The COVID-19 crisis hit airline workers with speed and devastation. Passenger flow through TSA checkpoints fell 97 percent in March compared to a year earlier. In the months since, travel demand has only barely recovered, to 20 percent of a year ago.
Flight attendants know from hard experience the volatility of the airline industry and the harsh impact a crisis can have on airline workers. And this is a crisis like no other in the history of commercial aviation.
We know cuts to our contracts at any one airline set up a downward spiral for our careers. Instead, we’re getting ahead of any attempts by management. Flight attendants across the industry are united against concessions.
Together, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA), the Association of Professional Flight Attendants, and the Transport Workers Union—representing 80 percent of all U.S. flight attendants—signed an open letter making clear: “Concessions cannot and will not resolve the crisis in the industry. We are putting management on notice: don’t even think about it.”
Unions Unite Against Concessions
Excerpted from three flight attendants unions’ open letter:
Staffing at the airlines is a function of flight schedules and passenger demand. Cutting wages and work rules will not bring our jobs back. It simply means those remaining at work will work for less. And those returning from furlough would come back to lessened career expectations and diminished jobs.
We know from experience it can take years or decades to recover from concessions, impacting Flight Attendants of all seniority levels long after the crisis has passed and profitability is restored.
On behalf of tens of thousands of Flight Attendants across the industry, we stand united in our opposition to concessions. Flight Attendants must not be allowed to bear the burden of the aviation crisis. When the industry recovers, and it will, we are committed to retaining our contracts intact.
Management likes to say that agreeing to concessions will save jobs. News flash: It’s not true.
The crisis in the airline industry is caused by a drastic drop in customer demand due to the uncontrolled pandemic. Cutting flight attendant wages and benefits will do nothing to make the public feel safe to fly.
Dealing with the virus would require political leadership, something the Trump administration is unwilling to provide. Concessions would mean only that flight attendants would work for lower wages, and those who were furloughed would come back to a diminished job.
Labor costs are not the problem, and never will be.
While many of our veteran leaders have gone through the airline bankruptcy period of the early 2000s, others lack that firsthand knowledge. We pulled together an online panel of industry experts to inform leaders of our three unions for the fights to come.
Our expert panel included Labor Notes’ Jane Slaughter, author of the classic Concessions and How to Beat Them. Jane explained why the false trade-off of concessions to save jobs did not work in the auto industry and others in the 1980s, and why it would not work in the airline industry today.
Commercial airline travel is now an unregulated joke. People are crammed into smaller seats (unless they are flying $$first class$$). There are more seats and god forbid if you aren’t thin. You sneeze, you pay a fee. The snacks stink! Boeing can’t even build a safe airliner cos of……..quickprofits are craporate rule number one. Now, the CV crud epidemic, a highly contagious new family of viruses that spreads via airborne transmission. Hubster and I sure won’t be flying any time soon. Labor has got to strike, and the more, the better. This country is paralleling the 1930s Depression. It will only get worse unless people stand up! T and R, la58!! 🙂
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
“Concessions cannot and will not resolve the crisis in the industry. We are putting management on notice: don’t even think about it.” I LOVE IT!
Lansing — Many Michigan employees will be required to reauthorize their union membership each year after a vote from the Michigan Civil Service Commission on Monday.
The rules also would eliminate by 2022 “agency fees,” which are deducted from state worker paychecks if an employee does not authorize dues deductions. The smaller fees usually go to the union instead of union dues for negotiating pay, benefits, grievances and other services.
The civil service commission approved the changes in a 3-1 vote Monday, amid opposition from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and several union members.
The commission, made up of four appointees of Republican former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, includes Republican former Speaker of the House Jase Bolger; former Michigan Chamber of Commerce President James Barrett, a Republican and board member at the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy; Michigan State Police retiree Jeff Steffel, an independent; and former state personnel director Janet McClelland, an independent.
McClelland voted against the proposed changes, noting she was in support of workers being reminded of their rights each year. But she said the current system gives employees enough opportunity to decide whether to join or leave their respective unions at any given time.
Bolger said the proposal is a “protection of rights” that eliminates the assumption that state employees “endlessly waive their rights” to leave the union.
“Unions will remain free to make their case, but I do believe it protects individual workers’ rights,” Bolger said.
