Representatives of the Egyptian union movement announced they are forming a new labor federation, the Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions, which will represent workers in more than a dozen industries and  enterprises. The federation also plans to set a date for a nationwide general strike for democracy and fundamental rights. Many people believe the labor demonstrations in the past two years played a significant role in giving Egyptian citizens  courage to stand up to the government.

In a letter today to Egyptian union leaders Kamal Abbas and Kamal Abu Eita, recipients of  last year’s George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka praised the workers’ “extraordinary courage and defiance of a ban on free and independent unions.”

Yesterday we learned that your organizations joined with retirees, the technical health professionals and representatives of workers in the important industrial areas to announce the organization of a new labor federation to represent workers in a new era of democracy in Egypt. We salute you in this brave endeavor and join the international labor movement in standing with you.

The people’s movement for democracy in Egypt and the role unions are playing for freedom and worker rights inspires us and will not be forgotten.

Abbas is general coordinator of the Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS) and Eita heads  the Real Estate Tax Authority Workers (RETA), the first independent trade union in Egypt in more than 50 years. The Egyptian government has not formally recognized RETA, but has ignored its application for recognition.

The Egyptian government tried to silence the CTUWS, closing down two of its regional offices and its headquarters in 2007.  Bowing to an Egyptian court decision and international criticism, the government allowed CTUWS to reopen in July 2008.

RETA was formed after municipal tax collectors held an 11-day sit-in strike in front of the Ministry of Finance, gathered 30,000 signatures and elected local union committees in the provinces.

Read a statement from the CTUWS here about the situation in Egypt and workers’ demands.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) joined in congratulating the Egyptian unions and supporting the call for a general strike. In a statement, ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow said:

The union actions will increase pressure for genuine democratic change and respect for human rights. Just as in Tunisia, where the ITUC-affiliated UGTT has been at the forefront of the democracy movement, we salute the courage and determination of Egypt’s working people in standing up to an autocratic and illegitimate regime.

This article originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on Jan 31, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author, James Parks: My first encounter with unions was at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when my colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. I saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. I am a journalist by trade, and I worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. I also have been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. My proudest career moment, though, was when I served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections.

Since the November elections attacks on public employees and their unions have exploded.  Everywhere you turn you read of attacks on public sector workers, from teachers to janitors, firefighters to administrators.  Wealthy right-wing corporations and their political pawns and media enablers have tried to make public employees into public enemies.

Even in union-dense states like California, Michigan, New York, New Jersey and Ohio, public employees and their unions are suddenly in the crosshairs of right-wingers hell-bent on starving state budgets along with public employees and their unions.  Attacks on public employees and their unions are nothing new.  For decades public employees have been scapegoats for right-wing government haters who have accused them of doing nothing while falsely claiming that they make considerably more money than their private sector counterparts.

To fully appreciate the significance of the present attack on public employee unions it must be considered in the context of the four decade war being waged by corporate America against the American labor movement.  Over the past forty-plus years corporations and their political pawns have systematically attacked unions in each economic sector having significant density as well as political and economic power.  In the late 1960s large corporations, working in concert, decided the time was right to wage a serious, well-organized and well-financed war on the American labor movement.  The era of cooperation, conciliation and collective bargaining of the 1940s, 1950s and part of the 1960s was tossed on the proverbial ash heap of history.

We can look back and see the carnage that the corporate war on workers and their unions has wrought: a decline in wages, benefits, unions and jobs–while corporations and the wealthiest one-percent have amassed the largest concentrations of wealth in history.

It may come as a surprise to many that the current assault on public employee unions has its roots in the late 1960s when a deliberate, well-organized and financed effort by 200 of America’s largest corporations to destroy the building trades unions got underway.  With the organization of the Construction Users’ Anti-Inflation Roundtable, chaired by U.S. Steel’s Roger Blough, the largest U.S. industrial corporations dependent upon the skilled union trades organized around the desire to have their projects built and maintained without having to pay union wages and benefits.  The “Roundtable” commissioned a series of studies designed to provide cover for their efforts to undermine the building trades unions and began giving unwarranted competitive advantages to nonunion contractors.

