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SAVE RENT CONTROL! NO ON PROP. 98!
http://leftinsf.com/blog/index.php/archives/2492
We All Hate that 98!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Phrt5zVGn0
[The catch is, that while it's true that the landlord can increase rents to whatever he or she wants once a property becomes vacant, the current rent-control law now ensures that the new tenants are still under rent-control for their, albeit higher, rent. Under the new law, there simply will be no rent control when the new tenant moves in so their much higher rent-rate can increase as much as the landlord chooses each year from then on!!! So, no more rent-control at all!!! Tricky, huh?...BW]
Prop 98, a statewide measure on the June 3 ballot will end rent control and just cause eviction protections for renters. San Francisco will see massive displacement and the city will change forever if 98 passes.
READ ALL OF PROP. 98 at: http://yesprop98.com/read/?_adctlid=v%7Cwynx8c5jjesxsb%7Cwziq39twoqov52
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Stop fumigation of citizens without their consent in California
Target: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senator Joe Simitian, Assemblymember Loni Hancock, Assemblymember John Laird, Senator Abel Maldonado
Sponsored by: John Russo
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/stop-fumigation-of-citizens-without-their-consent-in-california
Additional information is available at http://www.stopthespray.org
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http://takingaim.info/
Murdering Mumia: A Strategic Component of the War on Black America --
A Conversation with Chris Kinder, Coordinator, Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu Jamal
Access the "Taking Aim" web site above for the one hour program with Chris Kinder broadcast last Tuesday on WBAI, New York. Accessing the web site gives you the choice of playing the entire program or downloading it so that you can go both forward and backwards. The show is heard primarily on WBAI New York but also on Pacifica "listener-supported" radio.
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A CALL TO ACTION MAY 1
ALL OUT ON MAYDAY TO STOP THE WAR!
ILWU-called May Day Labor Antiwar Demo
Meet at 10:30 a.m. at Mason & Beach (Fisherman's Wharf)
March at 11:00 a.m.
Rally at Noon at Justin Herman Plaza
SF Immigrant Rights May Day Demo
Meet at Dolores Park at 2pm
March at 3:30 pm
Rally at 6:00 pm in Civic Center Plaza
Oakland Immigrant Rights May Day Demo
Meet at 3:00 pm Fruitvale Plaza (35th & International Blvd.)
March at 4:00 pm
Rally at 6:00 pm at Oakland City Hall Plaza
At the start of the Iraq War in 2003, many working people were opposed to the invasion. Now the overwhelming majority want to end the war and withdraw troops. Yet, both major political parties continue to fund the war. Marches and demonstrations have not been able to stop the war. The Longshore Union (ILWU) will stop work for 8 hours in every port on the West Coast on May 1st. This action shows that working people have the power to stop the war.
Don't work on May 1st! MAKE MAYDAY A "NO PEACE, NO WORK HOLIDAY"!
We'll march from the Longshore Union hall at the corner of Mason and Beach Streets (Fisherman's Wharf area), along the Embarcadero--where San Francisco was forged into a union town in the 1934 General Strike. A rally will be held in Justin Herman Plaza across from the Ferry Building at noon.
--Stop the war!
--Withdraw the troops now!
--No scapegoating immigrant workers for the economic crisis!
--Healthcare for all!
--Funding for schools and housing!
--Defend civil liberties and workers'rights!
MAKE MAYDAY A "NO PEACE, NO WORK HOLIDAY"!
Port Workers' May Day Organizing Committee
http://maydayilwu.googlepages.com
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Rock for Justice-Rock for Palestine
FREE outdoor festival
May 10th, 2008
Civic Center, San Francisco
Please make your tax-deductible donation, payable to 'Palestine Right to Return Coalition' or 'PRRC/Palestine Solidarity Concert'
Mail to:
Local Nakba Committee (LNC)
PO Box #668
2425 Channing Way
Berkeley, CA 94704
For more information about, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition, see: www.al-awda.org.
For regular concert updates see our website at: http://www.araborganizing.org/concert.html
You can donate online at the Facebook Cause 'Nakba-60, Palestine Solidarity Concert' at: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/causes/19958?h=plw&recruiter_id=6060344
List of confirmed artists:
Dam, featuring Abeer, aka 'Sabreena da Witch'–Palestinian Hip-Hop crew from Lid (1948, Palestine).
Dead Prez
Fred Wreck–DJ/Producer, for artists Snoop Dogg, Hilary Duff,
Brittany Spears and other celebs.
Ras Ceylon –Sri Lankan Revolution Hip Hop
Arab Summit:
Narcicyst - with Iraqi-Canadian Hip Hop group Euphrates
Excentrik- Palestinian Producer/Composer/MC
Omar Offendun- with Syrian/Sudani Hip Hop group The N.o.m.a.d.s
Ragtop- with Palestinian/Filipino group The Philistines
Scribe Project – Palestinian/Mexican Hip Hop/Soul Band
Additional artists still pending confirmation.
Points of Unity for Concert Sponsorship
An end to all US political, military and economic aid to Israel.
The divestment of all public and private entities from all Israeli corporations and American corporations with subsidiaries operating within Israel.
An end to the investment of Labor Union members' pension funds in Israel.
The boycott of all Israeli products.
The right to return for all Palestinian refugees to their original towns, villages and lands with compensation for damages inflicted on their property and lives.
The right for all Palestinian refugees to full restitution of all confiscated and destroyed property.
The formation of an independent, democratic state for its citizens in all of Palestine.
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For Immediate Release
UPDATE: SIXTH AL-AWDA CONVENTION TO MARK 60 YEARS OF PALESTINIAN NAKBA
Embassy Suites Hotel Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard,
Garden Grove, California, 92840
May 16-18, 2008
The 6th Annual International Al-Awda Convention will mark a devastating event in the long history of the Palestinian people. We call it our Nakba.
Confirmed speakers include Bishop Atallah Hanna, Supreme Justice Dr. Sheikh Taiseer Al Tamimi, Dr. Adel Samara, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta, Dr. Ghada Karmi, Dr. As'ad Abu Khalil, Dr. Saree Makdisi, and Ramzy Baroud. Former Prime Minister of Lebanon Salim El Hos and Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar have also been invited.
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-685-3243
Fax: 360-933-3568
E-mail: info@al-awda. org
WWW: http://al-awda. org
Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.
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Call for an Open U.S. National Antiwar Conference
Stop the War in Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Crown Plaza Hotel
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
List of Endorsers:
http://natassembly.org/thecall/
Endorse the conference:
http://natassembly.org/endorse/
Join us in Cleveland on June 28-29 for the conference.
Sponsored by the National Assembly to End the Iraq War and Occupation
P.O. Box 21008; Cleveland, OH 44121; Voice Mail: 216-736-4704; Email: NatAssembly@aol.com
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Help Save Troy Davis
Troy Davis came within 24 hours of execution in July, 2007 before receiving a temporary stay of execution. Two weeks later the Georgia Supreme Court agreed to hear his extraordinary motion for a new trial. On Monday, March 17, 2008 the court denied Mr. Davis’ appeal. Troy Davis was sentenced to death for the murder of Police Officer Mark MacPhail in Georgia. The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimony which contained inconsistencies even during the trial. Since then, all but two of the state's nine non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony. Many of these witnesses have stated in sworn affidavits that they were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing statements against Troy Davis.
The message:
"I welcomed your decision to stay the execution of Troy Anthony Davis in July 2007, and thank you for taking the time to consider evidence of his innocence. When you issued this decision, you stated that the board "will not allow an execution to proceed in this State unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused." Because the Georgia Supreme Court denied Troy Davis a hearing, doubts of his guilt will always remain. I appeal to you to be true to your words and commute the death sentence of Troy Davis.
"This case has generated widespread attention, which reflects serious concerns in Georgia and throughout the United States about the potential for executing an innocent man. The power of clemency exists as a safety net to prevent such an irreversible error. As you know, Mr. Davis has been on death row in Georgia for more than 15 years for the murder of a police officer he maintains that he did not commit. Davis' conviction was not based on any physical evidence, and the murder weapon was never found.
"Despite mounting evidence that Davis may in fact be innocent of the crime, appeals to courts to consider this evidence have been repeatedly denied for procedural reasons. Instead, the prosecution based its case on the testimony of purported "witnesses," many of whom allege police coercion, and most of whom have since recanted their testimony. One witness signed a police statement declaring that Davis was the assailant then later said "I did not read it because I cannot read." In another case a witness stated that the police "were telling me that I was an accessory to murder and that I would…go to jail for a long time and I would be lucky if I ever got out, especially because a police officer got killed…I was only sixteen and was so scared of going to jail." There are also several witnesses who have implicated another man in the crime but the police focused their efforts on convicting Troy.
"It is deeply troubling to me that Georgia might proceed with this execution given the strong claims of innocence in this case. It has been repeatedly demonstrated that our criminal justice system is not devoid of error and we now know that 127 individuals have been released from death rows across the United States due to wrongful conviction. We must confront the unalterable fact that the system of capital punishment is fallible, given that it is administered by fallible human beings. I respectfully urge the Board of Pardons and Paroles to demonstrate your strong commitment to fairness and justice and commute the death sentence of Troy Anthony Davis.
Thank you for your kind consideration."
Messages will be sent to:
Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE
Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, Georgia 30334-4909
Telephone: (404) 657-9350
Fax: (404) 651-8502
Clemency_Information@pap.state.ga.us
Please take a moment to help Troy Davis. On Monday, March 17, 2008, the Georgia Supreme Court decided 4-3 to deny a new trial for Troy Anthony Davis, despite significant concerns regarding his innocence. The stunning decision by the Georgia Supreme Court to let Mr. Davis' death sentence stand means that the state of Georgia might soon execute a man who well may be innocent.
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1265/t/5820/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=23774
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"ANGOLA 3"
For 35 years, Jim Crow justice in Louisiana has kept Herman Wallace
and Albert Woodfox locked in solitary confinement for a crime
everyone knows they didn't commit.
Despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence, the "Angola 3",
spend 23 hours each day in a 6x9 cell on the site of a former
plantation. Prison officials - and the state officials who could
intervene - won't end the terrible sentence. They've locked them up
and thrown away the key because they challenged a system that deals an
uneven hand based on the color of one's skin and tortures those who
assert their humanity.
We can help turn things around by making it a political liability for
the authorities at Angola to continue the racist status quo, and by
forcing federal and state authorities to intervene. I've signed on
with ColorOfChange.org to demand an investigation into this clear case
of unequal justice. Will you join us?
http://www.colorofchange.org/angola3/?id=1798-532528
When ColorOfChange.org spoke up about the Jena 6, it was about more
than helping six Black youth in a small town called Jena. It was about
standing up against a system of unequal justice that deals an uneven
hand based on the color of one's skin. That broken system is at work
again and ColorOfChange.org is joining The Innocence Project and
Amnesty International to challenge it in the case of the Angola 3.