Under the rule changes, starting Oct. 4, a union member’s due withdrawal authorization will expire at the start of the first full pay period each fiscal year unless reauthorized. Employees who have reauthorized since Oct. 1, 2019, will not be required to do so again before Oct. 3, 2021.
Service fees will be barred from payroll deduction Jan. 1, 2022.
Many union members questioned the timing of the decision as state employees are being asked to work on the front lines of the pandemic and communication between unions and work-from-home employees is strained.
Yesterday’s release of the recommendations of the “Unity Task Force” made up of delegates from both the Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden camps marked an unprecedented attempt to formally unite the centrist and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. But it also crystallized the depth of their ideological disagreement, including within the world of organized labor.
The task force, made up of 49 surrogates from both Sanders and Biden, produced a report of more than 100 pages, intended to influence both the Democratic Party’s platform and Biden’s own policy priorities. The eight members of the economy section of the task force included two labor leaders: Lee Saunders, head of the 1.6 million-member public sector union AFSCME, a Biden delegate; and Sara Nelson, head of the Association of Flight Attendants, a Sanders delegate. Their experiences crafting the labor policy recommendations are a microcosm of the larger divide between the more establishment and radical wings of American unions.
The task force’s labor and worker rights platform includes several items that are standard on most unions’ political wish list: a repeal of “right to work” laws that make it more difficult to organize; “card check” recognition that makes it easier to put new unions in place; a ban on anti-union “captive audience meetings” and harsher penalties for employers that violate labor laws; and passage of the PRO Act, a strong pro-labor bill that passed the House earlier this year.
Perhaps the most notable part of the platform, however, is an omission. It asks to “ensure that all private-sector workers’ right to strike… is vigorously protected.” But for public sector workers, it asks only to “Provide a federal guarantee for public sector employees to bargain for better pay and benefits and the working conditions they deserve.” In other words, despite the fact that the public sector is much more heavily unionized than the private sector, and has been under legal attack from the right for decades, there is no demand that public sector workers be granted the right to strike—the single most potent weapon in any union’s toolbox.
More remarkable is the fact that Lee Saunders, one of America’s most powerful public sector union leaders and an Obama confidante, represents the faction that was not seeking to give his own members the right to strike. “In the public sector, AFSCME has taken the position that… in order to come to a conclusion if there are difficult negotiations, we should have binding arbitration in place of the right to strike,” Saunders told In These Times. “Public sector unions believe binding arbitration is better because we provide valuable public services.”
Saunders acknowledged that the issue of the public sector’s right to strike was discussed in the task force’s negotiations, but his view, unsurprisingly, carried the day. Sara Nelson, a leftist in the labor movement who is often mentioned as a future candidate to lead the AFL-CIO, pushed unsuccessfully for public workers to have the same right to strike as their counterparts in the private sector. “My mind wasn’t changed during this process on any issue we brought forward. I fundamentally believe in the right to strike. The strike is a necessary component of collective bargaining,” she told In These Times. “If federal workers had the right to strike, there would never be a government shutdown ever again.”
The United States Postal Service (USPS) was in trouble before the Covid-19 outbreak, but now it’s fighting for its life—officials predict a $13 billion revenue loss amid declining mail volume this year alone and warn the agency will run out of cash by September unless Congress steps in.
President Donald Trump has called the USPS a “joke” and refused additional funding unless the price to send packages increases by “four or five times.” Republicans now see an opportunity to deal a death blow to a public service they have tried to bleed dry for decades.
Previously a federally funded cabinet-level department, President Richard Nixon overhauled the Post Office in 1971, which created what we know today as the USPS. The move followed a wave of militancy by more than 200,000 clerks and carriers in 30 major cities who walked off the job for higher pay and collective bargaining rights. While postal unions did win better pay and bargaining rights, the reorganization was a double-edged sword. The 1971 federal legislation established the USPS as a new independent agency and required it to “pay for itself”—meaning the agency would receive no tax dollars and instead fund itself directly through the sale of its postage, products and services. As explained by Lawrence Swaim, former leader in the Postal Clerks Union, in a four-part series for In These Times in 1977:
The effort to make the post office run like “a regular business” had advantages for conservative interests as well. They could announce to the world that they would create a postal system in which revenues could match expenditures—in which the Post Office could “pay for itself,” and if this turned out to be impossible or necessitated unreasonable rate increases they could blame it on labor costs, focusing public resentment on the unions.