This original “Roundtable” later merged with another corporate backed anti-labor organization known as the Labor Law Study Committee to form the Business Roundtable.  Of the many schemes hatched by the Business Roundtable was the conspiracy to award billions of dollars of industrial construction work to the largest nonunion contractors in the nation.  To make this a reality they helped establish the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) as the counterpoint to the well organized labor/management committees among the union sector of the construction industry.  The ABC became the mechanism for challenging the supremacy of union construction in every market in the nation and one of the most vehemently anti-union organizations in the nation.

In May 1979, J.C. Turner, President of the International Union of Operating Engineers, made the following observations:

“It has become apparent that a systematic and well planned campaign is being conducted to totally destroy the building trades… the current attack is the result of a decade of planning and groundwork by the Business Roundtable acting in concert with regional and local construction user associations, the contractor associations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, pro-business academic institutions and their allies in government… Our real enemy is clearly these large industrial concerns, organized as the Business Roundtable, who are using the contractors and their associations as soldiers in the battle.  Their purpose is to put the lid on costs by pressuring their construction contractors to slash wages… The Business Roundtable represents a threat not just to the building trades unions but to the trade union movement as a whole… If corporate America can weaken the hard-won gains of this country’s construction unions, the ultimate target will be the entire trade union movement…”

Double-breasting, where union contractors establish so-called alter ego nonunion firms to compete with and undermine their own union companies became rampant. The federal government purposefully failed to enforce federal prevailing wage and workplace safety laws.   Legal restrictions, such as repeal of common situs picketing further restricted building trades’ efforts to maintain or expand market share and membership.

While the corporate assault on the building trades unions was in full swing, it gained a powerful ally when Ronald Reagan became President on January 20, 1981.  Following his election Reagan wasted no time and quickly met with the president of the ABC and signaled his strong support for the war on the building trades unions.

Reagan’s alliance with the Business Roundtable and the ABC was certainly not his only contribution to union busting.  On August 5, 1981, in the single most infamous act of anti-unionism in memory Reagan fired striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).

PATCO was a good target for Reagan since PATCO was a “professional” organization and was not affiliated with the AFL-CIO.  Lacking critical relationships necessary for support and solidarity in times of crisis it was unlikely that the rest of the labor movement would rise up and defend this small, professional, independent organization that may have made a grave tactical error by calling a prohibited work stoppage.  PATCO had endorsed and supported Reagan in his campaign for president, adding to its outsider identity and alienation from the rest of the labor movement.

It is universally agreed that by firing and decertifying PATCO, Reagan signaled to employers that his administration would be complicit in the corporate war on workers and their unions.  Reagan’s actions were just the opposite of what FDR had accomplished for unions when he declared, “If I went to work in a factory the first thing I’d do is join a union.”  FDR, through his words, deeds and legislation did more to spur the growth of unions in America than any single political leader in history.  Reagan’s actions accomplished just the opposite and began an era of union busting in which high paid consultants used every legal and illegal trick in the books, with the assistance and cooperation of the Reagan NLRB and DOL, to harass unions and thwart organizing at every turn.

Reagan’s action ushered in an era in which the use of permanent striker replacements became the norm, effectively nullifying labor’s most powerful weapon – the strike.  In disputes where workers engaged in work stoppages to pressure employers into negotiating reasonable terms and conditions, employers emboldened and encouraged by Reagan’s treatment of PATCO, simply hired permanent striker replacements and eliminated the persuasive impact of work stoppages as a means of pressuring employers to bargain in good faith.

The extent to which the use of permanent replacements became the favored method to undermine the effect of strikes is borne out by the fact that strikes have become virtually non-existent and are no longer considered a very useful weapon.  The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2009 (the latest year available) the number of work stoppages reached it lowest level since 1947, when they first began collecting data on work stoppages.

