Chief James Allan of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe

New Orleans   In this week’s continuing experiment with new forms and focus “under the headlines” for the daily blog, here’s more:

• Jackie Calmas in the New York Times on a meeting expected between Columbian President Juan Manuel Santos and Obama:  “they are expected to force a discussion Mr. Obama is not eager for in an election year, on decriminalization of drugs.  Their push is based on the widespread belief that the military approach of the American-led war on drugs in the region has failed.”

• Chief James Allan of the Coeur d’Alene tribe on their part of the $1 billion settlement with 41 Indian tribes on governmental mismanagement of natural resources on tribal lands:  “They have kept their promises to Native Americans to ensure we are heard in Washington.  He [Obama] has not made treaties with us, but he gave us his word.  And his word has been golden.”

• Frank Langella, the actor in his memoir, Dropped Names:

“In the less forgiving light of cold reality, I have lived my life as many actors have:  available and waiting, and often in a sort of emotional wilderness, feeling alone and apart.”  Interesting to think about how often they, and others, are waiting in the wings, and so rarely on the big stages.

He quotes Maureen Stapleton’s saying about working with Lauren Bacall, “I stay out of her way till they feed her.”  Vivid!

Charles Isherwood of the Times with a dead-on observation on memoirs:  “This is a true memoir, or rather a collection of memoirs.  The word has been corrupted these days to mean essentially the recounting of anything traumatic or even vaguely interesting that happened to the author, but it used to be more commonly used to describe recollections of famous figures:  other people.”

• R. Crumb quoted by Elaine Sciolino for a piece in the NYT on the cartoonist’s retrospective in Paris:  “Death?  Afraid of death?  When you get older, you dry up.  You die.  That’s it.  I’ve lived my life.  I’ve lived it out.  I’ve left my mark.  I’ve had great sex.  I got a great record collection…”

• “Wal-Mart’s environmental push has helped transform public opinion of the company, easing the way for it to open stores in urban areas like Chicago and Los Angeles.  About a quarter of Americans now have a favorable impression of Wal-Mart, about double the percentage that did in 2007…”  Let me see, in 5 years they went from 12.5% to 25% approval in 2012 meaning that 75% still disapprove, and that’s now considered a sufficiently successful image rehab?!?

• According to Stephanie Clifford NYT: “The head of the fund [Environmental Defense Fund] took Mr. Scott [Walmart’s ex-CEO Lee Scott] on a trip to Mount Washington in New Hampshire, where the two bunked in a cabin and discussed how climate change would affect products Wal-Mart sold, including coffee….”   Eeeeewwww!

• Two professors comparing the “recovery” efforts in Joplin, Missouri, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama and arguing for why Joplin has done so much better by encouraging immediate, pedal to the metal rebuilding, versus Tuscaloosa’s program of moratorium, delay, planning and consultant sclerosis and quoting another Joplin resident in the Wall Street Journal:  “When you have the magnitude of that disaster, really the old ways of doing things are suspended for a while until you create whatever normal is…The government was realistic to know that there is a period of time when common sense, codes and laws that are in place to protect people are suspended for the sake of the greater good.”  That my friends is something fascinating to wrap your minds around.
  

  Joplin Recovery

Kingston    

In recent communications with their workforce (“associates”), Wal-Mart lowered the boom by eliminating any access to healthcare insurance for any worker averaging less than 24 hours per week – and from our experience that would be a vast majority of their 1.4 million workers!  Additionally for employees who remain eligible the costs went up marginally on a weekly basis but the co-pays and deductibles went through the roof, sometimes moving from $1000 to as high as $5000.  Under the new Wal-Mart plan if you smoke, you croak.  Any admitted smokers would be required to pay additional huge premiums.  Other incentives that Wal-Mart (and may other large corporations) had supported to encourage coverage or savings for health care were substantially reduced or eliminated.

Wal-Mart’s argument was straightforward and simple:  it’s their economy, stupid!  Premiums had gone up and their profits were flat in the recession, so it’s so long, Charlie, and goodbye.  Will it hurt their workforce?  Hell, yes!!! Was that a factor, hell, no!  The company, which had been glad to herald its expanded coverage several years ago (though we questioned the veracity of their reporting!), now was very close mouthed about how many people were affected and how many would remain covered and actively insured.   Relatively speaking, I would bet from our experience that the numbers would plummet to less than 10% of the hourly, non-supervisory workforce, though Wal-Mart is always slick about the way it merges the salaried and supervisors into all figures about average wages and healthcare coverage.