"Angola", sits on 18,000 acres of former plantation land in Louisiana
and is estimated to be one of the largest prisons in the United
States. Angola's history is telling: once considered one of the most
violent, racially segregated prison in America, almost a prisoner a
day was stabbed, shot or raped. Prisoners were often put in inhumane
extreme punishment camps for small infractions. The Angola 3 -
Herman, Albert and Robert - organized hunger and work strikes within
the prison in the 70's to protest continued segregation, corruption
and horrific abuse facing the largely Black prisoner population.
Shortly after they spoke out, the Angola 3 were convicted of murdering
a prison guard by an all-white jury. It is now clear that these men
were framed to silence their peaceful revolt against inhumane
treatment. Since then, they have spent every day for 35 years in 6x9
foot cells for a crime they didn't commit.
Herman and Albert are not saints. They are the first to admit they've
committed crimes. But, everyone agrees that their debts to society
for various robbery convictions were paid long ago.
NBC News/Dateline just aired a piece this week about the plight of the
Angola 3. And it's time to finally get some justice for Herman and
Albert. For far too long, court officials have stalled and refused to
review their cases. Evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and
constitutional violations have not swayed them.
It's now time for the Governor of Louisiana and the United States
Congress, which provides the funding for federal prisons like Angola,
to step in and say enough is enough. Please join us in calling for
Governor Bobby Jindal and your Congressperson to initiate an immediate
and full investigation into the case of the Angola 3.
http://www.colorofchange.org/angola3/?id=1798-532528
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DEFEND FREE SPEECH RIGHTS ON THE NATIONAL MALL!
~ Please circulate this urgent update widely ~
The ANSWER Coalition is vigorously supporting the campaign launched by the Partnership for Civil Justice to defend free speech rights on the National Mall. We thank all the ANSWER Coalition supporters who have joined this campaign and we urge everyone to do so. What follows is an urgent message from the Partnership for Civil Justice about the campaign.
1) The Partnership for Civil Justice has set up an easy-to-use mechanism that will allow you to send a message directly to the National Park Service about their National Mall Plan. Click this link to send your message.
http://www.pephost.org/site/R?i=8_RVxCikVreKjAjXZlb49Q..
2) Sign the Statement in Defense of Free Speech Rights on the National Mall.
http://www.pephost.org/site/R?i=PKScBmTUgEZOZ_cxmhZbAg..
3) If you have already signed this statement, click this link right now to let us know if we can publicize you as a signer of this important statement.
http://www.pephost.org/site/R?i=6kKl3z44MGnkeYbNr_pA_w..
4) If you are unsure whether you have already signed, you can sign the statement again, and all duplicate names will be eliminated.
http://www.pephost.org/site/R?i=XoId_W834FDPRKYz6DjgfA..
Sincerely,
Mara Verheyden-Hillard and Carl Messineo, co-founders of Partnership
for Civil Justice
Background on the NPS initiative to restrict protesting on the National Mall
http://www.pephost.org/site/R?i=wuIJnWmxqhcuEOXlEiwung..
Washington Post article: The Battle to Remold the Mall
http://www.pephost.org/site/R?i=EWmH5pSb477zqvLc8c8WDw..
Alternet article: National Mall Redesign Could Seriously Restrict Free Speech
http://www.pephost.org/site/R?i=jdbtCB0LDdDpdEAvIgwtqg..
A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition
www.answercoalition.org
info@internationalanswer.org
National Office in Washington DC: 202-544-3389
New York City: 212-694-8720
Los Angeles: 323-464-1636
San Francisco: 415-821-6545
Chicago: 773-463-0311
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) The Wage That Meant Middle Class
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
The Nation
April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/weekinreview/20uchitelle.html?ref=us
2) Working Life (High and Low)
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/business/20work.html?ref=us
3) Medicare Plans Affected by Rising Drug Costs
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
April 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/business/19specialtyside.html?ref=health
4) Running Out of Planet to Exploit
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
April 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp
5) Sending in the Marines (to Recruit Women)
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Advertising
April 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21adcol.html?8dpc
6) Justice Stevens Renounces Capital Punishment
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Supreme Court Memo
April 18, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/washington/18memo.html?fta=y
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1) The Wage That Meant Middle Class
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
The Nation
April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/weekinreview/20uchitelle.html?ref=us
Whatever Senator Barack Obama meant by his less than artful remarks about small-town Pennsylvanians “bitter” over lost jobs, he certainly turned a lot of attention last week to the decline of the American worker, bitter or not.
The talk most often has been of shuttered factories, layoffs, outsourcing and other effects of globalization, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, which has lost tens of thousands of industrial jobs. But there is another way to look at blue-collar workers or their counterparts in the service sector.
Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still have them? Once upon a time, a large number earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don’t.
The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction.
Americans greeted the loss with anger and protest when it first began to happen in big numbers in the late 1970s, particularly in the steel industry in Western Pennsylvania. But as layoffs persisted, in Pennsylvania and across the country, through the ’80s and ’90s and right up to today, the protests subsided and acquiescence set in.
Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class.
The nation’s political leaders — Democrats and Republicans alike — have argued that education and training are a route back to middle-class wages for those who have fallen out. But the demand isn’t sufficient to absorb all the workers that the leaders would educate. Even now, roughly 15 percent of college-educated workers find themselves in jobs for which they are overqualified, the Economic Policy Institute reports, and many of these jobs pay less than $20 an hour.
“People are mainly worried about having a job and only secondly what it pays and whether they are gaining ground,” said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, trying to explain the absence of an outcry and a political debate in which the candidates do not quantify the decline. “If you aren’t gaining ground,” Mr. Levy added, “then you look for other ways to pay for consumption, going into debt or, until recently, refinancing your home.”
Still, the erosion haunts the presidential campaign. Mr. Obama, competing against Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary to be held on Tuesday, touched this nerve in his description of small-town voters who “cling” to their guns and their religion in their resentment over lost jobs. It was a description that prompted John McCain, the Republican candidate, to label Mr. Obama an “elitist,” and Mrs. Clinton to portray him as out of touch with small-town sentiment. But like Mr. Obama, neither spoke of dollars missing from paychecks, or of the disappearing $20-an-hour wage.
That basic wage blossomed first in the auto industry in 1948 and served, in effect, as a banner in the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As the news media frequently noted, salt-of-the-earth American workers were earning enough to pay for comforts that their counterparts behind the Iron Curtain could not afford.
As the years passed, unions succeeded in negotiating this basic wage not as an ultimate goal but as an early rung in their wage ladders. That was the union standard, particularly in heavy industries, and in the early postwar decades nonunion employers fell into line, spreading middle-class incomes broadly through the service sector.
“The most important model that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, “was the middle class for blue-collar workers.”
The high point came in the 1970s, just as the United States was beginning to lose its controlling grip on the economies of the non-Communist world. Since then the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.
The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
The shrinkage is sometimes quite open. The Big Three automakers are currently buying out more than 25,000 employees who earn above $20 an hour, replacing many with new hires tied to a “second tier” wage scale that never quite reaches $20. A similar buyout last year removed 80,000 auto workers. Many were not replaced, but many were, with the new hires paid today at the non-middle-class scale, and with fewer benefits.
The United Auto Workers agreed to this arrangement, accepting management’s argument that it must have labor cost relief to rebound and prosper. Whatever the justification, the new accord in effect abandoned the 1948 contract. That agreement is still hailed as historic. In contrast, the 2007 contract that reversed it is hardly recognized as a significant event in labor history. “It is significant,” Mr. Shaiken insisted, referring to last year’s contract. “The Big Three and the U.A.W. were the model for industrial America at its zenith.”
This time the auto workers weren’t first. They ratified a practice that had spread to tire makers, heavy-equipment manufacturers, parts plants, groceries, retailers and longshoremen, diluting older workers’ resistance by preserving their status, while lowering earning power for new hires.
Two tiers is one tactic. Another is filling middle-income jobs with temporary workers earning less. Add outsourcing to the list, and the off-shoring of such middle-income work as computer programming and radiology. Then there are the manufacturers who close a union plant and shift production to a nonunion one, often in the South but also in the Midwest.
When Whirlpool, for example, acquired Maytag last year it closed a Maytag washing machine factory in Newton, Iowa, that had employed hundreds of workers at more than $20 an hour and shifted production to its plant in Clyde, Ohio, adding hundreds of workers at $17 an hour.
Put givebacks on the list as well. Tens of thousands of workers have accepted wage cuts pressed on them by embattled employers, cuts that in many cases pushed their wages below middle-class levels. Flight attendants are a notable example. And as each new group acquiesces, the standard for what constitutes an acceptable wage comes down in America.
“You can’t have an economy heavily invested in tradable goods and services that is completely oblivious to global wages,” said Ron Bloom, special assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers.
The decline is most significant in the data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects for the nation’s hourly work force, which totals 76 million, or 52 percent of all workers, and ranges from managers and professionals to factory and construction workers to technicians, educators and sales people. The wages of many salaried workers show a similar trend, although the bureau does not convert their pay into hourly amounts.
The trend in the hourly work force is striking. Take only the peak years in each business cycle, starting in 1979. The proportion earning at least $20 an hour declined from 23 percent that year, to 20 percent in 1980, to 18 percent in 1989, and to 16 percent in 2000. Manufacturing was hit the hardest.
The current business cycle brought some relief. It reached its peak last year, before plunging into what now appears to be the opening months of a stiff recession. In 2007, before the plunge, the percentage of middle-income hourly workers earning at least $20 an hour had risen, to 18 percent. The improvement came mainly from a rising proportion of women in higher-end hourly work.
Wages also held up in the public sector. Strip out that sector, and only 16 percent of privately employed hourly workers took home at least $20 an hour, just fractionally above the 2000 level.
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2) Working Life (High and Low)
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/business/20work.html?ref=us
WHEN Jean Capobianco was diagnosed for the second time with breast cancer, her doctors ordered a mastectomy. She first contracted the disease three years earlier and suffered through seven months of chemotherapy. After her cancer came back, her husband walked out on her. “He told me he wasn’t sexually attracted to me anymore,” she said.
For more than a decade, Jean and her husband had been a truck-driving team, driving hazardous waste. Now, with husband and truck gone, her career as a long-haul driver was gone as well.
After she recovered, Jean started looking for work. She spotted a help-wanted ad from Roadway Package Systems, which said it was looking for independent contractors to deliver packages.