With the building trades unions on the defensive, PATCO busted and the use of permanent striker replacements widespread, the next major assault on organized labor focused on industrial unions like the United Auto Workers, United Steel Workers, Machinists, IUE, etc.  It came in the form of so-called free trade agreements like NAFTA and provided employers with another mechanism to undermine unions by placing American workers directly in competition with much lower paid workers in other countries.  With unionized workers in industries like auto, steel and aerospace making the highest wages and benefits they became primary targets of employers wanting to lower labor costs and the most vulnerable to foreign outsourcing.

Under not-so-free-trade agreements corporations can simply close down factories and move them to Mexico, India, China or wherever.  Corporations pay little or no tariffs on the products they export back to the U.S.  On top of that they can get tax breaks for moving good-paying union jobs to foreign countries.  What a great deal!  Also, foreign corporations that agree to operate non-union factories in America, like large auto assembly plants, receive huge tax breaks, incentives and other competitive advantages over the unionized domestic producers and you get the same result–workers pitted against each other between unionized and non-union employers.

Not-so-free-trade-agreements, which facilitate the movement of factories to foreign countries, are an extension of the old “runaway shop” used by corporations for more than a century to run away from union shops in the heavy unionized industrial northeast and Midwest.  Prior to the not-so-free-trade agreement era corporations ran away to southern states where adherence to Jim Crow, right-to-work-for-less and other traditions kept unions from expanding and gaining political and economic power.

Not-so-free-trade can be thought of as the runaway shop on steroids and has become an effective and widespread tool for getting rid of American unions and cowing those that remain.  Corporations don’t really have to get their hands dirty either.  They really don’t have to hire high priced union busting attorneys.  They really don’t have to deal with the NLRB or DOL.  All they have to do is close the plant and move it to a foreign country where unions are weak, compliant or nonexistent and cooperative governments keep workers in line and union power to a minimum.  Not-so-free-trade agreements have wiped out millions of good-paying American manufacturing jobs–a disproportionate number of these union jobs.

Now it is the public sector unions that are in the crosshairs of anti-union politicians and their corporate bosses.  Given the history of anti-unionism in America over the past forty years it should come as no surprise they are now the target of large scale coordinated union busting.  Just as the building trades and industrial unions have been targeted for destruction, public employees are now facing a gauntlet of anti-unionism aimed squarely at them.  With more public sector employees belonging to unions than those in the private sector (7.9 million v. 7.4 million) and union membership rates for public sector workers substantially higher than the rate for private industry workers (37.4% v. 7.2%) it should come as no surprise that public sector unions are now the primary targets in the corporate war on workers and their unions.

The preceding condensed version of the last forty years of the corporate war on America’s workers and their unions brings to mind one of the most moving and incisive quotations over the consequences of being divided against a common enemy.  It is from Pastor Martin Niemoller (1892-1984) referring to the rise of Nazi power in Germany and the complicity of those who failed to act to prevent the spread of the Nazi plague:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me –
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Using Pastor Niemoller’s words as a template and with profound respect, I would submit the following requiem for American workers for their complicity in or ignorance of the corporate war on America’s workers and their unions:

Requiem for The American Worker First they attacked the building trades unions,
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a member of the building trades;

Then they fired the air traffic controllers,
and I did not speak out –
because I was not an air traffic controller;

Then they shipped millions of union manufacturing jobs overseas,
and I did not speak out –
because I did not work in a union shop;

Then they vilified and attacked public sector unions,
and I did not speak out –
because I was not a member of a public employee union;

Then I needed a union –
and there were none left to speak out for me.

*This post originally appeared in Union Review on January 26, 2010.

About the Author: Bill Londrigan is President of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO.

The new year started with better but not great news on the jobs front. The latest figures from the U.S. Department of Labor released this morning show that unemployment dropped from 9.8 percent in November to 9.4 percent in December.

Even with the expected holiday season hires, only 103,000 net new jobs were created last month. Economists had predicted 150,000 to 175,000 new jobs for December. The number of jobs created is a drop from November, when 151,000 jobs were added.

The jobless rate has been at 9 percent or more for the past 20 months—the longest it has been this high since World War II, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Heidi Shierholz says the drop in the unemployment rate is somewhat misleading. 