Ever since, conservatives have pushed the idea that the USPS is just a mismanaged business—and because of that, should be fully privatized. Importantly, Swaim warns that, in its current form:
The USPS is, in many ways, an entirely new phenomenon in this country, one for which we really have no name. Neither completely in the private nor the public sector, it tends to combine the most repressive and least democratic features of both. Its major tendency is to insulate from unions and particularly the paying public all control of its operations. Perhaps in more ways than we wish to admit, it is the American institution of the future.
Then, in 2006, a Republican-controlled Congress passed a law requiring the USPS to fund its future health benefits for retirees at an annual rate of at least $5.5 billion. By the end of 2019, the USPS carried $160.9 billion in debt—with nearly $120 billion of it from that requirement. So now, on paper, the USPS appears to be broke.
Still, the USPS remains one of the country’s most popular federal agencies and will have an especially crucial role in an election season likely to depend on mail-in ballots. It also provides more than 600,000 stable, good-paying jobs (21% of which are taken by African American workers). Congress must hold the line to protect the USPS.
The United States Postal Service has long been the most popular government agency. The last Gallup poll on the question found 74 percent of Americans rated it as excellent or good — as compared to 60 percent for NASA or 50 percent for the IRS. Despite years of cash trouble (mainly the fault of Congress), most people like their good old mail carrier. Indeed, as I have written, this country could not function without the USPS.
So it should come as no surprise that President Trump is taking the agency apart. Jacob Bogage reports at The Washington Post that the USPS is facing huge problems under Louis DeJoy, a big Trump donor who was recently appointed postmaster general. DeJoy supposedly wants it to run more like a business, and has implemented structural changes that have fouled up deliveries. It’s yet another example of how Trump’s authoritarian rot is dissolving the American state — and raising the possibility of interference with the 2020 election.
It is hard to explain what is going on here. Part of it is surely the Republican hatred of public services of any kind. GOP dogma holds that government is bad by definition, and if there is a popular and successful agency, by God they will ruin it out of spite. Part of it is just the general malicious incompetence that saturates every part of the Trump administration. Part of it probably has to do with Trump’s feud with Jeff Bezos — he seems to think that by punishing the USPS he can hurt Amazon.
But it’s also impossible not to notice that Trump has been screeching paranoid lies about voting by mail for the last few months, falsely portraying it as some kind of Democratic conspiracy to commit voter fraud. The pandemic will surely still be raging come November, and people will therefore want to vote by mail if they can. Indeed, the USPS is already warning people to submit their ballots early. Trump or his toadies may be calculating that Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, therefore ruining mail delivery might mean enough ballots are lost or unable to be delivered in time to tip the election to Trump.
If that were to happen, it would be straight-up election theft. However, it might actually boomerang on Trump and other Republican candidates, which have historically relied on mail-in ballots to drive turnout among their elderly voters. Trump’s own campaign has a large absentee ballot operation, but Trump’s howling has apparently made his crackpot base leery of mail-in voting themselves — missing the intended message that mail-in voting is fraud only when Democrats do it. And if the pandemic is bad enough, many older Republicans may not vote at all for fear of catching COVID-19.
Whatever the reason, it’s just one more potential accelerating catastrophe to add to the pile caused by Trump’s disastrous misrule. The U.S. could not possibly have become a rich country without the connective social tissue of efficient mail service. But it seems the president is determined to cause as much destruction on his way down as he can.
President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed U.S. postmaster general ordered the endangered public service Monday to make major cost-cutting changes, which could slow mail delivery.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor who has given more than $2 million to the GOP, warned employees that the agency needed to make “difficult” decisions to stay afloat, according to a new report in The Washington Post.
“If the plants run late, they will keep the mail for the next day,” one guideline says, according to a document obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union.
Carriers do not typically leave mail behind, often making multiple trips under heavy loads to get letters and packages to marked recipients as soon as possible.
Experts who reviewed the internal document, titled “New PMG’s [Postmaster General’s] expectations and plan,” said it presented “a stark reimagining of the USPS,” which could alienate customers. If the agency increases package delivery rates, which has the support of the administration, competing private companies could smell blood and throw new weight behind smothering the agency.