“I needed a job,” said Jean. “They tell you, ‘You’ll make all this money working for yourself.’ ”
She soon discovered that her new employer had embraced a controversial strategy to squeeze down costs by millions of dollars each year: it insisted that Jean and the other drivers were independent contractors, not employees. The I.R.S., New York and many other states are investigating this strategy, convinced that many companies use it to cheat their workers and cheat on taxes.
Jean arrived at the Roadway terminal in Brockton, Mass., at 6 each morning and spent the next 90 minutes loading 100 to 140 packages into her truck. She usually left the terminal around 7:30 a.m. and returned after 6 p.m.
Jean had to leave her job for two years when she suffered a severe back injury while lifting a package. Before she could return to work, FedEx Ground, which had acquired Roadway, required her to purchase a truck. The list price was $37,800, with Jean having to make 60 monthly installments of $781.12 and a final, one-time payment of $8,000.
In Jean’s view, it was ludicrous for Roadway and FedEx to call the drivers independent contractors.
“We’re told what to do, when to do it, how to do it, when to take time off,” Jean said. “You have to wear their uniform. You can’t wear your hair certain ways. You have to deliver every single thing they put on the truck.”
Jean called it “a great deal for FedEx. They don’t have to pay for trucks, for the insurance, for fuel, for maintenance, for tires,” she said. “We have to pay for all those things. And they don’t have to pay our Social Security.”
By some estimates, this arrangement saves FedEx $400 million a year, giving it a significant cost advantage over U.P.S., which treats its drivers as regular employees. Moreover, FedEx Ground has sought to rebuff a Teamster organizing drive by arguing that its 15,000 drivers have no right to unionize because they are independent contractors.
“These drivers are more like business people,” said Perry Colosimo, a FedEx Ground spokesman. “They can set their own hours. They can buy routes. They can develop their business.”
In 30 lawsuits, FedEx Ground drivers have argued that they are employees, not independent contractors, and that the company should therefore pay for their trucks, insurance, repairs, gas and tires. In one lawsuit, a California judge ruled that FedEx Ground was engaged in an elaborate ruse in which FedEx “has close to absolute control” over the drivers. Last December, FedEx acknowledged another setback: the I.R.S. ordered it to pay $319 million in taxes and penalties for 2002 for misclassifying employees as independent contractors. FedEx could face similar I.R.S. penalties for subsequent years. FedEx said it would appeal.
To attract drivers, FedEx Ground often runs ads claiming that its drivers earn $60,000 to $80,000 a year. Many drivers say those ads are deceiving. Gross income can exceed $60,000, but Jean, echoing many drivers, said she had to pay nearly $800 a month for her truck, $125 a week for gas, $55 a week for business equipment, $4,000 a year for insurance policies, plus outlays for tires, maintenance and repairs. Some years, Jean calculated, her net pay was just $32,000, amounting to $10.25 an hour.
Many drivers find it hard to walk away because they have invested so much in their trucks. If they leave, they might still be stuck with years of monthly payments and the final payment of $8,000.
One morning in August 2004, Jean doubled over in pain. Three days later, her doctor informed her she had ovarian cancer.
“The doctor told me to stop working immediately,” Jean said. She not only finished her route that Friday but worked the following Monday and Tuesday as she struggled to find someone to cover her route. Her terminal’s two replacement drivers demanded unrealistic amounts, she said. “They knew they had me over a barrel.”
On Aug. 21, 2004, surgeons removed a large, malignant tumor and did a hysterectomy. The next week the doctors told her she had Stage 4 cancer that had spread to her lungs. She would need chemotherapy through late December.
Jean had twice beaten breast cancer, and she was intent on beating this, too. She fully expected to return to her job in January, and called FedEx Ground’s headquarters to request a leave of absence. Weeks later, a letter arrived saying she was terminated.
“I was crazy with anger,” she said.
Fired and with no income, Jean stopped making payments on her truck. She had already paid more than $40,000 on it, but now she was powerless to prevent it from being repossessed.
“Ten years of beating my brains out for them, and they throw me away like I was a piece of garbage,” Jean said.
FedEx Ground officials said they had sympathy for Jean but had to terminate her under company rules, because she was no longer covering her route and she hadn’t found a replacement driver.
Company officials said they were free to terminate her because in FedEx’s view she was an independent contractor and therefore not protected by the Americans With Disabilities Act. That law requires companies to make reasonable accommodations to keep employees who have cancer or other disabilities. Jean has sued FedEx, asserting that it violated the act.
“To this day, I still can’t understand how they can get away with it,” Jean said. “You work for a company for 10 years and you give 150 percent. I used to go above and beyond. And then I get sick, something totally out of my control. And then to get fired.”
Her voice dropped off, then tears streamed down her cheeks.
•
Just inside the door of the men’s room was a rack that held sweaty biking shirts, damp bathing suits and clammy running shoes. The aroma seemed to belong more to a high school locker room than to a corporate headquarters. But this was the house of Patagonia, the apparel company that prides itself on letting its employees take their play every bit as seriously as they take their work.
At lunchtime many days, Patagonia employees go surfing for two hours, while a half-dozen others take a 100-minute, 27-mile bike loop in the hills overlooking the Pacific.
One of the sweaty biking shirts belonged to Andy Welling, a sales manager at Patagonia’s headquarters in Ventura, Calif. At 41, Welling is a fiend about staying in shape — he bikes several days a week at lunchtime, and joins Patagonia’s weekly pick-up soccer game. He often makes up for his lunchtime cycling by working a few hours at home in the evening.
Patagonia is so mellow about flextime that the receptionist at headquarters, an 11-time world Frisbee champion, is allowed to take three months off each summer to run a surfing school. “I could make quite a bit more money working somewhere else,” Welling said. “But to have the quality of life and to remain physically fit, by cycling or going surfing, you can’t put a dollar amount on it.”
Welling has taken advantage of another Patagonia offering: the child care center at headquarters. He drops off his two boys, 5 and 3, at 9 and often has lunch with them. “Being able to have my kids a few feet away from me all the time is fantastic,” Welling said. “It is a bonding relationship I never would have had if I were working somewhere else.”
Patagonia is not like anywhere else. With 1,300 workers and $275 million a year in sales, it donates 1 percent of its annual sales to environmental groups. Four days a week at lunchtime, the company offers yoga and Pilates sessions; there are also occasional classes on fly fishing. Each year Patagonia lets 40 employees take paid two-month internships with an environmental group. The best spots in the parking lot are reserved for the most fuel-efficient cars, and above dozens of parking spots are solar panels that supply all the power for one of Patagonia’s administration buildings.
Patagonia has 900 applicants for every job opening at headquarters. It sponsors civil disobedience training for employees who want to participate in environmental protests. Its mission statement calls for making the best outdoor products while doing the least damage to the environment. Its Synchilla fleece vests are made from recycled plastic bottles.
At headquarters, 20 surfboards are tucked under the stairs to the second floor, and employees often work barefoot. “When you walk through the front door, we don’t want you to stop being the person you are,” said Lu Setnicka, Patagonia’s director of training.
This unusual blend of work, play, family and environmentalism grows out of the philosophy of Patagonia’s founder and principal owner, Yvon Chouinard. Born in Maine and raised in Burbank, he felt passionate about just one activity in high school: the Southern California Falconry Club. He learned how to rappel down cliffs to visit falcon nests, and out of that grew a lifelong passion for mountain climbing.
Dissatisfied with the era’s soft-iron pitons — small spikes that climbers drive into rock and attach ropes to — Chouinard set out to produce stronger ones. He bought an anvil, taught himself blacksmithing, and made his first pitons out of an old harvester blade. For several years, he lived on less than a dollar a day, selling pitons out of his car and pursuing his passions by climbing in Yosemite and Wyoming.
As demand for his pitons grew, Chouinard rented a metal shed in Ventura and hired a small staff. By 1970, his company had become the nation’s largest producer of climbing equipment. During an excursion to Scotland, he purchased a rugby shirt and concluded that the thick, sturdy shirt was ideal for rock climbing. When he returned to California, his climbing friends asked for shirts just like it, and soon Chouinard expanded into the apparel business, importing rugby shirts.
As the company grew, it had one unbending rule — the business closed whenever the waves in the Pacific were running six feet high, hot and glassy. “Since none of us wanted to be in business, we wanted to blur the distinctions between work and play,” Chouinard said. “That meant we had to break a lot of rules of business.”
Chouinard often jokes about his M.B.A. philosophy: management by absence. Many years he disappeared for six months to go ice climbing in the Alps or surfing, skiing and climbing in South America. His was the ultimate flextime.
Chouinard has a simple philosophy that he says ensures that employees don’t abuse their flextime. “Hire the people you trust, people who are passionate about their job, passionate about what they’re doing. Just leave them alone, and they’ll get the job done.”
Shannon Ellis, Patagonia’s vice president for human resources, says the unusual flextime policies yield increased productivity. “A lot of people recognize that what they have here is unique, and I don’t think they want to jeopardize that,” she said.
In addition to the child care center, Patagonia offers other family-friendly benefits like eight weeks of paid maternity and paternity leave. It also pays 100 percent of the health insurance premiums for its workers, even part-timers. Chouinard says this helps attract the gung-ho outdoors types Patagonia wants — workers who test the company’s products as they climb and surf and convey their expertise and enthusiasm to customers.
“All of these things I’m doing are not to have a socialist birth-till-death utopia here,” Chouinard said. “Every one of these things is good business.”
Lisa Pike, who oversees Patagonia’s environmental grants, said: “He’s proving Wall Street wrong. You can do the right thing and still have an extremely profitable company.”
This article is adapted from "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker," by Steven Greenhouse, a reporter for The New York Times. The book, published by Knopf last week, examines difficulties faced by workers at companies like Fed Ex and Wal-Mart, and points to Patagonia and Costco as models for corporate America.
Read Chapter One of the book.
Worked Over and Overworked
Chapter One
The New York Times
April 20, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/business/20workexcerpt.html
In the last couple of decades, corporate profits and executive salaries have soared. But for many workers, the only thing that has increased is insecurity. In “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” Steven Greenhouse, a labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, examines the difficulties faced by workers at companies like FedEx and Wal-Mart, and points to Patagonia and Costco as models for corporate America. The book was published by Knopf on April 15. Chapter One is excerpted here.
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Excerpted from “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” by Steven Greenhouse (Knopf, 2008).
In his job at a Wal-Mart in Texas, Mike Michell was responsible for catching shoplifters, and he was good at it, too, catching 180 in one two-year period.