Around half of the improvement was due to 260,000 people dropping out of the labor force, leaving the labor force participation rate at 64.3 percent, a stunning new low for the recession. Incredibly, the U.S. labor force is now smaller than it was before the recession started, though it should have grown by over 4 million workers to keep up with working-age population growth over this period.

According to the report, 14.5 million are officially jobless, down by 556,000 from last month. Long-term joblessness did not change from last month, with 6.5 million workers jobless for six months or more. That represents 44.3 percent of all unemployed workers.

The economy needs to add about 150,000 new jobs each month to keep up with the growth in the labor force. But to lower the nation’s unemployment rate to 6 percent by 2013 and make up for the more than 8 million jobs lost due to the Bush recession, the economy needs to add 350,000 jobs a month.

The nation is in dire need of a battle plan to create jobs and revive the economy. But instead of tackling job creation out of the gate, the new Republican majority in the House is playing cheap partisan politics by devoting its first week of action to repealing health care reform.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says that while the drop in December’s unemployment rate is welcome news, “net job growth is still not enough to accommodate our growing population, let alone close the 11-million job gap left by the Bush recession.”

The cuts being proposed by Republicans in Washington and around the country, including undermining Social Security and Medicare and cutting transportation spending, are the wrong remedies at the wrong time and threaten our economic future. We need dramatic action to invest in America and give states and cities breathing room to prevent further layoffs and create jobs.

Manufacturing gained 10,000 jobs in December, contributing to a gain of more than 100,000 jobs since December 2009. Construction jobs fell by 13,000, while retail jobs increased slightly by 12,000. But that follows November’s loss of 28,000 retail jobs. State and local public employee jobs fell by 20,000 last month.

The health care and leisure/hospitality sectors continue to be the strongest areas of job growth, with leisure/hospitality jobs increasing by 47,000 and health care employment expanding by 36,000 in December.

Earlier this week, Michael Snyder took a dispiriting look at how working families have been battered in recent years, especially with vanishing middle-class jobs and blue-collar jobs that pay decent wages. These jobs vanished in large part because of Bush-era trade and economic policies that encouraged U.S. firms to export jobs and gave Wall Street and Big Banks free rein to recklessly ride the economy off a cliff.  Snyder writes:

More than half of the U.S. labor force (55 percent) has “suffered a spell of unemployment, a cut in pay, a reduction in hours or have become involuntary part-time workers” since the recession began in December 2007.

Since the year 2000, we have lost 10 percent of our middle-class jobs. In the year 2000, there were about 72 million middle-class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle-class jobs. Meanwhile, our population is getting larger.

One out of every six Americans is now enrolled in at least one anti-poverty program run by the federal government.

Income inequality continued to grow with the richest 20 percent of working families taking home 47 percent of all income and earning 10 times that of low-income working families.

This article was originally published on AFL-CIO Now Blog.

About The Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety.

Most workers have seen notices about their right to a minimum wage or safe workplace posted in the company break room or elsewhere on the job. Employers are required to post those notices by federal law.

But there is no requirement for employers to post any sort of notice about workers’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), including the right to form a union. Now, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is proposing a rule that would require employers to post such notices in the workplace.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the proposed rule is “a common sense policy needed in today’s workplace.”

Every working person in America deserves to know his or her rights… [The rule]…ensures that workers’ rights are effectively communicated in the workplace. It is necessary in the face of widespread misunderstanding about the law and many workers’ justified fear of exercising their rights under it.

According to the proposed rule, published in the Federal Register, the NLRB believes that

many employees protected by the NLRA are unaware of their rights under the statute. The intended effects of this action are to increase knowledge of the NLRA among employees, to better enable the exercise of rights under the statute, and to promote statutory compliance by employers and unions.

Federal contractors must post such notices and the new proposed rule mirrors that requirement. The NLRB says notices would inform workers that they have

the right to act together to improve wages and working conditions, to form, join and assist a union, to bargain collectively with their employer, and to choose not to do any of these activities. It provides examples of unlawful employer and union conduct and instructs employees how to contact the NLRB with questions or complaints.