Trick the Dick and Trumpcorp, 2 Presidents? That have damaged America beyond belief
OzoneTom
Then, in 2006, a Republican-controlled Congress passed a law requiring the USPS to fund its future health benefits for retirees at an annual rate of at least $5.5 billion.
In 2006 and prior to congress passing The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) the Postal Service was profitable.
I doubt Amazon would remain solvent as a company if bezos had to do this for his workers
OzoneTom
You are right, not likely governmental/corporate pension-funding entities could survive a requirement to fund their pension plans for 75 years in the future.
After all, almost none of them are funding them for present-day requirements.
polarbear4
an institution of “the future.”. it doesn’t have to be.
Aint Supposed to Die A Natural Death
The way I heard it put some time ago, the USPS is being required to fund the retirement of employees who aren’t even born yet. Wow! The GOP scams are unbelievable.
As calls to defund the police rise across the country, many of us are taking stock of our own association with police through our common membership in unions. We’re coming to see the police as a direct threat to us as union members, and we’re also frustrated with the ways that too many police exploit the strengths of collective bargaining to avoid punishment for racist actions.
Service Employees (SEIU) members remember when police attacked Justice for Janitors members on a Los Angeles picket line 30 years ago. We’ve watched in horror as police have gassed and beaten demonstrators standing up for Black lives. This is on top of their regular harassment of Black and Brown members of our communities and our unions.
And while most police unions are unaffiliated with national unions, some of our biggest unions do include police locals. Rayshard Brooks, one of the most recent in a seemingly endless series of Black people murdered by police, was killed by an Atlanta officer represented by SEIU and the National Association of Government Employees.
Those of us who are SEIU members have found ourselves facing an internal conflict that we cannot ignore—and many of us are ready to stop protecting members who directly harm us.
WHOSE BUDGET WILL BE CUT?
This conflict arises in another material way. Many public sector SEIU members are hearing about budget cuts and impending layoffs because of the pandemic and its accompanying financial crisis. Those of us in social services, health care, and city and county jobs that protect and nurture the common good are once again the first to be threatened when the economy goes bad, while police budgets, drawn from the same small pot of public money, only seem to grow.
And as these austerity threats increase, we know who will be called on to evict us from our homes, or to confront us physically on the picket line. Law enforcement officers are not our union brothers and sisters; they are enforcers of our oppression. Black, Brown, and Native people, trans and queer people, women, youth, and people with disabilities have all been targeted.
As unionists, one tool we have is disaffiliation of police unions.
Eric Schmidt and wife founded the institute supporting this
he was chair of Google/Alphabet from 2001 – 2011 and has retired and is part of a group advising the DOD in the use of AI and technology.
So this is another case of a billionaire doing good on the one hand, and bad on the other hand Like the Sackler (sp) family with opioids and global funder of art , and Koch funding MIT, Met Opera, etc
I met with him in the early 1980’s. I was at the forefront of software engineering methods in AT&T Bell Labs. An impressive man. He sure did well after Bell Labs.
OzoneTom
Eric Schmidt and his businesses made a lot of money as contractors for Democratic Party and Hilary Clinton campaign, and are deeply embedded in the DNC hierarchy.
A number of environmental protection groups on Wednesday announced their intention to bring the Trump administration to court directly after President Donald Trump announced his finalized plan to roll back the National Environmental Policy Act.
By weakening the 50-year-old law known as NEPA, the president will end the system of thorough environmental impact reviews, which are meant to keep infrastructure projects from damaging biodiversity, polluting waterways and residential areas, and threatening the climate.
Trump announced the sweeping changes to the law at a campaign stop in Atlanta Wednesday afternoon, touting the plan as one that will “modernize” and “streamline” infrastructure projects as environmental reviews will need to be completed within two years.
The Western Environmental Law Center rejected the administration’s euphemisms for what it called Trump’s attempt to “eviscerate…the single most important safeguard for environmental justice, public health, and environmental protection in the U.S.”
“This does not represent ‘streamlining,’ a ‘revision,’ a ‘modernization,’ or any such minimization of the very real effects this will have for Americans and the clean air and water we require to exercise our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” said Brian Sweeney, communications director for the group. “This overreach will also deliberately and massively curtail public input on major federal decision-making. Dramatic? Yes. This is a rewrite of a law written by Congress, without Congressional action. We will sue over this.”