But one afternoon things went wildly awry when he chased a thief — a woman using stolen checks — into the parking lot. She jumped into her car, and her accomplice gunned the accelerator, slamming the car into Michell and sending him to the hospital with a broken kneecap, a badly torn shoulder, and two herniated disks. Michell was so devoted to Wal-Mart that he somehow returned to work the next day, but a few weeks later he told his boss that he needed surgery on his knee. He was fired soon afterward, apparently as part of a strategy to dismiss workers whose injuries run up Wal-Mart’s workers’ comp bills.
Immediately after serving in the army, Dawn Eubanks took a seven-dollar-an-hour job at a call center in Florida. Some days she was told to clock in just two or three hours, and some days she was not allowed to clock in during her whole eight-hour shift. The call center’s managers warned the workers that if they went home, even though they weren’t allowed to clock in, they would be viewed as having quit.
Twenty-eight-year-old John Arnold works in the same Caterpillar factory in Illinois as his father, but under the plant’s two-tier contract, the maximum he can ever earn is $14.90 an hour, far less than the $25 earned by his father. Caterpillar, long a symbol of America’s industrial might, insists that it needs a lower wage tier to remain competitive. “A few people I work with are living at home with their parents,” Arnold said. “Some are even on food stamps.”
At a Koch Foods poultry plant in Tennessee, the managers were so intent on keeping the line running all out that Antonia Lopez Paz and the other workers who carved off chicken tenders were ordered not to go to the bathroom except during their lunch and coffee breaks. When one desperate woman asked permission to go, her supervisor took off his hard hat and said, “You can go to the bathroom in this.” Some women ended up soiling themselves.
Don Jensen anticipated a relaxing life of golf after retiring from his human resources post with Lucent Technologies in New Jersey, where he was in charge of recruiting graduates from Stanford, Cornell, MIT, and other top universities.
But when Lucent increased its retirees’ health insurance premiums to $8,280 a year, up from $180, Jensen was forced to abandon his retirement.
He took a job as a ten-dollar-an-hour bank teller.
As part of her software company’s last-lap sprint to get new products out the door, Myra Bronstein sometimes had to work twenty-four hours straight testing for bugs. She felt great loyalty to the Seattle-area company because its executives had repeatedly promised, “As long as we’re in business, you have a job.” But one Friday morning the company suddenly fired Bronstein and seventeen other quality assurance engineers. The engineers were told that if they wanted to receive severance pay, they had to agree to spend the next month training the workers from India who would be replacing them.
ONE OF THE LEAST EXAMINED but most important trends taking place in the United States today is the broad decline in the status and treatment of American workers — white-collar and blue-collar workers, middle-class and low-end workers — that began nearly three decades ago, gradually gathered momentum, and hit with full force soon after the turn of this century. A profound shift has left a broad swath of the American workforce on a lower plane than in decades past, with health coverage, pension benefits, job security, workloads, stress levels, and often wages growing worse for millions of workers.
That the American worker faces this squeeze in the early years of this century is particularly troubling because the squeeze has occurred while the economy, corporate profits, and worker productivity have all been growing robustly. In recent years, a disconcerting disconnect has emerged, with corporate profits soaring while workers’ wages stagnated.
The statistical evidence for this squeeze is as compelling as it is disturbing.
In 2005, median income for nonelderly households failed to increase for the fifth year in a row, after factoring in inflation. That is unprecedented in a time of economic growth. In 2006, median income for those households did finally rise, but it still remained lower — $2,375 lower — than six years earlier. That, too, is unprecedented. Even though corporate profits have doubled since recession gave way to economic expansion in November 2001, and even though employee productivity has risen more than 15 percent since then, the average wage for the typical American worker has inched up just 1 percent (after inflation). With the subprime mortgage crisis threatening to pull the economy into recession, some economists say this may be the first time in American history that the typical working household goes through an economic expansion without any increase in income whatsoever.
This, unfortunately, is the continuation of a long-term squeeze. Since 1979, hourly earnings for 80 percent of American workers (those in private-sector, nonsupervisory jobs) have risen by just 1 percent, after inflation. The average hourly wage was $17.71 at the end of 2007. For male workers, the average wage has actually slid by 5 percent since 1979. Worker productivity, meanwhile, has climbed 60 percent. If wages had kept pace with productivity, the average full-time worker would be earning $58,000 a year; $36,000 was the average in 2007. The nation’s economic pie is growing, but corporations by and large have not given their workers a bigger piece. The squeeze on the American worker has meant more poverty, more income inequality, more family tensions, more hours at work, more time away from the kids, more families without health insurance, more retirees with inadequate pensions, and more demands on government and taxpayers to provide housing assistance and health coverage. Twenty percent of families with children under six live below the poverty line, and 22 million full-time workers do not have health insurance. Largely as a result of the squeeze, the number of housing foreclosures and personal bankruptcies more than tripled in the quarter century after 1979. Economic studies show that income inequality in the United States is so great that it more closely resembles the inequality of a third world country than that of an advanced industrial nation. Many families are enjoying higher incomes, enabling them to buy a plasma-screen TV or take a vacation in Orlando, but this is frequently because fathers have taken on second jobs or more overtime hours or because mothers, even with toddlers, have opted for full-time paid employment. Millions of households have not slipped further behind only because Americans are working far harder than before. A husband and wife in the average middle-class household are, taken together, working 540 hours or three months more per year than such couples would have a quarter century ago, mainly because married women are working considerably longer hours than before. Viewed another way, the American worker’s financial squeeze has translated into a time squeeze. In a survey by the Families and Work Institute, two-thirds of employed parents responded that they didn’t have enough time with their kids, and just under two-thirds said they didn’t have enough time with their spouses. The typical American worker toils 1,804 hours a year, 135 hours more per year than the typical British worker, 240 hours more than the average French worker, and 370 hours (or nine full-time weeks) more than the average German worker. No one in the world’s advanced economies works more.
Aggravating the time squeeze is a phenomenon known as job creep in which our jobs have spilled increasingly into our leisure time. Americans are finishing work memos on their home computers at eleven p.m., they are reading office e-mails on Saturdays and Sundays, and they are using their cell phones and BlackBerries to answer their bosses’ queries while on vacation. The Conference Board, the business research group, found that Americans are less satisfied with their jobs — just 47 percent are satisfied — than at any time since it started tracking the numbers two decades ago. “The breadth of dissatisfaction is unsettling,” the Conference Board wrote, its director of research adding, “The demands in the workplace have increased tremendously.” Americans are going deeper into debt than ever before. Millions of households have supersized their credit card balances, and many have taken cash out of their homes by obtaining second mortgages, arguably unhealthy ways to try to maintain a comfortable lifestyle on a less-than-comfortable income. In 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, the nation’s personal savings rate sank below zero, meaning that Americans were actually spending more than they were earning. As a result, among the bottom two-fifths of households, nearly one in four spends at least 40 percent of its monthly income paying down its debts. And foreclosure filings, spurred by the sub-prime mortgage crisis, are expected to soar to as many as two million by the end of 2008. Two million would represent one in sixty-two households. Even as wages stagnated in recent years, many government officials triumphantly boasted that consumer spending had continued to rise. But this increase was largely due to soaring incomes at the top. From 1979 to 2005, a period when national output more than doubled, after-tax income inched up just 6 percent for the bottom fifth of American households after accounting for inflation, while it rose 21 percent for the middle fifth. For the top fifth, income jumped 80 percent and for the top 1 percent it more than tripled, soaring by 228 percent. A 2007 report by the Congressional Budget Office found that the top 1 percent of households had pre-tax income in 2005 that was more than two-fifths larger than that of the bottom 40 percent. (After taxes, the top 1 percent’s income in 2005 was still nearly 10 percent greater than the bottom 40 percent’s.) As Paul Krugman wrote, “It’s a great economy if you’re a high-
level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.” The nation appears to be on the threshold of recession, and as a result, America’s workers are likely to be squeezed not just by stagnant wages but also by rising unemployment. One of the most worrisome — and puzzling — aspects of the economic expansion that began in November 2001 is that wages have remained stubbornly flat, after factoring in inflation, even though the jobless rate has been low by historical standards. That wages have gone nowhere in a tight labor market underlines the American worker’s declining ability to command higher wages, and now with unemployment increasing, workers’leverage to push for higher wages is bound to grow even weaker.
The squeeze is of course worst for those on the lowest rungs, including millions of workers who are part of our everyday lives: fast food workers, cashiers, child care workers, hotel maids, and nurse’s aides. Nearly 33 million workers — almost one-fourth of the American workforce — earn less than ten dollars an hour, meaning their wages come to less than the poverty line for a family of four ($20,614 in 2006). Despite strong economic growth, the number of Americans living in poverty jumped by 15 percent from 2000 to 2006 — an increase of 5.4 million to 36.5 million. For millions of low-income workers, the promise of America has been broken: the promise that if you work hard, you will be rewarded with a decent living, the promise that if you do an honest day’s work, you will earn enough to feed, clothe, and shelter your family.
Not only do workers on the bottom rungs lack money, but they often lack basic benefits. Three out of four low-wage workers in the private sector do not have employer-provided health insurance, while eight out of nine do not participate in a pension plan. Three-fourths of low-wage workers do not receive paid sick days, so if they need to miss two days’ work because they are sick or their child is sick, they receive no pay for those days — and often risk getting fired. A study sponsored by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Annie E. Casey foundations, “Working Hard, Falling Short,” concluded, “More than one out of four American working families now earn wages so low” — defined as income of less than twice the poverty line for a family of four ($41,200 in 2006) — “that they have difficulty surviving financially.” The study continued, “While our economy relies on the service jobs these low-paid workers fill . . . our society has not taken adequate steps to ensure that these workers can make ends meet and build a future for their families, no matter how determined they are to be self-sufficient.” In her book Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich described these workers as “the major philanthropists of our society.” Ehrenreich wrote, “They neglect their own children so the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect.” Across America more than 50 million people live in near poor households, those with incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 a year. Katherine Newman, a Princeton sociologist, has described this large but often overlooked group as “the missing class.” The mass of workers who are barely getting by is likely to grow only larger, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts that low-wage jobs will account for six of the top ten categories in overall job growth between now and 2014: janitors, nursing home aides, waiters, home-health aides, retail sales workers including cashiers, and food-prep and fast food workers. America’s ailing health care system is a big part of the worsening squeeze.
From 2000 to 2006, the number of Americans without health insurance climbed by 8.6 million, to 47 million. One study found that more than two-fifths of moderate-income, working-age Americans went without health insurance for at least part of 2005. Not only that, for employees who want coverage, companies are requiring them to pay more for it, and as a result, the cost of family coverage has soared 83 percent in just six years. As health costs consume more and more of the nation’s economic output — they account for 16 percent of gross domestic product, or GDP, up from 5 percent in 1960 — that necessarily leaves less money for wage increases.