Says Trumka:

When workers know their rights, they can make the best decisions for themselves and their families.

Click here for the proposed rule and here for a fact sheet and more information about the proposed rule from the NLRB.

This article was originally posted on AFL-CIO Now Blog.

About The Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety.

Last night’s election, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters today in a conference call, “was about jobs, plain and simple. It was a mandate to fix the economy and create jobs. But here’s what it wasn’t”:

It wasn’t a mandate for the policies most Republicans campaigned on.

An election night survey of voters in 100 swing congressional district bears that out. That survey, Trumka says:

shows clearly that the election wasn’t an endorsement of tax cuts for the wealthy—or for undermining Social Security or the minimum wage. It wasn’t a rejection of building a middle class economy. And it wasn’t an ideological purge—as many Blue Dogs lost as progressives.

Overall, union members voted for the union-endorsed candidate by 64 percent. The union movement’s mobilization included 200,000 union volunteers who distributed 19.4 million fliers while talking with workers one on one at the workplace. They knocked on 8.5 million doors and made millions of  phone calls.

Members of Working America, the AFL-CIO community affiliate for people without a union, was in 13 cities, nine states and more than 80 electoral races around the country and knocked on nearly 800,000 doors and made half a million phone calls to voters around the country.

While Republicans today are claiming a mandate for their “Pledge to America” agenda—more or less a return to Bush-era economic policies—the survey numbers show a different story. When asked about specific Pledge to America agenda items, just 34 percent of all voters and 49 percent of Republicans support extending the tax cuts for the wealthy. By almost the same small numbers, they support rolling back Wall Street reform.

Among other proposals from Republican candidates this fall, only 29 percent of all voters and 35 percent of Republicans back raising the Social Security retirement age, while only 28 percent of all voters and 45 percent of Republicans back privatizing Social Security.

Reducing or eliminating the minimum wage draws the support of just 18 percent of all voters and 25 percent of Republicans.

Instead, the voters surveyed are big supporters of many of the economic proposals the AFL-CIO and most Democrats have called for and want Congress to invest money in job creation and help for the unemployed. Voters say they want:

• A major job creation tax credit for business to create jobs in the United States—89 percent of all voters and 87 percent of Republicans.

• Job creation by rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure of roads, bridges, schools and energy systems—77 percent of all voters and 63 percent of Republicans.

• Job investment to maintain U.S. competitiveness with China, India and Germany—77 percent of all voters and 74 percent of Republicans.

• Federal unemployment insurance benefits extended for those who have lost their jobs and are unable to find new ones—65 percent of all voters and 47 of Republicans.

Trumka also said voters were angry and rightfully so because, “They’ve felt the pain of economic collapse, and paid for it with their jobs, their homes and often their hope.”

That anger is directed at everyone in Washington. Our election night survey showed that, quite frankly, voters don’t make a distinction between Democrats and Republicans on having a plan to strengthen the economy.

The survey shows that just 35 percent of the voters believe the Republicans have a clear economic plan to rebuild the economy and create a jobs plan. Those numbers are just slightly better than the 30 percent who believe Democrats have an economic fix it plan.

While Republicans picked up huge gains in the House and some Senate seats, Trumka told reporters:

The months of intense, grassroots organizing on the ground by working people and their unions prevented yesterday from being even worse—particularly in places like Nevada, West Virginia, and California. In those states and many House districts, union members voted for our endorsed candidates by huge margins—40 percent in Nevada, for example—and we were the firewall.

Trumka also pointed to the huge amount of corporate money that played a major influence in the election.

According to Open Secrets, 74.2 percent of ALL money spent in the elections was spent by corporations—and their spending started well before the elections. In 2009 alone, the top three business industries—the health care and pharmaceutical industry, business associations like the Chamber of Commerce, and the oil and gas industry, spent $626 million on lobbying to defeat and distort President Obama’s agenda.

But, despite last night’s outcome, Trumka promised the fight

begins all over again for working families—for jobs, for building the middle class, for protecting retirement security and more.