But with a pandemic raging and an eviction crisis looming, the Senate is preparing to spend three quarters of a trillion dollars… not on public health or housing, but on the Pentagon.
The United States may be going down, but we’re going down well-armed.
At a time when health workers have struggled to find masks and protective gear, the Pentagon has so many extra trucks, guns, and other gear, it hands the surplus out for free to police departments—who then use it whether they need it or not, much like the Pentagon itself.
The Pentagon is like a giant black hole, devouring hundreds of billions of dollars each year. Even the Pentagon doesn’t know where the money goes. Meanwhile, everything else—from public health and medical research to education, housing, and infrastructure—has been severely and chronically underfunded.
At more than $740 billion this year, the Pentagon budget is more than 100 times the budget of the CDC—and more than 1,800 times the U.S. contribution to the World Health Organization that the president has promised to cut.
Despite the Pentagon’s favorite child status in Washington, most Americans agree that making reasonable cuts to the Pentagon to fund domestic needs is a good idea, according to a poll released just before the coronavirus shook the world. Since then, our needs have only grown more dire.
That’s why now is such an urgent time to finally break the gravity of the Pentagon’s black hole.
Senators Bernie Sanders, Representative Barbara Lee, and Representative Mark Pocan have put forward an eminently reasonable proposal to cut 10 percent from the Pentagon budget to fund other urgent needs — like education, housing, and infrastructure—in the country’s most destitute places.
On day one, we will end the prosecution of low-level drug offenses here in Travis County,” announced district attorney candidate José Garza, at a February forum on criminal justice reform in Austin. “We will end the prosecution of possession and sale offenses of a gram or less.”
That may have sounded to some like a bold statement, but Garza argued it was the rational response to a “broken system.”
On Tuesday night, voters in the state capital of Texas and the surrounding county agreed. Garza, a former federal public defender, immigrant rights activist, and executive director of the Texas Workers Defense Project–Proyecto Defensa Laboral, swept to victory over Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore in a closely watched Democratic primary runoff election. And the successful challenger signaled that he is ready to act. “We know that 60-percent of all people arrested and charged with drug possession through traffic stops are people of color,” he told reporters. “So, it is time to end the war on drugs in this community to begin to unwind the racial disparities in our criminal justice system.”
Garza won 68 percent of the vote to 32 percent for Moore, who, as The Austin Chronicle noted earlier this year, had been “under fire on many fronts for her perceived insufficient commitment to true justice, particularly for women survivors of sexual assault.” The Chronicle endorsed Garza as a candidate who would bring to the office “a demonstrable commitment to equity.”
With the party nomination secured in an overwhelmingly Democratic county, Garza is positioned to further demonstrate that commitment as one of the most high-profile members of the emerging class of county prosecutors who are prepared to upend old ways of thinking about law enforcement and the achievement of justice. He’ll join Chicago’s Kim Foxx, Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner, and San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin as part of a movement to transform how cities and countries across the country address public safety issues. “The movement is growing!” observed Boudin, as he celebrated the victory by Garza, who ran with strong support from unions, Austin Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
The Texan summed up the thinking of the movement during the course of a campaign in which he told voters, “Our system doesn’t have to be broken. We have the power to fix this. And we have a right and a responsibility to demand that it be fixed.”
The Nixon-spawned War on Drugs has wrecked lives, created the for-profit prison industry, and helped make the fuzz into FRight militarized monsters. Hope Austin’s actions become nationally contagious.
Vanessa Dundon has spent 16 weeks supporting her fellow Navajo Nation members as they continue to grapple with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the United States.
“It feels like biological warfare,” said Dundon, a Dine Bikeyah woman and enrolled member of the Navajo Nation.
In May, Navajo Nation, which has a population of 173,647 people living within its borders, surpassed New York City as the region with the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 in the U.S. At its peak, Navajo had an infection rate of 2,304.41 cases per 100,000 people. (Comparatively, Texas currently has an infection rate of of 942 cases per 100,000 people and Florida is reporting 1,315 cases per 100,000 people.) As of Monday, the Navajo reported a total of 8,243 confirmed virus cases, with 402 deaths. And after three months of fighting COVID-19, mandatory weekend curfews have flattened the nation’s curve, but outbreaks are ongoing.