Pensions, the other pillar of employee benefits, are under assault as never before. In May 2005, a bankruptcy judge allowed United Airlines to default on its pension plans and dump them on the federal agency that protects retirement benefits. Because that agency guarantees pensions only up to a certain amount, many United pilots will receive only half what they expected when they retire. United’s move was the biggest pension default in American history, releasing it from paying $3.2 billion in obligations over the following five years. One of United’s lawyers predicted that more and more companies would use this “strategic tool” to increase their competitiveness. Since then, US Airways and Delta have followed suit. When Delphi, the auto parts giant, filed for bankruptcy in October 2005, its chief executive, Robert S. Miller, threatened to slash the company’s pensions unless the workers agreed to massive wage concessions.
As part of this assault on pensions, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Verizon, Sears, Motorola, and many other companies have embraced a riskier, far less generous type of retirement plan, 401(k)s, while turning away from the traditional plans that promised workers a specific monthly benefit for life after they retired. When Hewlett-Packard took that step, a company spokesman said, “Pension plans are kind of a thing of the past.” With pensions growing ever scarcer, more and more workers are convinced that they won’t have enough money to retire. Ominously, some economists have begun to warn that millions of Americans might have to continue working into their seventies.
Even though this is an era of increased economic volatility, the federal government has decided to let Americans fend increasingly for themselves. Just one-third of laid-off workers receive unemployment benefits, down from 50 percent a generation ago. And even though workers’ skills are becoming obsolete faster than ever because of new technologies and globalization, funding for the main federal program for retraining has been reduced by more than $10 billion in the last quarter century. “Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if — as is ever more likely — they lose their footing,” wrote Jacob S. Hacker, author of The Great Risk Shift. Business executives say they have been forced to tighten their belts on wages and everything else because they face ever-fiercer competition. That is true, but corporate profits have nonetheless soared, climbing 13 percent a year in the six years after the 2001 recession ended, while wages have remained flat.
(Employee productivity has also far outpaced wages, rising 15 percent from 2001 through 2007.) Corporate profits have climbed to their highest share of national income in sixty-four years, while the share going to wages has sunk to its lowest level since 1929. “This is the most pronounced several years of labor’s share declining,” said Lawrence Katz, an economics professor at Harvard. “For as long as we’ve had a modern economy, this is the worst we’ve seen it.” Very simply, corporations, along with their CEOs, are seizing a bigger piece of the nation’s economic pie for themselves, leaving the nation’s workers and their families diminished.
MANY AMERICANS ARE FEELING the squeeze as part of a growing wave of worker exploitation. Faster line speeds at the nation’s meat and poultry plants are causing workers’ bodies to break down and leading to more amputations.
Workers have died at construction sites when scaffolding or trenches collapsed because supervisors ignored the most elementary precautions. Inside some of the nation’s best-known retail stores, immigrant janitors have been forced to work 365 days a year.
Exploitation is of course nothing new, as Upton Sinclair’s writings, Lewis Hines’s photographs, and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire all made clear. In the decades after the Great Depression, exploitation declined as the United States created the world’s most prosperous middle class and as business, labor, and government often worked hand in hand to improve workplace conditions. In recent years, however, worker mistreatment has been on the rise, spurred by a stepped-up corporate focus on minimizing costs and by an influx of easy-to-exploit immigrants. Corporate executives, intent on maximizing profits, often assign rock-bottom labor budgets to the managers who run their stores and restaurants, and those managers in turn often squeeze their workers relentlessly.
A steady decline in workplace regulation has opened the door to greater exploitation. Even though the workforce has grown from 90 million to 145 million over the past three decades, the number of federal wage and hour investigators has fallen. Seven hundred eighty-eight federal wage and hour inspectors are responsible for ensuring compliance at the nation’s 8.4 million business establishments. George W. Bush’s labor secretary, Elaine Chao, signaled her ambivalent views about enforcement when she said, “Sometimes it’s not what you do, but what you refrain from doing that is important.” The infamous Sago Mine in West Virginia had been cited 273 times for safety violations in the two years before an explosion there killed twelve miners in 2006. But none of those fines exceeded $460, and many were just $60 — a minuscule amount considering that the company that owned Sago had $110 million in annual profits. In the five years before, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, then run by former industry executives appointed by President Bush, failed to collect fines in almost half the cases in which it had levied them. The rising tide of exploitation has taken countless forms. Target, Safeway, Albertsons, and Wal-Mart have all hired cleaning contractors who required janitors to work the midnight shift thirty days a month. These contractors systematically broke the law by virtually never paying Social Security or unemployment insurance taxes, and they almost never paid janitors time and a half for overtime even though the janitors often worked fifty-five hours or more each week. These contractors sometimes dumped badly injured workers in front of a hospital or at a bus station with a ticket back to Mexico.
At Taco Bell, Wal-Mart, and Family Dollar, many employees complained that managers forced them to work five or more unpaid hours off the clock each week. The workers who were cheated often earned just $12,000 to $18,000 a year. At an A&P in Westchester County, New York, Wilfredo Brewster, a customer service manager, said he worked from six a.m. to six p.m. Monday through Friday, sixty hours, but was paid for only forty. Managers pressured him to donate his Saturdays to the store as well, telling him it would help him earn a promotion. Under federal and state law, he, as an hourly employee, was supposed to be paid overtime for those Saturdays.
Stylists at SmartStyle, the nation’s largest hair salon company, said that pressure to minimize payroll costs was so intense that on days when there were few customers, managers often ordered stylists to clock out, then clean up the salon. Several hairdressers said they were occasionally paid for only half the hours they worked, their earnings sometimes slipping to $2.50 an hour, less than half the $5.15 federal minimum wage at the time. According to many workers and supervisors at Pep Boys, Toys “R” Us, Family Dollar, Wal-Mart, and other companies, some managers illegally tampered with time clock records to erase hours that employees had worked. Dorothy English, a payroll assistant at a Wal-Mart in Louisiana, said that if an employee had clocked forty-three hours in a week, her boss often ordered her to delete three hours from the worker’s time records to avoid paying time and a half.
“I told them this wasn’t right,” she said. “But they said, ‘This is how we keep people to forty hours.’ ” At dozens of upscale supermarkets in Manhattan, including Food Emporium and Gristede’s, deliverymen often worked seventy-five hours a week but were paid just two hundred dollars, or less than three dollars an hour. They were told they were independent contractors, a group that is not covered by minimum wage and overtime laws. Some call centers deduct pay for every minute a worker spends in the bathroom.
Workers at Wal-Mart and the Cheesecake Factory complained that managers often refused to give them the lunch breaks and fifteen-minute rest breaks that state law required. Bella Blaubergs, a diabetic who worked at a Wal-Mart in Washington State, said she nearly fainted several times from lowblood sugar because managers often would not let her take breaks. At numerous Abercrombie & Fitch stores, African American, Asian, and Hispanic workers complained that they were relegated to back-of-the-store jobs, doing stockroom work and inventory, while white employees were given jobs up front — all to promote Abercrombie’s preppy, fraternity, all-American look. Some cleaning workers at several of the hottest software companies in Silicon Valley earn so little that they live in rented garages in someone else’s home. Rosalba Ceballos, a divorced immigrant from Mexico, was one of them; she lived with her three daughters — ages one, three, and seven — in an absurdly cluttered, windowless garage just outside Palo Alto.
Middle-class workers have not been immune. On a day in 2003 that Circuit City workers remember as “Bloody Wednesday,” the retailer fired 3,900 senior commissioned salespeople — some earned $50,000 a year — having concluded that their commissions and wages were too high. Circuit City simultaneously hired 2,100 replacement salespeople who were to receive lower wages and far lower commissions. Then in 2007, Circuit City laid off another 3,400 employees because they, in the company’s words, earned “well above the market-based salary range for their role.” Many of those laid off were earning around $29,000 a year. Circuit City announced that these workers could reapply for their jobs ten weeks later, but if rehired, they would come back at the lower “market rate.”
In her ten years at the Circuit City in Hoover, Alabama, Julie Godette was considered a model employee, assigned to train new hires and receiving repeated raises that brought her up to $16.40 an hour. She, too, was suddenly laid off. “To work that long for a company and to be let go because you did a good job really hurts,” Godette said. At JP Morgan Chase, Barbara Parkinson, a customer service representative in the global investment services department in New York City, said managers had repeatedly complained when workers submitted time sheets listing several hours’ overtime. To avoid management’s continued wrath, she and other workers decided to forgo the overtime pay due them. At RadioShack’s headquarters in Fort Worth, four hundred workers were fired by e-mail. “The workforce reduction notification is currently in progress,” the e-mail dryly informed recipients. “Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.” Northwest Airlines gave laid-off workers a booklet entitled “101 Ways to Save Money.” But the booklet added insult to financial injury. “Borrow a dress for a big night out” and “Shop at auctions or pawn shops for jewelry” were among the tips it offered. And then it suggested, “Don’t be shy about pulling something you like out of the trash.” r=Rarely have so many economic and social forces been arrayed against the American worker. Downsizing, rightsizing, and reengineering have increasingly made job security an obsolete notion. Many workers fear pink slips so much that they are frightened to ask for raises or protest oppressive workloads.
Globalization, including the recent rush to offshore hundreds of thousands of white-collar jobs, has increased such fears. Layoffs have become a fact of life. Nowadays, on nearly a daily basis, some company announces that it is laying off several thousand employees, and except for the workers and their families, virtually everyone who hears about it ignores it.
America has lost one-fifth of its factory jobs since 2000, jobs that have long been a stepping-stone to the middle class. There has been a concomitant decline in the labor movement to its lowest point in decades, undermining the one force that, for all its faults, created some semblance of balance between workers and management during the second half of the twentieth century.
The massive influx of immigrants has created a huge pool of easy-to-bully workers that has given managers greater leverage — most visibly in construction and meatpacking — to squeeze wages and worsen conditions for all workers.
Many companies have embraced the just-in-time workforce — a mass of temps, freelancers, and on-call occasionals whose lower pay and unstable status often undercut the wages, benefits, and job security of the traditional year-round workforce.
The position of the American worker has been further undermined by the economy’s evolution from industrial capitalism to financial capitalism. Industrialists were once firmly in control, intent on maximizing production and market share, but now investment bankers, mutual fund managers, hedge fund managers, and, increasingly, managers of private-equity funds wield great power and are forever pressuring the companies that they’ve invested in to maximize profits and take whatever steps are necessary to keep stock prices at their highest. Companies, in response, often skimp on wages, lay off workers, and close operations.