That includes stepping up efforts to end corporate outsourcing of U.S. jobs, strengthening Social Security and Medicare, fighting to help jobless workers, asking multimillionaires to pay their fair share in taxes and investing in a 21st century infrastructure.

This article was originally posted on AFL-CIO Now Blog.

About The Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety.

In the past decade, more than 5 million manufacturing jobs and 850,000 information sector jobs have disappeared—many of which have been shipped overseas. This outsourcing is encouraged by faulty trade and tax policies that corporate executives use to boost record-breaking profits and outrageous and obscene executive salaries.

But finding out specific information on specific companies sending American jobs overseas and devastating their communities has been nearly impossible—until today. The AFL-CIO and Working America’s new Job Tracker database lists information on more than 400,000 corporations that have exported jobs overseas, violated health and safety codes or engaged in discriminatory or other illegal practice. (Check it out at http://t.co/qbg7wwm.)

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, in a conference call with reporters this morning, said Job Tracker’s searchable by ZIP code and the interactive database gives

everyday people the opportunity to actually see what is happening in their community and shine the light on what corporations are doing. For the first time, working people have one place to see the real impact of the failed policies of the past that gave corporations the ability to ship American jobs overseas.

With this new data as a benchmark, working people will have the ability to separate the economic patriots from the corporate traitors at the ballot box.

Karen Nussbaum, executive director of Working America—the AFL-CIO’s community affiliate— said, “Because of Job Tracker, corporations who have taken advantage of lax trade policies in America and abroad will no longer”

be able to hide behind the veils of bureaucracy. Every night on our neighborhood canvasses, we hear from people who want to know which companies are profiting off the loss of their jobs. Corporations have created a global race to the bottom and working people won’t stand for it.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows 83 percent of blue-collar workers say outsourcing of manufacturing jobs is the reason the U.S. economy is struggling and why companies are not hiring. Jobs are the No. 1 issue for working family voters this year, said Trumka.

We must demand that our leaders show that they stand with working families—fighting to create jobs, rejecting unfair trade deals and putting us on a path to make things in America again.

Here’s how Job Tracker works. Simply enter a ZIP code, for example Toledo, Ohio’s 43606. A few clicks of your mouse will find 20 companies—from Ace Packaging Systems to Tecumseh Products—have exported jobs, mostly manufacturing jobs. Another 19 firms have laid off workers because of the impact of trade and 61 companies have made or filed notice to make mass layoffs.

Also, 39 companies had cases involving workers’ rights violations under the National Labor Relations Act, and 1,170 have received health and safety violations under the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA).

Trumka said the Job Tracker provides the kind of information to help working families make their choices at the ballot box Nov. 2 and working families can use to determine who is on the side of working families.

The choice is clear—leaders who will fight to create and keep good jobs here in America, or the corporate traitors who insist on the policies that have rigged the playing field.

Job Tracker information draws on sources, including the U.S. Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance records, Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act notices, OSHA records and more. The Job Tracker site also enables visitors to use Facebook and Twitter and e-mail to report companies exporting jobs in their communities.

As part of Job Tracker, Working America also is releasing a “white paper,” OUTSOURCED: Sending Jobs Overseas: The Cost to America’s Economy and Working Families, which details how trade policies have outsourced good jobs. Working America will share the results with members of Congress and the economic community as a new analysis on what policies must be passed to turn our economy around.

This article was originally published on AFL-CIO Now Blog.

About The Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety.

So much for the economic independence that’s supposed to come with young adulthood.

But when unemployment among young men workers is the highest it’s been in 61 years, as noted by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, it’s little wonder that workers under 35 are facing so many economic obstacles.

On Tuesday, the AFL-CIO released the results of a disturbing new Peter Hart survey, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade” that found that about a third of workers under 35 live at home with their parents, and they’re far less likely to have health care or job security than they were ten years ago. Even then, in a 1999 survey, when they faced economic insecurity, they still had reasons to be hopeful.