Greenhouse indicated that some of the material on this change was supplied by OUR Wal-Mart (Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart) and was clear that part of the original “reform” by Wal-Mart had been the result of widespread labor and community pressure, but it seemed to me that the company was once again reminding all of us how transient our efforts had been in the past and how irrelevant current programs like OUR Wal-Mart are to them in their current calculations.  Those of us who worked to organize Wal-Mart in recent years at least liked to try to rationalize all of our work by hoping that we had created the leverage that had led to some reforms, even if we thought the leverage was sold short and stubbed out when it could have yield more dramatic results.

An advocacy and communications campaign with a company as large as Wal-Mart certainly has some value, and ACORN International continues to aggressively and substantially support the work in India of our India FDI Watch Campaign which has kept Wal-Mart and other big box retailers bottled up and at bay on their expansion efforts in this huge market, so we understand why it is important.  Nonetheless Wal-Mart seems not to mind rubbing our noses in the dirt and reminding us that without deep and permanent organization inside the company of their workforce, the rest is just public relations and politics to them, entered based on their will and exited at their whim.

For all of the smoke and mirrors, sound and fury, unless there is a sustained, permanent effort to create a viable and internally powerful workers organization at Wal-Mart, the worlds’ largest private sector employer, nothing will check the ability of this company to give and take away based on whatever it deems expedient.  That simply does not work for its workforce, and when the giant roars others will follow, so the big footprints of the company will be dug deeper by other large and small firms moving to curtail benefits and protections in the wake of this action.  The company cannot be organized “old school,” and the UFCW and others have not yet mastered how to mobilize the resources, support, and commitments to successfully create the infrastructure that will build organization inside the company for the long term.

Wal-Mart keeps throwing down the gauntlet and proving one generation of labor leaders after another that they have the staying power and that any deals with them are temporary and contingent.  It’s all about them and the devil take the hindmost.

We need to make a commitment to organize this company come hell or high water, and finally mean it, not for a couple of budget cycles but until the job is done.

Houston

Now more than a million women have to figure out how to individually collect on the sexual discrimination they have experienced at Wal-Mart.  The lawyers who have been handling this case for years (here’s to you, Joe Sellers!) stepped right up and said they would figure out a way, but there’s another dog in this hunt now that could bring this bear down:  the new Wal-Mart workers association, change at Wal-Mart or whatever we call the union!

This is the clarion call for a workers’ organization.  The chance to bring together women working at Wal-Mart now, along with women who have been there in the past, to move collectively through the myriad hoops standing between them and their money is the perfect scope for a union.  No one else has the nationwide network of people that could mobilize the lawyers and others necessary to represent all of these women.

One thing could easily lead to another.

In the end it such a campaign would cost Wal-Mart more both in penalties and lawyer fees.  What’s more it could finally be the bridge between all of these workers and their understanding of what a union does and why it is essential.

Time to make lemonade out of this lemon!

New Orleans

Cuomo is a Democrat from one of the darkest blue states in the United States.  Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was more gingerly in his anti-labor tactics in California.  Hard ball, sure, but not so ad hominem.

President Obama trying to shore up his base with business preempts the fiscal responsibility panel by unilaterally freezing wages for two years for 2 million federal civilian employees in government and non-combatant military.  The federal unions are screaming, as they should, but this seems more about posture than power.  Employees in the federal sector will still get raises in grades, seniority, and so forth, but the cost of living increase of 1 or 2% over the period will be slathered against the deficit.  This is not about shared pain as much as simple political calculation.

Oh, and benefits for the unemployed are expiring again, so there’s a big fat political football that can be heaved back and forth with the Republicans screaming screw those unemployed bastards and the Democrats doing what exactly?   The President pulled in the CEO of Wal-Mart to the White House this week for advice on the economy.  It won’t be long before the recommendation for public workers and unemployed will be wear a blue vest and make minimum wage.  Fellows, there still won’t be enough jobs.

The politics of finger pointing and worker victimization is not a program for a sick economy, but if we thought that a least Democrats understood that, then we seem to have been at the wrong party with the bad company.

Canyon

Like how important pickups and suburbans are to working stiffs.  Pulling into the lot outside of Shreveport in a motel filled with Anglo and Latino oil field hands, a car was a surprise among that long beds and tall racks of the trucks.  Equally common in these motels is the small smoker or grill perched on the motel railing or the pickup flap next to a couple of six packs.  These have now become the standard carry-on’s for fence minding just as wireless, cable-TV, and coffee and juice has become the fare even at $50 buck motels.  Filled parking lots at midnight are empty before 8AM.  One of our caravan commented after a mandatory stop at Southern Maid Hot Donuts, which Orell and I will argue is simply the best donut spot in all of north Louisiana, that she had never had a hot donut, and thanks.   I’m 100% for healthy, but can you  believe that that is possible without a benchmark for comparison?

North of Dallas and Fort Worth once past the sprawling D/FW airport, I was still surprised in the depths of the recession to uncover the planted ½ acre mini-mansion suburbs that had been planted in the plains and rolling scrub oak literally in the middle of nowhere, and were still standing somehow.  The Texas Speedway incidentally is so big that as we approached from a distance one passenger thought that might be the new Cowboys’ billion dollar stadium on the horizon.

The small towns along the trail continue their slow deaths.  The Wal-Mart had actually closed in Bunkie, Louisiana, which shocked me since I could remember when it opened 25 years ago as I would drive by on the way to Shreveport to negotiate nursing home contracts, sometimes 3 in one day.  In many there are more antique stores than most anything else.  Fast food outlets are more of the same and equal in number to boarded up restaurants with nothing but signs on the windows.  Just the way of these things, I guess.

On the other hand there are three Thai restaurants in small Canyon alone and twice as many or more locally owned and run Mexican places giving a run to the last couple of steakhouses that are still mandatory in this town.  Fence riders still need a chicken fried steak sooner or later, but I would probably have to draw a picture of that for you to get the full sense of it.  For the record, I always hold the gravy.  Just never have been a gravy man or liked sugar in my coffee.  Just keeping it real on the road.

Mexico City

The Universidad Obrera is a small, public college that has existed since  about the Mexican Revolution more than 70 years ago.  Currently they are having some difficulty funding issues that revolve around former leadership of the school, but meant that as we met with Sr. Sanchez, she and the other professors and researchers here were unpaid, computers were gone, internet connections had been shut off, and they were managing on shoe strings, literally.

To the point though the additional thoughts she shared on the Wal-Mart impact on agriculture and particularly its propensity to import goods and take advantage of tax codes, was of interest to our our India FDI Watch coalition which is right now contending with governmental efforts to once again reform foreign investment rules at the peril of workers in the cities and farmers in India.  Ironically, the biggest claim the multi-nationals make in India is that modern agriculture and distribution impacts on the supply chain will increase the wages of ag workers.  Sr. Sanchez says the research in Mexico is finding the opposite with Wal-Mart.  And, this doesn’t even factor in the number of informal workers that Wal-Mart uses in Mexico, which Sr. Sanchez and others believe is illegal under Mexican law.

Additionally we talked about the impact of remittances and how to lower these costs which has been an issue for ACORN International.  Their research argues that remittances, even today in the depressed economy, are the #1 economic engine in Mexico, as opposed to the government’s arguments that natural resource extraction (oil) and tourism come ahead on the list.  We talked at length about the varying bank charges on both sides of the border.  We are hopeful that once this current crisis works its way out which seems soon, that a partnership between Universidad Obrera and ACORN International can finally put together the research we need to push banks around the world to finally do the right thing with governments finally providing the regulations that bring them in line.

Arizona had to be on the agenda of course.  The news of a DOJ lawsuit hardly seemed to move anyone we spoke with in Mexico.  The lines are simple.  They see the story much differently and find mainly hate in the eyes of the argument.  There’s a lot more to be said about this in coming days.

Philadelphia

I was not surprised because part of the reason I had agreed to support the great work in Philly lay at the footsteps of a good example of the potential of majority unionism.  For several years JwJ here under its director Fabricio Rodriguez had been involved in the long, arduous process of supporting the building of an organization among the 175 security workers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  After several years the organization had navigated the obstacles for security workers in organizing and recently had transitioned to an independent union, filed, and won a representation election handily, and not surprisingly having already proven the organization at the workplace long ago.  Now, they challenges of bargaining away, but that’s another story.

Majority unionism is what I have called the process of changing the labor organizing paradigm to allow workers first (not employers!) decide they want an organization, build strength through direct membership and direct action, and using that power along with community and political leverage to win recognition and advances regardless of any other obstacles in law or habit.  This kind of strategy led to the huge success in our generation among informal workers (home health and home day care) which have added more than a half-million members in the last 30 years to the ranks of organized labor.  This is also the heart of the successful pilot we led in Florida several years ago to prove that Wal-Mart workers could be organized a different way.