Wal-Mart, founded in a small Arkansas town in 1962, has spearheaded the rise of a less caring, less generous, and often less law-abiding management style. Wal-Mart employs nearly 1.4 million workers in the United States, far more than any other company. With its phenomenal growth, it has become the world’s largest retailer, and its low wages and benefits — it provides health insurance to just half of its workers — have created a downward pull on the way that many companies treat their workers. (For that reason, we will examine Wal-Mart in great detail.) The Wal-Mart effect could be seen most starkly when the three largest supermarket chains in California — Safeway, Albertsons, and Ralphs — grew alarmed about Wal-Mart’s plans to open dozens of super-centers in California that would sell groceries in addition to general merchandise.
The supermarket chains demanded lower wages and far less generous health benefits for all future hires, and after a bitter four-and-a-half-month strike and lockout in 2003-4, the chains got their way. The California supermarkets said they couldn’t compete when their cashiers earned $17.90 an hour on average and Wal-Mart’s earned $8.50 an hour.
The squeeze on the American worker has been further exacerbated by corporate America’s growing sway over politics and policy, making it harder for beleaguered workers to turn to government for help. When investigators unearthed serious child labor violations at a dozen Wal-Marts, officials in the Bush Labor Department signed a highly unusual secret agreement promising to give Wal-Mart fifteen days’ advance notice whenever inspectors planned to visit a Wal-Mart store to look for more such violations. Wal-Mart officials had been major donors to the Republican Party.
As a result of business’s strong influence over President George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress, the federal minimum wage remained stuck at $5.15 for nearly a decade. A full-time worker who earns $5.15 an hour grosses $10,712 a year, far below the $16,079 poverty line for a family of three. In 2007, the $5.15 minimum wage, after adjusting for inflation, was 33 percent below its 1979 level. In 2007, the Democratic Congress raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour over two years.
Nor have the tax policies emanating from Washington been very friendly to workers. President Bush and Republicans in Congress pushed vigorously to minimize taxes on investors, that is, taxes on dividends and capital gains, while urging elimination of the estate tax. Bush’s tax cuts saved the average middle-class taxpayer $744 a year, while saving $44,212 a year for the top 1 percent of taxpayers and $230,136 for the top one-tenth of 1 percent of households. Even though the government has done little of late to ease the squeeze on American workers, there are plenty of things government can do to alleviate the difficulties that workers face. I will return to this subject later. Now, however, I want to examine in depth a telling instance of the big squeeze.
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3) Medicare Plans Affected by Rising Drug Costs
By MILT FREUDENHEIM
April 19, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/business/19specialtyside.html?ref=health
Employers and patients in corporate health plans are not the only ones affected by the soaring prices of specialty drugs. Enrollees in Medicare drug plans are also feeling the pressure.
Many leading pharmacy benefit managers and drug insurers that oversee employer plans also offer coverage through the Medicare Part D drug insurance program, and so are profiting from federal spending on specialty drugs and from Medicare patients’ own high out-of-pocket co-payments.
Driven in part by specialty drugs, the prices of medicines heavily used by the elderly have risen more than 24 percent since June 2006, two senior health economists at Harvard reported in January in the policy journal Health Affairs.
In that article the economists, Richard G. Frank and Joseph E. Newhouse, said single-source unique drugs have the potential to present “important new pressures on the federal budget.”
Many Part D plans segregate specialty drugs in a special tier, where a Medicare enrollee pays 25 to 33 percent of the price, according to Jack Hoadley, a research professor at Georgetown University. At that rate, patients quickly reach the $5,726 cap on out-of-pocket spending, after which the patient pays only 5 percent. From that point, the drug plan sponsor pays 15 percent, while Medicare pays 80 percent of the cost.
The trend, the Frank-Newhouse article said, bodes ill for “the worrisome future financial health of Medicare.”
MILT FREUDENHEIM
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4) Running Out of Planet to Exploit
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
April 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp
Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.
In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”
Last week, oil hit $117.
It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?
How you answer this question depends largely on what you believe is driving the rise in resource prices. Broadly speaking, there are three competing views.
The first is that it’s mainly speculation — that investors, looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates, have piled into commodity futures, driving up prices. On this view, someday soon the bubble will burst and high resource prices will go the way of Pets.com.
The second view is that soaring resource prices do, in fact, have a basis in fundamentals — especially rapidly growing demand from newly meat-eating, car-driving Chinese — but that given time we’ll drill more wells, plant more acres, and increased supply will push prices right back down again.
The third view is that the era of cheap resources is over for good — that we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit.
I find myself somewhere between the second and third views.
There are some very smart people — not least, George Soros — who believe that we’re in a commodities bubble (although Mr. Soros says that the bubble is still in its “growth phase”). My problem with this view, however, is this: Where are the inventories?
Normally, speculation drives up commodity prices by promoting hoarding. Yet there’s no sign of resource hoarding in the data: inventories of food and metals are at or near historic lows, while oil inventories are only normal.
The best argument for the second view, that the resource crunch is real but temporary, is the strong resemblance between what we’re seeing now and the resource crisis of the 1970s.
What Americans mostly remember about the 1970s are soaring oil prices and lines at gas stations. But there was also a severe global food crisis, which caused a lot of pain at the supermarket checkout line — I remember 1974 as the year of Hamburger Helper — and, much more important, helped cause devastating famines in poorer countries.
In retrospect, the commodity boom of 1972-75 was probably the result of rapid world economic growth that outpaced supplies, combined with the effects of bad weather and Middle Eastern conflict. Eventually, the bad luck came to an end, new land was placed under cultivation, new sources of oil were found in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, and resources got cheap again.
But this time may be different: concerns about what happens when an ever-growing world economy pushes up against the limits of a finite planet ring truer now than they did in the 1970s.
For one thing, I don’t expect growth in China to slow sharply anytime soon. That’s a big contrast with what happened in the 1970s, when growth in Japan and Europe, the emerging economies of the time, downshifted — and thereby took a lot of pressure off the world’s resources.
Meanwhile, resources are getting harder to find. Big oil discoveries, in particular, have become few and far between, and in the last few years oil production from new sources has been barely enough to offset declining production from established sources.
And the bad weather hitting agricultural production this time is starting to look more fundamental and permanent than El Niño and La Niña, which disrupted crops 35 years ago. Australia, in particular, is now in the 10th year of a drought that looks more and more like a long-term manifestation of climate change.
Suppose that we really are running up against global limits. What does it mean?
Even if it turns out that we’re really at or near peak world oil production, that doesn’t mean that one day we’ll say, “Oh my God! We just ran out of oil!” and watch civilization collapse into “Mad Max” anarchy.
But rich countries will face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living. And some poor countries will find themselves living dangerously close to the edge — or over it.
Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling.
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5) Sending in the Marines (to Recruit Women)
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
Advertising
April 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21adcol.html?8dpc
THE Marines are looking for a few good women.
Actually, they will take as many as they can get. Faced with the difficulty of recruiting during a long and unpopular war, the United States Marine Corps has started marketing itself to women in a concerted way for the first time. It is running ads in magazines like Shape, Self and Fitness, which appeal mainly to female readers, as well as through more mainstream outlets like “American Idol,” where the message is a unisex one of patriotism rather than macho swagger.
The Marine Corps still runs its traditional ads — during National Basketball Association and National Hockey League games, and in magazines like Sports Illustrated and Men’s Fitness — often showing male recruits parachuting from airplanes, wielding big guns, driving heavy tanks and stampeding across the ground.
But now it is also showing a softer side. In the latest campaign, a print ad shows a female marine striking a martial arts pose in front of a crowd of men who are looking up to her as their leader. The tag line: “There are no female marines. Only marines.”
The campaign is a big departure for the Marine Corps, which started accepting women for clerical duties in 1918 but until last year advertised to them only fitfully. During World War II, the most memorable recruitment ads aimed at women came from the Army and the Navy.
In 1973, when the military dropped the draft in favor of a volunteer force, the Marines introduced its “few good men” slogan and ran at least one spot for women, reaching out to high school graduates and “college gals” with a brochure that had a picture of a flower on it.
In the 1990s, when the Marines Corps was having trouble reaching recruitment goals, it ran a scattering of ads in magazines like Seventeen and Sports Illustrated for Women, using tag lines like “You can look at models, or you can be one” and “Get a makeover that’s more than skin deep.” That outreach “wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now,” said Jay Cronin, management director of JWT, a unit of the WPP Group, which has been the Marine Corps’ advertising agency for more than 60 years.
Mr. Cronin said the current effort was much different because everyone involved took the time to “understand the psychographics,” that is, figuring out which women might actually want to join the military, and why. That is why the campaign aims at athletic women, not just all women graduating from high school, and the messages conveyed are much more egalitarian.
Although most combat jobs are off-limits to them, women make up 6.2 percent of the Marine Corps and go through the same basic training as men.
“We had never done much female outreach,” said Lt. Col. Mike Zeliff, assistant chief of staff for marketing and advertising for the Marines Corps in Quantico, Va. “but there was an opportunity for us to go after the athletic, young woman who would be well suited to graduate from boot camp. We asked ourselves, ‘What can we do to get the message out to these young women?’ ”
Women are not the only ones being courted specifically. The Marines Corps is reaching out to Latinos with ads in La Raza newspaper that emphasize family and honor (“Each unit in the Corps is a family, and each member knows they never stand alone”), and to Arab-Americans with a message about nationality and identity (“I am American. I am Arab. I am a Marine ... I know where I stand”).
“We never used to have much of a targeting strategy — we were just looking for 18-24-year-old men” said Colonel Zeliff. “Today, we are more niche than ever.”
Given the drumbeat of bad news from the lingering conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American military casualties recently topped 4,000, the sell can be a tough one. Sentiment against recuiting has flared on some campuses, as well as in Berkeley, Calif., where the City Council approved a measure in February asking Marine recruiters to vacate their downtown office.
Dana Balicki, national media coordinator for Code Pink, a women’s peace group, called the Marine campaign “just another example of potentially misleading tactics used to sell the war to young people, and especially young women.”
Talking specifically about the print ad that shows a woman in a leadership role, Ms. Balicki said, “She’s supposed to look like she’s being empowered, but she’s in a typical self-defense stance. After knowing the statistics and talking to women who have experienced sexual trauma or violence in the military, it’s hard to think of it as empowerment.”
As opposition against the war continues, Congress has ordered the Marines and the Army to augment their forces. All branches of the military have been reaching out to nontraditional audiences, but none have done so quite as emphatically as the Marine Corps, which is the fourth-largest of the five branches (the Coast Guard is the smallest). Its advertising budget is $157.4 million this year, up from $152.4 million in fiscal year 2007.
The ad featuring a woman commander is intended to appeal to young women who are weary of being separated from boys and men in sports and are eager to prove themselves on a larger stage, said Marshall Lauck, JWT’s lead executive on the Marines account.
“The message is that the Marine Corps offers a unique opportunity to earn that title and be shoulder to shoulder with your male counterparts,” Mr. Lauck said. “That’s an important aspect for the young women seeking that challenge, women seeking an opportunity for a great and selfless endeavor.”
The Marines also broke from tradition earlier this year by running a 60-second spot during several episodes of “American Idol.” Titled “America’s Marines,” the ad featured marines standing in formation against various national landmarks. It was intended to appeal to a general audience, including parents and other people whom military recruiters refer to as “influencers.”
That ad “helped us get that female audience that we’re looking for,” said Steve Harding, a partner at the Marine Corps’ media agency, MindShare (which places ads), which is also part of WPP.
The effect of the publicity is difficult to measure. There has been a small increase in the number of female recruits — to 2,507 in 2007 from 2,320 in 2006 and 2,282 in 2005— but the Marine Corps says it is particularly pleased by the volume of responses to the campaign. The magazine ads include reply cards, and, Mr. Harding said, they yielded more than 1,044 “qualified leads” in 2007, though only two turned into enlistments.
One is Ana Castillo, a senior at William Chrisman High School in Independence, Mo., who mailed in a reply card last September after seeing an ad in a women’s fitness magazine in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Her older brother is a Navy veteran, and while she had been seriously considering joining the military, the ad prompted her to take action.
Ms. Castillo seems to be precisely the kind of young woman being sought by the advertising. She plays soccer and softball at high school and says she is hungry to prove herself on more dangerous fields.
“The Marines are the toughest,” she said in a telephone interview. “They have the longest boot camp, the highest standards. The Marines want people to actually want to be in the Marines, not just be in it for the money.”
It was those traits that Ms. Castillo saw reflected in the magazine ad, as well as in the words of the recruiter who called her a week after she mailed the reply card. She will turn 18 on June 24 and plans to leave for boot camp on July 7, after her high school graduation.
While the Marines seem to be taking the lead, other branches of the military are increasing their niche efforts as well. The Navy, for example, has started using the Web to recruit women for nontraditional jobs like aviation mechanics, placing banner ads on portals like Yahoo and movie and video game Web sites.
“We did e-mail blasts to women only, and what we found was lots of women out there have an interest” in joining the Navy, but they did not know what jobs were available to them, said Kathleen Donald, an executive vice president and account director with Navy’s ad firm, Campbell-Ewald, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies.
Although military officials cite a number of reasons for their recruiting woes — high obesity rates in America, for example, and young people’s shifting attitudes toward military service — the fact is that the images from the battlefront are hard to counteract.
“We’re in the midst of a very difficult war, and the ground forces are taking a pounding,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer and military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a research firm.
“I think what the Marine Corps is finding is that even recruiting for a small force in the midst of an unpopular war is becoming something of a challenge,” he said. “They can no longer ignore people purely on the basis of demographic or inscriptive characteristics.”
Maj. Wes Hayes, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, said in response to Mr. Thompson’s comment, “Look at our fiscal year missions. Since May 2005, we’ve met or exceeded our recruiting goals. Remember, recruiting is a marathon and not a sprint.”
Ms. Castillo said her parents needed some persuading to let her join, despite her brother’s experience in the Navy.
“My mom, well, I’m her little girl,” she said. “She wants me to go to school. My dad was proud. He wanted me to go into the military, but he wants me to go into the Air Force.”
Like anyone entering the Marine Corps today, Ms. Castillo is keenly aware of where she is probably headed. “I’m O.K. with it,” she said. “If I get sent to Iraq, I’m going to be ready.”
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6) Justice Stevens Renounces Capital Punishment
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Supreme Court Memo
April 18, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/washington/18memo.html?fta=y
WASHINGTON — When Justice John Paul Stevens intervened in a Supreme Court argument on Wednesday to score a few points off the lawyer who was defending the death penalty for the rape of a child, the courtroom audience saw a master strategist at work, fully in command of the flow of the argument and the smallest details of the case. For those accustomed to watching Justice Stevens, it was a familiar sight.
But there was something different that no one in the room knew except the eight other justices. In the decision issued 30 minutes earlier in which the court found Kentucky’s method of execution by lethal injection constitutional, John Paul Stevens, in the 33rd year of his Supreme Court tenure and four days shy of his 88th birthday, had just renounced the death penalty.
In an opinion concurring with the majority’s judgment, Justice Stevens said he felt bound to “respect precedents that remain a part of our law.” But outside the confines of the Kentucky case, he said, the time had come to reconsider “the justification for the death penalty itself.”
He wrote that court decisions and actions taken by states to justify the death penalty were “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process” to weigh the costs and risks of the penalty against its benefits.
His opinion, which was not separately announced in the courtroom, was the culmination of a remarkable journey for a Republican antitrust lawyer.
During his tenure, Justice Stevens, originally an opponent of affirmative action, has changed his views on that and other issues. “Learning on the job is essential to the process of judging,” he observed in a speech in 2005.
But it is on the death penalty that his evolution is most apparent. He was named to the Supreme Court by President Gerald R. Ford at a time when ferment over capital punishment was at a peak. Less than four years earlier, the court had invalidated every death penalty statute in the country, and states were racing to draft laws that would test the court’s tolerance for a fresh start.
In July 1976, little more than six months after taking his seat, Justice Stevens announced the opinion for the court in Jurek v. Texas, one of the three cases by which the justices gave their approval to a new generation of death penalty statutes. The defendant, Jerry Lane Jurek, had been convicted of kidnapping a 10-year-old girl from a public swimming pool and then raping and killing her.
The new justice’s opinion described the crime in vivid detail before concluding that Mr. Jurek’s death sentence was constitutional because “Texas has provided a means to promote the evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law.”
During the child rape argument on Wednesday, it was the lawyer for Louisiana who was giving the vivid description of the crime, recounting in grisly anatomic detail the injuries inflicted on an 8-year-old girl by her stepfather, the convicted rapist challenging the state’s death penalty law. As justices and the courtroom audience cringed, the air seemed to leave the room, along with any points the defendant’s lawyer had managed to make in his initial turn at the lectern.
Justice Stevens had remained silent during that first half of the argument, but now he pounced. “Could you clarify?” he began, interrupting the state’s lawyer, Juliet L. Clark. “Were those injuries permanent?”
He knew the answer, of course: the record of the case indicated that the girl’s physical injuries had healed in two weeks. His point was to bring the anatomy lesson to an end and refocus the argument on the legal issues. If it was also to throw the state’s lawyer off stride, he succeeded in that as well. Ms. Clark, reluctantly conceding that the injuries had healed, shifted to her legal arguments. Justice Stevens’s mild expression and tone never changed.
His renunciation of capital punishment in the lethal injection case, Baze v. Rees, was likewise low key and undramatic. While reminiscent of Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s similar step, shortly before his retirement in 1994, Justice Stevens’s opinion lacked the ringing declaration of Justice Blackmun’s “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.” Justice Stevens’s strongest statements were not in his own voice, but in quotations from a former colleague, Justice Byron R. White, an early death penalty opponent.
But Justice Stevens was not so restrained last June in an opinion dissenting from a decision that in retrospect appears to have been, for him, the final straw. In that case, Uttecht v. Brown, a 5-to-4 majority gave state courts great leeway in death penalty trials to remove jurors who express even mild doubt about capital punishment.
“Millions of Americans oppose the death penalty” and yet can serve as conscientious jurors, Justice Stevens objected then, adding that the majority “has gotten it horribly backwards” in enabling prosecutors to weed them out.
In his opinion on Wednesday, Justice Stevens said the Uttecht decision was “of special concern to me,” and used it to explain his journey from Jurek v. Texas to Baze v. Rees. Those who voted to uphold the death penalty in 1976, he said, “relied heavily on our belief that adequate procedures were in place” to treat death penalty cases with special care so as to minimize bias and error.
“Ironically, however,” he continued, “more recent cases have endorsed procedures that provide less protections to capital defendants than to ordinary offenders.”
In other words, capital punishment had become for him, in the court’s hands, a promise of fairness unfulfilled.
One of the court’s most frequent dissenters throughout his tenure, Justice Stevens, an optimist at heart, does not look back on every loss with such a sense of stinging disappointment. In 1989, he dissented vigorously from the court’s decision in Texas v. Johnson that flag-burning is a form of expression protected by the First Amendment. While he still believes he was right, he told a Chicago audience of lawyers in 2006, he sees a silver lining: flag-burning has all but disappeared.
“What once was a courageous act of defiant expression,” he said, “is now perfectly lawful, and therefore is not worth the effort.”
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LINKS AND VERY SHORT STORIES
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Coal Company Verdict in West Virginia Is Thrown Out
By ADAM LIPTAK
April 4, 2008
National Briefing | Mid-Atlantic
The State Supreme Court for a second time threw out a $50 million verdict against the coal company Massey Energy. The court decided to rehear the case after the publication of photographs of its chief justice on vacation in Monte Carlo with the company’s chief executive, Don L. Blankenship. The chief justice, Elliott E. Maynard, and a second justice disqualified themselves from the rehearing and were replaced by appeals court judges, but the vote was again 3-to-2 in favor of Massey. A third justice, Brent D. Benjamin, who was elected to the court with the help of more than $3 million from Mr. Blankenship, refused to recuse himself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/us/04brfs-COALCOMPANYV_BRF.html?ref=us
Utah: Miners’ Families File Lawsuit
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | Rockies
April 3, 2008
A lawsuit by the families of six men killed in August in a mine cave-in claims the collapse occurred because the mine’s owners were harvesting coal unsafely. The suit, filed in Salt Lake City, says the Murray Energy Corporation performed risky retreat mining last summer. It seeks unspecified damages. Three men trying to reach the miners died 10 days after the collapse in another cave-in at the Crandall Canyon Mine.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/us/03brfs-MINERSFAMILI_BRF.html?ref=us
Regimens: Drug Samples Found to Affect Spending
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Vital Signs
Having doctors distribute free samples of medicines may do exactly what drug companies hope for — encourage patients to spend more money on drugs.
A study in the April issue of Medical Care found that patients who never received free samples spent an average of $178 for six months of prescriptions. Those receiving samples spent $166 in the six months before they obtained free medicine, $244 when they received the handouts and $212 in the six months after that.
Researchers studied 5,709 patients, tracking medical histories and drug expenditures; 14 percent of the group received free samples. The study adjusted for prior and current health conditions, race, socioeconomic level and other variables.
The authors acknowledge that the study results could be partly explained by unmeasured illness in the group given samples.
The lead author, Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, said although free samples might save some patients money, there were other ways to economize. “Using more generics, prescribing for three months’ supply rather than one month’s and stopping drugs that may no longer be needed can also save money,” Dr. Alexander said.