Those days are long gone. A quarter of young workers say they don’t earn enough to even pay their monthly bills, a 14% rise from the last survey. As Richard Trumka, the presumptive incoming president of the AFL-CIO, said in a press conference today:

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.Thirty-five percent are significantly less likely to have health care than older workers, only 31 percent make enough money to pay their bills while putting anything aside in savings, and almost half are more worried than hopeful about their economic future.

That’s one reason that Trumka and other labor leaders announced this week a new outreach campaign to recruit young workers — and a stepped-up drive for the Employee Free Choice Act and health care reform. They used Labor Day, with the  involvement of 100,000 union members in just the AFL-CIO alone in events and actions, as a launching pad to spur Congressional action.

As Trumka declared in a speech Monday at the Center for American Progress (via Working In These Times blog):

The challenge facing unions isn’t just to change the way labor laws work; it’s to change the way we work.It’s to reconfigure ourselves to respond to the needs of a new generation of working Americans….

Younger workers ought to have health care. They ought to have paid sick leave and paid vacations. They ought to have pensions. They ought to have union representation.

But when they look at unions too often what they see is a remnant of their parents’ economy — not a path to succeed on their own. This is the issue that will decide the future of the American labor movement.

We all hear a lot about unions coming back into the AFL-CIO — and that’s a personal priority of mine – but, ultimately, it won’t matter how many unions are in the AFL-CIO if we fail to capture the imagination of millennials.

Now, we ought to be clear: the problem isn’t that they have some deep-seated hatred of unions; they don’t….They think we do a lot of good things for our members; the problem is that they don’t think we have much to offer them.

The union movement hopes to change that perception by offering them the concrete gains unions can offer them in the workplace, and as In These Times’s David Moberg observes, they’re potentially open to progressive appeals:

They primarily blame Bush, Wall Street/banks, and corporate CEOs and see job loss, inadequate wages, and healthcare costs as working people’s biggest economic problems.They strongly prefer public investment to create jobs over reducing the deficit. And by a 50 to 23 percent margin, they think workers are better off with a union. They support Obama and identify with Democrats much more strongly than older workers.

But the future now looks particularly bleak, especially if the “jobless recovery” continues at its relatively slow pace, and the level playing field for union organizing remains blocked by opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act.

At the media conference on Tuesday, one 31-year-old worker, Nate Scherer, explained his all-too-common plight:

After getting married, my wife and I decided to move in with my parents to pay off our bills. We could afford to live on our own but we’d never be able to get out of debt. We have school loans to pay off, too. We’d like to have children, but we just can’t manage the expense of it right now…so we’re putting it off till we’re in a better place. My [work] position is on the edge, and I feel like if my company were to cut back, my position would be one of the first to go.

Nate at least has a job, but he represents an economic tsunami for young workers that offers a profound challenge to the country — and our economic future. As Bob Herbert, looking at both long-term joblessness and the problems facing young workers, summed up recently in his column“A Scary Reality”:

For those concerned with the economic viability of the American family going forward, the plight of young workers, especially young men, is particularly frightening. The percentage of young American men who are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61 years of record-keeping, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old were working on any given day in the first six months of this year. In the age group 25 through 34 years old, traditionally a prime age range for getting married and starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.

For male teenagers, the numbers were disastrous: only 28 of every 100 males were employed in the 16- through 19-year-old age group…

This should be the biggest story in the United States. When joblessness reaches these kinds of extremes, it doesn’t just damage individual families; it corrodes entire communities, fosters a sense of hopelessness and leads to disorder.

The union movement’s leaders are hoping that by engaging young workers and increasing its power in more workplaces, they can start turning around this crisis and making up for “The Lost Decade.”

This article was originally published on Alternet.org.

About the Author: Art Levine, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, has written for Mother Jones, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate.com, Salon.com and numerous other publications. He can be reached at artlevine@inthesetimes.com.

The Minnesota Vikings and the New Orleans Saints kicked off the NFL season in a show of solidarity Thursday night and the AFL-CIO has taken the field in the players’ behalf. In a letter released today, the AFL-CIO’s top leaders warned NFL team owners that locking-out players next season could create significant job losses off the field and cause a “spiraling impact on communities.”

