Union Voice.

I graduated from college right before 9/11. I had a bachelor's degree from a good state college, and struggled for years to find a decent-paying job. I sometimes went without health care coverage--not because I didn't want it, but because I couldn't afford it. Meanwhile, I tried to keep up with student loan payments, paying for rent, utilities and food, all while working a series of low-wage jobs. I finally gave up and went to graduate school--not least because there, I knew my student loan payments would be deferred, and I would be able to purchase (relatively) cheap insurance from my school.

I was lucky. My husband and I were lucky to find good jobs after our graduate programs ended. Since I belong to a union (and work for one), I have good, affordable health care coverage for both of us, too. But many people my age and younger have not been so lucky.

A new report, "Young Workers: A Lost Decade," conducted in July 2009 by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and Working America, details exactly how and why our country has failed young workers in the last decade. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka described the findings:

We're calling the report "A Lost Decade" because we're seeing 10 years of opportunity lost as young workers across the board are struggling to keep their heads above water and often not succeeding. They’ve put off adulthood—put off having kids, put off education—and a full 34 percent of workers under 35 live with their parents for financial reasons.

Some of the report's key findings:

• 31 percent of young workers report being uninsured, up from 24 percent 10 years ago, and 79 percent of the uninsured say they don’t have coverage because they can't afford it or their employer does not offer it.

• Strikingly, one in three young workers are currently living at home with their parents.

• Only 31 percent say they make enough money to cover their bills and put some money aside—22 percentage points fewer than in 1999—while 24 percent cannot even pay their monthly bills.

• A third cannot pay their bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.

These findings show plainly that it's more important than ever for labor unions and union members to reach out to young workers. Many don't know how much better the odds are for young workers when they belong to a union. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR),there is a substantial boost in wages and benefits for unionized workers between the ages of 18 and 29:

• On average, unionization raises young workers' wages by over 12% – about $1.75 per hour.
  
  
• Young workers in unions are about 17 percentage points more likely to have health insurance than those not in unions.
  
  
• Young unionized workers are about 24 percentage points more likely to be in a pension plan than their non-union counterparts.

As the retail workers' union, UFCW represents a lot of young workers at our grocery stores and non-food retail stores, and they see the value of a voice in the workplace everyday, whether it's dental benefits, paid time off, flexible hours, affordable health care, or real job security.

As UFCW members, and indeed as members of everyone labor union, we have to spread the word and reach out to our friends, our neighbors and to all young workers who have the most to gain from belonging to a union.

UFCW Challenges Walmart to Live up to American Values (w/video)

The UFCW is joining with author Nelson Lichtenstein, Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice Kim Bobo, and a broad coalition of labor, consumer, environmental, and community groups calling on Walmart to support core American values: worker rights, quality jobs, equal opportunity, corporate responsibility, and a healthy environment.

As part of the launch, WakeUpWalmart.com is releasing two new TV ads--each highlighting Walmart's failure to provide 700,000 of its employees with affordable health care coverage.