April 1, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/01/health/policy/01regi.html?ref=health
Rhode Island: Order to Combat Illegal Immigration
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | New England
Linking the presence of undocumented workers to the state’s financial woes, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri signed an executive order that includes steps to combat illegal immigration. The order requires state agencies and companies that do business with the state to verify the legal status of employees. It also directs the state police and prison and parole officials to work harder to find and deport illegal immigrants. The governor, a Republican, said that he understood illegal immigrants faced hardships, but that he did not want them in Rhode Island. Under his order, the state police will enter an agreement with federal immigration authorities permitting them access to specialized immigration databases.
March 29, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/us/29brfs-002.html?ref=us
North Carolina: Ministers Say Police Destroyed Records
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
Three ministers accused a Greensboro police officer of ordering officers to destroy about 50 boxes of police files related to the fatal shooting of five people at an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in 1979. The Revs. Cardes Brown, Gregory Headen and Nelson Johnson said an active-duty officer told them he and at least three other officers were told to destroy the records in 2004 or 2005, shortly after a seven-member panel that had been convened to research the shootings requested police files related to them. The ministers did not identify the officer who provided the information. On Nov. 3, 1979, a heavily armed caravan of Klansman and Nazi Party members confronted the rally. Five marchers were killed and 10 were injured. Those charged were later acquitted in state and federal trials. The city and some Klan members were found liable for the deaths in civil litigation.
February 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/us/27brfs-MINISTERSSAY_BRF.html?ref=us
Gaza: Israeli Army Clears Itself in 21 Deaths
By ISABEL KERSHNER
World Briefing | Middle East
The army said no legal action would be taken against military officials over an artillery strike in Beit Hanun in 2006 in which an errant shell hit residential buildings and killed 21 Palestinian civilians. An army investigation concluded that the shell was fired based on information that militants were intending to fire rockets from the area, an army statement said. The civilian deaths, it said, were “directly due to a rare and severe failure” in the artillery control system. The army’s military advocate general concluded that there was no need for further investigation.
February 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/27/world/middleeast/27briefs-israelistrike.html?ref=world
World Briefing | Asia
Taiwan: Tons of Fish Wash Up on Beaches
By REUTERS
About 45 tons of fish have washed up dead along 200 miles of beach on the outlying Penghu Islands after an unusual cold snap. News reports said 10 times as many dead fish were still in the water.
February 23, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/world/asia/23briefs-TONSOFFISHWA_BRF.html?ref=world
Zimbabwe: Inflation Breaks the Six-Figure Mark
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
World Briefing | Africa
The government’s statistics office said the inflation rate surged to a new record of 100,580 percent in January, up from 66,212 percent in December. Rangarirai Mberi, news editor of the independent Financial Gazette in Harare, said the state of the economy would feature prominently in next month’s presidential and parliamentary elections. “Numbers no longer shock people,” he said. Zimbabweans have learned to live in a hyperinflationary environment, he added, “but the question is, how long can this continue?”
February 21, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/21/world/africa/21briefs-INFLATIONBRE_BRF.html?ref=world
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GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENTS AND INFORMATION
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Russell Means Speaking at the Transform Columbus Day Rally
"If voting could do anything it would be illegal!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8Lri1-6aoY
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Stop the Termination or the Cherokee Nation
http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/activismissues.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5580
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We Didn't Start the Fire
http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html
I Can't Take it No More
http://lefti.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html#9214483115237950361
The Art of Mental Warfare
http://artofmentalwarfare.com/pog/artofmentalwarfarecom-the-warning/
MONEY AS DEBT
http://video. google.com/ videoplay? docid=-905047436 2583451279
http://www.moneyasd ebt.net/
UNCONSTITUTIONAL
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6582099850410121223&pr=goog-sl
IRAQ FOR SALE
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6621486727392146155
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Port of Olympia Anti-Militarization Action Nov. 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOkn2Fg7R8w
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"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: 'Look how much progress we're making. I'm in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.' While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education.
"But how many sitting here right now feel that they could [laughs] truly identify with a struggle that was designed to eliminate the basic causes that create the conditions that exist? Not very many. They can jive, but when it comes to identifying yourself with a struggle that is not endorsed by the power structure, that is not acceptable, that the ground rules are not laid down by the society in which you live, in which you are struggling against, you can't identify with that, you step back.
"It's easy to become a satellite today without even realizing it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power of economic dollarism. You can cut out colonialism, imperialism and all other kind of ism, but it's hard for you to cut that dollarism. When they drop those dollars on you, you'll fold though."
—MALCOLM X, 1965
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=987
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A little gem:
Michael Moore Faces Off With Stephen Colbert [VIDEO]
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/57492/
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LAPD vs. Immigrants (Video)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/qws/ff/qr?term=lapd&Submit=S&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Search&st=s
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Dr. Julia Hare at the SOBA 2007
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeo9ewi/proudtobeblack2/
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"We are far from that stage today in our era of the absolute
lie; the complete and totalitarian lie, spread by the
monopolies of press and radio to imprison social
consciousness." December 1936, "In 'Socialist' Norway,"
by Leon Trotsky: “Leon Trotsky in Norway” was transcribed
for the Internet by Per I. Matheson [References from
original translation removed]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/12/nor.htm
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Wealth Inequality Charts
http://www.faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html
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MALCOLM X: Oxford University Debate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dmzaaf-9aHQ
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"There comes a times when silence is betrayal."
--Martin Luther King
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YouTube clip of Che before the UN in 1964
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtATT8GXkWg&mode=related&search
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The Wealthiest Americans Ever
NYT Interactive chart
JULY 15, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html
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New Orleans After the Flood -- A Photo Gallery
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=795
This email was sent to you as a service, by Roland Sheppard.
Visit my website at: http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret
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[For some levity...Hans Groiner plays Monk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51bsCRv6kI0
...bw]
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Which country should we invade next?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3g_zqz3VjY
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My Favorite Mutiny, The Coup
http://www.myspace.com/thecoupmusic
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Michael Moore- The Awful Truth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeOaTpYl8mE
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Morse v. Frederick Supreme Court arguments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_LsGoDWC0o
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Free Speech 4 Students Rally - Media Montage
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfCjfod8yuw
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'My son lived a worthwhile life'
In April 2003, 21-year old Tom Hurndall was shot in the head
in Gaza by an Israeli soldier as he tried to save the lives of three
small children. Nine months later, he died, having never
recovered consciousness. Emine Saner talks to his mother
Jocelyn about her grief, her fight to make the Israeli army
accountable for his death and the book she has written
in his memory.
Monday March 26, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2042968,00.html
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Introducing...................the Apple iRack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-KWYYIY4jQ
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"A War Budget Leaves Every Child Behind."
[A T-shirt worn by some teachers at Roosevelt High School
in L.A. as part of their campaign to rid the school of military
recruiters and JROTC--see Article in Full item number 4, below...bw]
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"200 million children in the world sleep in the streets today.
Not one of them is Cuban."
(A sign in Havana)
Venceremos
View sign at bottom of page at:
http://www.cubasolidarity.net/index.html
[Thanks to Norma Harrison for sending this...bw]
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FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein
http://www.walterlippmann.com/sylvia-weinstein-fightback-intro.html
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[The Scab
"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad,
and the vampire, he had some awful substance left with
which he made a scab."
"A scab is a two-legged animal with a corkscrew soul,
a water brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue.
Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten
principles." "When a scab comes down the street,
men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and
the devil shuts the gates of hell to keep him out."
"No man (or woman) has a right to scab so long as there
is a pool of water to drown his carcass in,
or a rope long enough to hang his body with.
Judas was a gentleman compared with a scab.
For betraying his master, he had character enough
to hang himself." A scab has not.
"Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage.
Judas sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver.
Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of
a commision in the british army."
The scab sells his birthright, country, his wife,
his children and his fellowmen for an unfulfilled
promise from his employer.
Esau was a traitor to himself; Judas was a traitor
to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country;
a scab is a traitor to his God, his country,
his family and his class."
Author --- Jack London (1876-1916)...Roland Sheppard
http://web.mac.com/rolandgarret]
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Sand Creek Massacre
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
On November 29, 1864, 700 Colorado troops savagely slaughtered
over 450 Cheyenne children, disabled, elders, and women in the
southeastern Colorado Territory under its protection. This act
became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. This film project
("The Sand Creek Massacre" documentary film project) is an
examination of an open wound in the souls of the Cheyenne
people as told from their perspective. This project chronicles
that horrific 19th century event and its affect on the 21st century
struggle for respectful coexistence between white and native
plains cultures in the United States of America.
Listed below are links on which you can click to get the latest news,
products, and view, free, "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" award-
winning documentary short. In order to create more native
awareness, particularly to save the roots of America's history,
please read the following:
Some people in America are trying to save the world. Bless
them. In the meantime, the roots of America are dying.
What happens to a plant when the roots die? The plant dies
according to my biology teacher in high school. American's
roots are its native people. Many of America's native people
are dying from drug and alcohol abuse, poverty, hunger,
and disease, which was introduced to them by the Caucasian
male. Tribal elders are dying. When they die, their oral
histories go with them. Our native's oral histories are the
essence of the roots of America, what took place before
our ancestors came over to America, what is taking place,
and what will be taking place. It is time we replenish
America's roots with native awareness, else America
continues its decaying, and ultimately, its death.
You can help. The 22-MINUTE SAND CREEK MASSACRE
DOCUMENTARY PRESENTATION/EDUCATIONAL DVD IS
READY FOR PURCHASE! (pass the word about this powerful
educational tool to friends, family, schools, parents, teachers,
and other related people and organizations to contact
me (dvasicek@earthlink.net, 303-903-2103) for information
about how they can purchase the DVD and have me come
to their children's school to show the film and to interact
in a questions and answers discussion about the Sand
Creek Massacre.
Happy Holidays!
Donald L. Vasicek
Olympus Films+, LLC
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Vasicek,+Don
http://www.donvasicek.com
dvasicek@earthlink.net
303-903-2103
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FEATURED AT NATIVE AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL:
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/local/16035305.htm
(scroll down when you get there])
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING
WRITER/FILMMAKER DONALD L. VASICEK REPORT:
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/sandcreekmassacre.html
"THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FINALIST IN DOCUMENTARY CHANNEL COMPETITION (VIEW HERE):
http://www.docupyx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=41
VIEW "THE SAND CREEK MASSACRE" AWARD-WINNING DOCUMENTARY
SHORT FILM MOVIE OF THE WEEK FOR FREE HERE:
http://twymancreative.com/twymanc.html
SHOP:
http://www.manataka.org/page633.html
BuyIndies.com
donvasicek.com.Peace Articles at Libraryofpeace.org">
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