Dundon lives in White Cone, Arizona, in one of Navajo Nation’s 110 communities. Her area hasn’t been hit particularly hard by COVID-19, but she knows several people who’ve caught the virus and she’s bracing for the worst. As of “this past week, there are cases now in my area and I knew it was coming,” Dundon said.
Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez has reissued a state of emergency multiple times and implemented several lockdowns, on and off mandatory curfews, mandatory facemasks, and checkpoints limiting flow in and out of the nation—measures Indigenous communities around the world have taken to prevent contagion.
COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Indigenous communities all over the world, from Brazil to Australia, highlighting a global pattern of colonial governments that continuously fail Indigenous peoples. Indigenous communities have had to take matters into their own hands in response.
It’s common for Navajo families to set up multigenerational homes, often sheltering up to 10 or 12 people, many of whom are elders, in the same house. Dundon said that makes it difficult to maintain distance from others and likely contributes to the growing number of COVID-19 cases. But there are bigger issues as well, including the lack of clean, running water in nearly 30 percent of homes, too little government funding, too few medical staff on reservations, and a shortage of sanitizers and medical-grade protective gear, Dundon said.
The Trump administration and Senate Republicans are reportedly considering a plan to pressure U.S. schools to reopen in the fall by attaching conditions or incentives to desperately needed Covid-19 relief funds as educators and parents warn that—in addition to being unpopular—the White House push to send children back to the classroom without an adequate safety strategy is reckless and dangerous.
With school districts across the nation in need of billions of dollars in funding to prepare for potential reopenings, the Washington Post reported Wednesday that “the White House and Republicans are debating whether to take a carrot or a stick approach with the aid.”
“Some White House officials are pushing for conditioning the aid on schools reopening partly or fully, but others involved prefer to offer incentives to schools to take steps to reopen,” according to the Post. One anonymous Senate GOP aide told the Post that “there are those who would rather incentivize good behavior, and others want to punish bad behavior.”
Teachers and public health experts have voiced alarm at the Trump administration’s aggressive push to reopen schools as states across the U.S. see a surge in Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations, cautioning that sending children back to full in-person classes without adequate precautions in place could endanger students and faculty—a warning the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has echoed.
This is getting really dark. The White House and Senate GOP now want to blackmail states and localities into full reopening of schools. You only get more COVID relief if the kids are in the seats. https://t.co/aOsEl7iLQi
n. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. n. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government. ——————- It’s fascism.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will spearhead a new campaign to push Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to tax billionaires who live in New York State and use the money to assist people hurt by the pandemic-fueled economic crisis.
Similar measures targeting the wealthy have stalled in Albany, opposed by Republicans who long controlled the State Senate or by Mr. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat who has made his tax-cutting ways a central platform of his decade-long tenure.
But the environment has changed: Democrats gained control of both houses of the Legislature in a “blue wave” election in 2018, and the effects of the coronavirus-forced shutdown have created a $13 billion state budget shortfall.
Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who was among the progressive Democrats who won office in 2018, sponsored the bill that would tax the unrealized capital gains of the state’s 119 billionaires. The money raised would be redirected to workers not eligible for unemployment insurance or the federal stimulus.
The proposed legislation is one of at least three tax-the-rich bills, including one that would impose an ultra-millionaires’ tax, that will greet the State Legislature when it returns for a rare July session on Monday.
But even with Democrats in control in Albany, the measures are still sure to encounter opposition from Republicans and many business leaders.
On Thursday, a campaign-like video will be released featuring Ms. Ocasio-Cortez; Ms. Ramos; the New York City public advocate, Jumaane Williams; and two Assembly members, Carmen De La Rosa and Yuh-Line Niou.
“Governor Cuomo, we need you to pass a billionaires’ tax, in order to make sure that we’re providing for our working families,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said in the video. “It’s time to stop protecting billionaires, and it’s time to start working for working families.”
Also on Thursday, 100 immigrant workers will start a 24-hour fast and sleep-out near the Fifth Avenue penthouse of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the richest men in the world. On Friday, hundreds of people are expected to hold a “march on billionaires” that will end at Mr. Cuomo’s Manhattan office.
“We are calling for a just recovery for all New Yorkers, but right now our system is rigged to protect the mega-rich,” said Angeles Solis, lead organizer for Make the Road New York, one of the groups in the coalition.
