New Orleans

Here’s why I believe they will win:

• Delays Always Favor the Company: This decertification election has been on and off too long to allow the challenger to maintain the momentum against the incumbent.  In regular organizing that means the company wins more than 2/3rds of the time that the election is over 60 days from the filing.  In this case the “company” is SEIU, and its ability to tie up the challenger means just on the numbers, before any work was done, if normal odds prevailed their chances of winning were at 2/3rds.
• Change the Boss: One of the standard pages in any law firm or company side labor relations manual holds that when you are caught behind, it’s best to change the boss or whomever the workers see as responsible for the problem.  SEIU’s boss has changed.  In this very personal struggle between Sal Rosselli from Oakland and SEIU’s Andy Stern from DC, too much of the dissident’s campaign always presumed it was safe to individualize the attack and target Stern as the problem.  When Rosselli saw me in the Detroit hotel hallway and told me he had heard that Mary Kay Henry had the votes to become SEIU’s president, he chortled that it was “good news for the union, but bad news for me.”  Had Anna Burger, Andy’s longtime leadership partner prevailed in the board election, the dissidents would have easily just said “same ol’ same ol’” but in Henry the workers would see a new leader from California harder to brand with the problems in Stern’s legacy, yet someone who had fought Rosselli for 20 years and had been the losing candidate as Secretary-Treasurer to Rosselli’s winning slate when he took over Local 250 after that trusteeship.  I’m not saying that Stern left SEIU because of this election, but I will say that SEIU’s organizing expert, Tom Woodruff, has been in too many hard fought company/union elections, not to have calculated the impact on this election.

• The New Kaiser Contract Helps: The other thing that SEIU’s legal team bought the International and their folks in the bunkers of Northern California was enough time to negotiate a new contract with the employer, Kaiser Permanent, and its chain of hospitals and clinics in the state.  NLRB lawyers are maddening to union organizers and have driven many to drink and screaming as they argue from their training manuals that the contract ratification vote is a bellwether for a decertification vote, so “why do you care if there’s a decert; you ratified the contract?”  The dissidents needed to bleed the new contract, make the ratification close, or block the ratification entirely and for whatever and a number of reasons, they were unable to do this.  In fact the published reports indicate that the new contract was wildly popular with the Kaiser members and approved by 80%+, as I recall.  The tactical advantage lay heavily with the incumbent, and SEIU seized the advantage and powered it home, but this also hurt the dissident campaign, since much of Rosselli’s framing has been that SEIU’s merger-mania in California would “reduce standards.”  People like Dave Reagan (originally from SEIU Local 1199 WV/OH/KY, Woodruff’s old local) and Hal Ruddick (who worked at my SEIU Local 100 for 10 years) know how to negotiate a contract and made the most out of it.
• Majority Signs SEIU Election Support Petition: Another classic tactic that all of us have used in elections with the company focuses on rebuilding the majority during the election campaign.  This is a huge barometer and seeks to restore the momentum that usually falls off at the point of filing for the election, which is usually the union’s strongest moment against the company.  The 30%+ showing of interest that Rosselli’s forces mustered both before and during the original chaos and rage at the SEIU trusteeship has long dissipated, and the ability of the current SEIU ground forces to produce and show a “public” majority that workers at the hospitals and centers will see sends a huge blinking message to the full Kaiser workforce that SEIU has the majority and is going to win.  Workers like it or not, vote overwhelmingly with whichever side they believe is going to win.  That’s why companies are willing to break the law, coerce, intimidate, and fire leaders to send a message of power to back off workers and convince them that struggle is futile and victory impossible.  Workers have to survive.  Individual bosses and union leaders come and go.  A majority on a petition within 2 months of the vote count should make SEIU the heavy voting favorite.
• SEIU Ready for the Ground War on GOTV: In the last huge test in this blood battle SEIU proved it was willing to do what was necessary in the Fresno home health care challenge and eked out a narrow victory after pouring in millions and moving thousands of people into the Fresno get out the vote effort.  The dissidents and their supporters took some comfort and counted some coup, because they were able to keep the margin down with SEIU only narrowly holding the unit.  That was then, and this is now.  Time has traveled and other benchmarks have been set, but SEIU will spend millions again and every indication is that they will once again put a thousand or more people on the streets in the GOTV effort.  The dissidents are in less of position to match this effort now than they were.
• SEIU Has Crippled the Dissidents Financially: One thing I have learned as a union organizer over the last 30 years is that when the company really wants to beat you, they can absolutely beat you:  it comes down to will.  The real story financially in the SEIU battle is their willingness to barter their future and “play for anything” stakes in this internal fight.  They isolated the dissidents financially by cutting off the critical outside sources of money and organizing talent.  Stern did this first by making peace with what used to be called the California Nurses Association, now an AFL affiliate, and essentially giving up the fight that SEIU had made for nurses jurisdiction for years, helping his cause first within Kaiser where they would have been a formidable problem and inside the workplace voice against SEIU had he not neutralized them.  The price was high and included walking away from thousands of workers that SEIU had everything but won in Ohio and elsewhere, but this is part of the “below the line” calculus on this deal.  Mary Kay Henry finished the job with Stern’s departure by making peace, also at a huge price, with John Wilhelm of  Unite HERE and his former co-president Bruce Raynor, now an SEIU VP with Workers United.  A couple of months ago when I was in northern California briefly it was clear that HERE’s interjection of money and organizers into this family feud was effective and was hurting SEIU.  This was not a deal that Stern turned out to have been able to make, but Henry made it job #1 and got it done, and done in time to impact this election.  Wilhelm didn’t have many cards but he played what he had, particularly his strength in Local 2 with Mike Casey and his ability to leverage Maria Elena Durazo in Los Angeles with the county federation, perfectly.  Oh, yeah, they lost a lawsuit, too, but who cares that was just garnish and no money has changed hands.  With these two deals, SEIU cut off the outside bankers and made the fight totally uneven in terms of resources.
• Mail Ballots Favor GOTV Outside the Workplace: We love mail ballots.  We never lose them.  We’ll do almost anything to get one in an election.  Clearly, a unit of 40,000+ had to have a mail ballot, and with such a ballot the odds roll over to whichever side can get to the voters where they are voting and in this case that means at home, not at work.  The dissidents can’t match the home field advantage here.  What they have is at the workplaces where they still have committed workers in place.  I don’t need to talk to anybody to know that SEIU’s willingness to gear up a huge GOTV operation means that their assessments and polling indicate that the more that people vote; the more likely they are to win.  They obviously feel now that their real campaign is against apathy and not Rosselli, and that they can only lose if they get a light turnout and the diehards are both sides are left to decide.