The hard question asked by several of the union lawyers and reps in the room, was how do you make the organization sustainable over the time frame necessary to win?  This question was particularly important because the examples from home health care and Wal-Mart were based on more modest dues levels (in some cases only $10/month) than what many of them were accustomed to seeing in existing unions.  Certainly this had also been our challenge as well, and led to our independent union becoming part of the SEIU, and kept us from continuing the Wal-Mart Workers Association as an independent entity.

The answer I was too well mannered to give was that this question lies at the heart of the dilemma between being a union movement and an institutional structure.  The efforts among farmworkers, home care workers, and others – including what we are doing with ragpickers and cartoneros now – are rooted in deep political, individual, and organizational commitments over long time frames of sacrifice and struggle until victory is achieved.  These are projects that don’t fit the normal box of excellent wages and benefits for union organizers, but will be driven by rare organizing zealots willing to pay the price for years in the conviction and passion that success will justify the climb long into the future.  There’s a crazy, courageous history to this, but my friends were right:  it’s not a model.

But it is a way to shift the paradigm and turn the tide, especially if we can convince unions and others to help balance the books while the work is done until what I, perhaps crazily, believe will be the inevitable victory.  The workers want organizations.  They want power on the job.  Eventually, we are going to have to pay the dues, and give them what they demand, even if it is harder than we like and different than what we know.

San Francisco

The story furnished by ProPublica writers Michael Grabell and Chris Flavelle nailed the issue that almost half of the states in the US are going to walk away from the desperately needed money in the fund, because they are not willing – or able – to come up with their 20% share of this 4 to 1 federal to state match.   This is money that goes directly to citizen wealth and survival and can be used as direct cash transfers, aid on expanding welfare caseloads, rent payments to forestall evictions, and even creating temporary jobs for the unemployed.  The reporters highlight the plans and problems in a number of states like California, New York, and Tennessee.  They also redlined Louisiana, which is already notorious for not taking stimulus money to help the unemployed, and now indicates that its budget crunch means that despite the fact that 20% of our citizens live in poverty, it doesn’t have the money to help them get out of poverty.

What the heck?!?

In the Alice in Wonderland upside down world in which we live and work, the Administration is going around to the states trying to convince them to find someone else to put up the match.  New York State convinced George Soros, who has more money than god, to pony up for them, so now the government seems to think that’s the model.  According to the reporters, they think Wal-Mart or Target might be good sources for example for school clothing.  I have to go look out the window and see if this is in fact the day that pigs are going to fly!

Why are we not able to say to the states do this because citizen wealth makes your people richer and more secure, rather than advising the states in how to practice some weird form of grantsmanship with counties, cities, parishes, and corporations?  If we are going to get that weird, why don’t we rebrand it as ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, calculate how much the state will get back in sales and other taxes for their expenditures since the money will be spent right at home in the blink of an eye, and finally have some economic development that actually works for people rather than for developers and fast talkers?

New Orleans

My thank you notes are going to some outfits that I never thought would be so solidly on my team, like Wal-Mart and ConAgra!  Admittedly, they weren’t doing me a personal favor, but nonetheless it is a huge favor.  A couple of months ago, I honestly had no idea who Glenn Beck was, but when he started stalking me around the world and virtually putting my picture on a wanted sign and a bulls-eye on my back, well, how can I say this:  he got my attention.   Most of these outfits could live with all of that craziness, but when he started calling President Obama a racist, that crossed the green, money line for them, so “Man overboard!” for Beck.

But enough of that, let’s give some thanks to my 20 new friends (a least on this issue!):

1. Wal-Mart
2. Best Buy
3. CVS Drugstores
4. Allergen
5. Ally Bank (part of GMAC!)
6. Broadview Security
7. Re-Bath
8. Travelocity
9. ConAgra

10.  GEICO

11.  Lawyers.com

12.  Men’s Wearhouse

13.  Proctors & Gamble

14.  Progressive Insurance

15.  Radio Shack

16.  Roche

17.  SC Johnson

18.  Sanofi-Aventi

19.  Sargento

20.  State Farm Insurance

And, a huge debt of thanks to Color of Change, StopBeck, and a whole lot of others that have raised their voices and said, hey, enough of this craziness hate speech.  Here’s to you!