Last year, a so-called pied-à-terre tax on the second homes of the wealthy in New York City gained some momentum after Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge fund billionaire with an estimated net worth of $10 billion, purchased the most expensive single family home in the United States, a $238 million apartment on Central Park South.
Mr. Cuomo voiced support for the plan before it fell apart after the real estate industry exerted pressure on legislators.
But the financial crisis created by the coronavirus — the state estimates it needs more than $10 billion to stave off major cuts in education, health care and public safety — has forced lawmakers to reconsider implementing new taxes.
Don midwest
Florida now has 4x the number of covid 19 cases as China. And there are many more. FL death count will soon overtake China.
A couple of people on twitter said that this is the start of republicans distancing themselves from Trump. Most of the other jerks will simply change stripes but not show by actions like these that they have bypassed Trump.
Gov of MD with a Korean wife who ordered test kits and supplies from Korea and had to hid them so that the feds would not steal them.
I will put in more text than usual because WA Post behind a paywall and my wife subscribes.
This should not have been necessary. I’d watched as the president downplayed the outbreak’s severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals. Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless; if we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response. I did the best I could for Maryland. Here’s what we saw and heard from Washington along the way.
recounts early days of lies, not listening to public health experts, etc.
I knew a little about this effort by Governors
America’s governors took a different approach. In early February, we descended on Washington for the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association. As chairman, I had worked closely with the staff for months assembling the agenda, including a private, governors-only briefing at our hotel, the Marriott Marquis, to address the growing viral threat. We brought in Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was already widely admired but whose awesome knowledge and straight-talking style hadn’t yet made him a national rock star; CDC head Robert Redfield; Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security; Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director for infectious diseases; and Robert Kadlec, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services.
They hit us with detailed presentations and the unfiltered truth, as well as it was known then. I remember hearing many dire claims: “This could be catastrophic. . . . The death toll could be significant. . . . Much more contagious than SARS. . . . Testing will be crucial. . . . You have to follow the science — that’s where the answers lie.”
Gov wife is named Yumi
It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts’ warnings and the president’s public dismissals. Weren’t these the people the White House was consulting about the virus? What made the briefing even more chilling was its clear, factual tone. It was a harrowing warning of an imminent national threat, and we took it seriously — at least most of us did. It was enough to convince almost all the governors that this epidemic was going to be worse than most people realized.
During the retreat in D.C., the Republican Governors Association sponsored a private dinner with the president. Backstage beforehand, I said hello to him. We took a photo together. He was perfectly cordial, even though we’d criticized each other in the past. Then he came out and gave one of his unscripted rally speeches that seemed to go on at least an hour too long. I don’t remember him mentioning the virus, but he talked about how much he respected President Xi Jinping of China; how much he liked playing golf with his buddy “Shinzo,” Prime Minister Abe of Japan; how well he got along with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.
Then, the jarring part: Trump said he really didn’t like dealing with President Moon from South Korea. The South Koreans were “terrible people,” he said, and he didn’t know why the United States had been protecting them all these years. “They don’t pay us,” Trump complained.
Yumi was sitting there as the president hurled insults at her birthplace. I could tell she was hurt and upset. I know she wanted to walk out. But she sat there politely and silently.
the final paragraph of the WA Post article which begins by quoting Pence
“The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different,” he wrote. “The truth is, whatever the media says, our whole-of-America approach has been a success. We’ve slowed the spread, we’ve cared for the most vulnerable, we’ve saved lives, and we’ve created a solid foundation for whatever challenges we may face in the future. That’s a cause for celebration, not the media’s fearmongering.”
wpDiscuz
https://labornotes.org/2020/07/flight-attendants-tell-airlines-dont-even-think-about-concessions
Commercial airline travel is now an unregulated joke. People are crammed into smaller seats (unless they are flying $$first class$$). There are more seats and god forbid if you aren’t thin. You sneeze, you pay a fee. The snacks stink! Boeing can’t even build a safe airliner cos of……..quick profits are craporate rule number one. Now, the CV crud epidemic, a highly contagious new family of viruses that spreads via airborne transmission. Hubster and I sure won’t be flying any time soon. Labor has got to strike, and the more, the better. This country is paralleling the 1930s Depression. It will only get worse unless people stand up! T and R, la58!! 🙂
“Concessions cannot and will not resolve the crisis in the industry. We are putting management on notice: don’t even think about it.” I LOVE IT!
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/07/13/panel-oks-controversial-changes-state-employee-union-due-authorizations/5426835002/
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22653/bernie-biden-task-force-labor-public-sector-right-strike-nelson-saunders
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22563/US-Postal-Service-Lawrence-Swaim-COVID-19-Donald-Trump-Postal-Clerks-Union
https://theweek.com/articles/925637/donald-trump-destroying-post-office
https://www.salon.com/2020/07/15/disturbing-memo-reveals-trumps-usps-chief-has-slowed-delivery-amid-calls-to-expand-voting-by-mail/
“Good” ole Trick the Dick Nixon and 1971, huh? The Powell Memo, 1971. That’s no coincidence, Birdies!
Trick the Dick and Trumpcorp, 2 Presidents? That have damaged America beyond belief
In 2006 and prior to congress passing The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) the Postal Service was profitable.
I doubt Amazon would remain solvent as a company if bezos had to do this for his workers
You are right, not likely governmental/corporate pension-funding entities could survive a requirement to fund their pension plans for 75 years in the future.
After all, almost none of them are funding them for present-day requirements.
an institution of “the future.”. it doesn’t have to be.
The way I heard it put some time ago, the USPS is being required to fund the retirement of employees who aren’t even born yet. Wow! The GOP scams are unbelievable.
https://labornotes.org/blogs/2020/07/why-and-how-seiu-members-are-calling-our-union-expel-cops
The floor/ soap box is open.
Good stuff! Thanks for keeping us up to date on labor news.
beautiful
Eric Schmidt and wife founded the institute supporting this
he was chair of Google/Alphabet from 2001 – 2011 and has retired and is part of a group advising the DOD in the use of AI and technology.
So this is another case of a billionaire doing good on the one hand, and bad on the other hand Like the Sackler (sp) family with opioids and global funder of art , and Koch funding MIT, Met Opera, etc
Go read this report on what Eric Schmidt’s been up to since he left Google
10
In short: promoting the use of tech and AI in the military
I met with him in the early 1980’s. I was at the forefront of software engineering methods in AT&T Bell Labs. An impressive man. He sure did well after Bell Labs.
Eric Schmidt and his businesses made a lot of money as contractors for Democratic Party and Hilary Clinton campaign, and are deeply embedded in the DNC hierarchy.
ABsolutely FABulous and beautiful!!!
This is the tip of the iceberg ,so many undiscovered creatures when you go that deep into the ocean
💕🐬🌊❣️
‘We Will Sue,’ Vow Green Groups After Trump Guts Nation’s Key Environmental Law
Cut the Pentagon 10 Percent, Invest in Public Health
Austin, Texas, Just Voted to End the Drug War
The Nixon-spawned War on Drugs has wrecked lives, created the for-profit prison industry, and helped make the fuzz into FRight militarized monsters. Hope Austin’s actions become nationally contagious.
Governments Worldwide Are Failing Indigenous Peoples During the Pandemic
edit
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/07/16/trump-and-gop-weighing-plan-punish-schools-dont-reopen-withholding-covid-19-funds?cd-origin=rss
Almost fascist.
fasc•ism făsh′ĭz″əm►
n.
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
n.
A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
——————-
It’s fascism.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”
― Benito Mussolini
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/nyregion/aoc-billionaires-tax.html
Florida now has 4x the number of covid 19 cases as China. And there are many more. FL death count will soon overtake China.
A couple of people on twitter said that this is the start of republicans distancing themselves from Trump. Most of the other jerks will simply change stripes but not show by actions like these that they have bypassed Trump.
Gov of MD with a Korean wife who ordered test kits and supplies from Korea and had to hid them so that the feds would not steal them.
I will put in more text than usual because WA Post behind a paywall and my wife subscribes.
Fighting alone
I’m a GOP governor. Why didn’t Trump help my state with coronavirus testing?
recounts early days of lies, not listening to public health experts, etc.
I knew a little about this effort by Governors
Gov wife is named Yumi
also from WA POST
A month later, Pence’s wildly optimistic view of the pandemic has proved almost entirely wrong
not news to people here
Pence wrote a WSJ column
the final paragraph of the WA Post article which begins by quoting Pence