Anyway you look at it, this is life or death for both sides, and SEIU knew it and has taken advantage of it powerfully to paint the dissidents into an impossible tactical bind, regardless of the support and sympathy they have in California and in much of what passes for a chattering class in the rickety house of labor.  I’m not saying that Stern’s sudden and still largely inexplicable resignation from SEIU was motivated by this election, since by all accounts much credibility should be given to the fact that he was “tired” as he’s said publically, and winning the health care vote at least left the rationalization of leaving well, but no one will ever convince me that all of these factors didn’t come to play in the decision and all of its aftermaths.  If he was going to leave mid-term anyway, then the spring was the perfect time so that all of this business could get done the way SEIU needed it to be done.

SEIU will retain its support among Kaiser workers and keep this unit.  I would bet they will get more than 65% support when all the votes are tallied.

I could be wrong, but I sure would be surprised if it turned out any differently than all of these signs are pointing.

New Orleans

This is all trending from blatant to bizarre.  The estimates of a settlement now range in the billions which is not surprising:  a million women workers each averaging only $1000 in the settlement would be a billon!

I’ve been wrong on this before.  Almost two years ago in a fit of optimism I wrote here that settlement might be imminent.  My bad!  I had forgotten one of the cardinal Wal-Mart rules:  it’s always cheaper to pay lawyers than to pay workers.

The company’s legal gambit seems to be that the “class” has too little in common, only the fact “of the lawsuit” and that “they are women.”  It’s hard to imagine why that isn’t more than enough?  The whole point is that they are women, and the company did them wrong.  Hello?  Are they just playing for time now?  Postponing a bad press day?  What’s up?  They can’t really be serious that they think the class is too big?  They should have thought of that before they paid women less, didn’t promote them, and rolled them out earlier than men.

Dukes is still working as a greeter for Wal-Mart even a decade after filing the suit.  Now there are going to be three women on the Supreme Court.

The waiting strategy is not going to work for Wal-Mart.

I’m liking Dukes’ odds now, because at a million to one, a million women against one company, I’m not seeing a way to lose at this point.

His cartoon about the near farcical Beckaton in front of the Lincoln Memorial along the reflecting pool says it all for me right down to the nonsensical right arm:  “ACORN = nuts = insane” though “mosque + cow = Moscow” is pretty much a classic.

When dealing with a clown, a cartoon just seems to say it best!

New Orleans

I’m going to sign up for bringing back support for the 1^st time home buyers program that ended in April even though it is a tax credit of $8000 rather than direct support at the point of sale, which would really get the sales charts soaring in the dead-in-the-water real estate market.  So far other than bailout and boost up banks, the Administration hasn’t had much success with anything else in the housing field and fall is usually not the hot season for sales in that industry with winter’s bite not far away in many markets.

Driving down Franklin Avenue returning from visiting the Mom yesterday afternoon, I was surprised by the number of for sale signs on this street where a ridge and houses built higher off the avenue had allowed recovery more quickly in the midst of the Gentilly deluge.  A betting man would believe that the prices are still based more on wishes than reality, but I’m not sure who would take the plunge even on Franklin where an ex-Mayor of New Orleans is one of the neighbors without a little bit of love from the federales. Milne Boys’ Home, where Louis Armstrong was partially raised during its time as an orphanage, continues to sit in sullen scandal with blue tarps flying frayed as the flags on Franklin, but there’s good news even there as several million was announced recently to finally rebuild.

Something has to move the inventory here and elsewhere, and at least the 1^st time homeowners program is something even HUD knows how to handle.

FORCED SAVINGS You may make nothing at all beyond inflation over time on a home, but the part of your mortgage payment that goes toward principal is a form of forced savings.
Sure, you might do better by renting and investing the difference between the rent and the total costs of ownership. But at least three things need to go right.
First, you need to actually save the money. Americans have trouble with that sort of plan. Then, you need an after-tax return that’s better than whatever a home would deliver. That’s a task that might not have gone so well over the last 10 or 12 years, and it involves its own future risk, given how little safer investments are returning now. Finally, you must not raid the savings along the way.”
Of course it goes without saying that the “forced savings” part of this equation only works out at the point of sale, and even the “nothing at all beyond inflation” somehow has to take in the cost of property taxes, insurance, and maintenance (which can easily be another $5-10000 per year).  Additionally, a family would have to factor in the computations the fact that after cashing out the house, you would either need to buy another house to escape capital gains consequences on the first sale, or make sure that you included those taxes in your figuring as well.    Taking all of those things into account, the house might have to appreciate more than $100,000 every 10 years to breakeven.
None of that says that owning a home is still not an asset providing more citizen wealth than renting, but all of this has to be part of the cold shower that boosterism must be forced to confront before continuing, unrealistically, to argue that home ownership is a guaranteed method of reducing poverty in the US and elsewhere.

New Orleans

I have to admit I have a couple of dogs in this race as well, since I’ve argued that the limp wicked, ham-handed, banker-driven no-home-mortgage-modification program was forcing foreclosures, robbing citizen wealth, and deepening the recession in countless communities which had been engines of group in the early 21^st century, and that the lack of new jobs and weird claims of jobs saved were political tropes not recession killers.  Krugman is on the same page.  He argues that we need to (1) “revamp” the “deeply unsuccessful attempt to aid troubled homeowners”

(2) “use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…to engineer mortgage refinancing that puts money in the hands of American families” and (3) deal with China on “currency manipulation” which is really out of my league but I’m betting with Krugman on that one, too.

He bells the cats for cowardice, no plans, and bureaucratic cover-ups.

I suspect the real issue is simply politics as we get ready for the post-Labor Day full tilt boogie on the mid-term elections and political control in DC.  Treasury and the Federal Reserve may be inept and chicken but they are not stupid, and everyone in the Beltway must realize that it’s still “the economy stupid.”  They probably believe that it is better to spin and pretend that there’s a recovery at work to push some points up in the polls, than admit that they have been bankers’ bitches and are letting the pain continue pulsing rather than really implementing the cures.

New Orleans

For many lower income and working families, the evidence I amassed in Citizen Wealth would still be correct in establishing that a house is an asset which can act to separate a family decidedly, if not irrevocably, from the ranks of poverty, and provides an intergenerational asset that can continue to create income security, which is how I defined citizen wealth in the first place.  It is

also undeniably true that despite the fact that a house may be an asset, it is definitely not a piggybank or a get-rich-quick scheme which some wheeler dealers were promoting on the infomericals and real estate hype of the time.

With millions of homes “underwater” families may need to walk away today in order to have a chance at building assets in the future.  Values may in fact not recover in the generation of their lives.  The housing crises has been disproportionately devastating to African-American and Latino families and the non-existence of any kind of effective home mortgage modification program has been equally disastrous.  Public policy has been at the banker’s heels in this crisis to the peril of the entire nation.

Tax policy and federal expenditure have not caught up to the housing crises.  Our single largest “safety net” expenditure on citizen wealth is the wholesale mortgage interest rate deduction to facilitate home ownership.  The early and mid-20^th Century view that home ownership was a guaranteed winning ticket to poverty reduction is simply not finding evidence in the 21^st Century to support the level of the expenditure, which has now been laid bare as more about subsidizing development, construction, and investments rather than poverty reduction.

The challenge now will be whether or not we can put some sacred cows out to pasture and run with some new programs and plans that remember that housing in its various forms can be assets, but we need a lot more in terms of affordable options for housing and realistic income maintenance and asset building strategies to actually build and sustain citizen wealth.  It’s hard to be optimistic, but that’s the work order today.