In individual letters to each NFL team owner, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Schuler and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said football generates hundreds of thousands of jobs in stadiums and in the cities. They said a conservative estimate is that a lockout would cost thousands of jobs and cause more than $140 million in lost revenue in each NFL city.

We strongly urge you to think about the stadium workers, hotel and restaurant workers, and thousands of other working people who support [your team] as dedicated employees and fans.

The owners terminated the collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association (NFLPA) a year early, claiming they were losing money. But like other employers, they refused to let the players’ union see the books that showed their financial condition.

In negotiations that have lasted more than a year, the owners continue to threaten a lockout and make demands for more work for less pay. Besides that, there is no guaranteed health care for players who are injured and players must play for three seasons before they are eligible for only five years of post-career health care.

This is significant because an NFL player’s career lasts, on average, between three and four years because of the physical toll on their bodies. A study commissioned by the NFL found that Alzheimer’s disease or similar memory-related diseases appear to have been diagnosed in the league’s former players far more often than in the national population—including a rate of 19 times the normal rate for men ages 30 through 49. The researchers found that 6.1 percent of former NFL players age 50 and above reported that they had received a dementia-related diagnosis, five times higher than the national average.

In the letters, the AFL-CIO officers said they will work with the NFLPA to let local elected officials in team cities and members of Congress know just how much a lockout would cost their cities. And, the officers said, where appropriate, they would call for hearings on the monies that teams got from taxpayers and the effect of the team’s non-profit status on tax revenues.

This article was originally posted on AFL-CIO NOW Blog.

About the Author: James Parks had his first encounter with unions at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Author photo by Joe Kekeris

The global economic crisis has been especially bad for young workers. A new report by the International Labor Organization (ILO) shows that while youth unemployment has been steadily worsening for more than a decade, the economic crisis caused an explosive increase in the jobless rate for young workers. The report, issued late last week, kicked off the United Nations International Youth Year.

At the end of 2009, 81 million young workers between the ages of 15 and 24 around the world were unemployed—the highest number ever. The overall jobless rate for young workers globally is now 13 percent, the ILO says. Rising youth unemployment is compounded by some 152 million young “working poor” caught in extreme poverty.

In the United States, an AFL-CIO report, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade,” published last fall, showed a massive decline in the economic situation of young workers here over the past 10 years. Among other findings, the survey shows that one-third of young American workers cannot pay their bills.

This high and rising level of youth unemployment globally is a “social time-bomb” that risks damaging the social, economic and political fabric of countries around the world, says Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC):

An entire generation of young people is being left behind, and the consequences of this for society will be severe. Governments have to act urgently to get job-creation moving, by maintaining economic stimulus where it is needed rather than by cutting public expenditure.

Read the ILO report here.

Trade unions in the United States and around the world are pressing governments to adopt policies that focus on creating good jobs now. Burrow says we also must push for specific measures to improve the access of young people to decent jobs and quality education and training.

About the Author: James Parks had his first encounter with unions at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. He has also been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections. Author photo by Joe Kekeris

Last week, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s July ruling that a proposed state constitutional amendment that sought to restrict how workers can vote in union representation elections was unconstitutional. Not surprisingly, it’s being pushed by opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act.

But that hasn’t stopped Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) and the Republican-controlled state legislature from taking a swing at workers and their unions. Brewer called a special session of the legislature and the state Senate and House today passed a measure to put the anti-union amendment on the November ballot.

Talk about fear of unions and real worker rights, even if passed, the amendment wouldn’t go into effect unless Congress passes and the president signs the Employee Free Choice Act.

Rebekah Friend, executive director of the Arizona AFL-CIO, tells the Arizona Republic:

They’re making a law that pre-empts a law that hasn’t even passed.

Of course knowing Brewer’s and the legislature’s anti-immigrant hysteria, their anti-union panic isn’t a real shock.

For more on the special session and the amendment from the Arizona AFL-CIO click here.

This post originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on August 11, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

About The Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and have written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety.