Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters
NEWS CLIPS
April 26, 2013
Randall Brassell, Director of Communications Telephone: 615-521-4097 (Fax) 615-824-2164 Email: [email protected]
Recently, an article written by former UTU employee Frank Wilner appeared in "Railway Age" magazine titled "Threatened BMWE Strike Could Cripple, or Kill, Amtrak". Wilner's article criticizes BMWED for fighting for its members. The following is a rebuttal written by Pennsylvania Federation General Chairperson Jed Dodd;
Rebuttal
Frank Wilner has been a writer and reporter on the railroad industry for nearly forty years. He is a well known hatchet man who will always serve his paymaster at the expense of the facts. Recently, he wrote an article about the current status of bargaining between Amtrak and the BMWED for the management magazine, “Railway Age.”
He certainly lived up to his reputation of reporting the facts incorrectly. For instance, he reports that it is the BMWED that is forcing Amtrak to a strike with unreasonable demands and does not even mention that we are in a coalition with the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, who are also demanding the same wage and benefit package as us. Frank Wilner reports on bargaining and does not even know who is sitting at the bargaining table. Additionally he asserts that a BMWED strike would destroy Amtrak. Strikes in the railroad industry are heavily regulated by the Federal government and no one believes that this particular government would permit a strike on Amtrak that would actually threaten Amtrak’s existence. This is just more fear baiting by management’s little tool, Frank Wilner. For an accurate report of the current status of bargaining please read the membership letter sent by General Chairman Dodd of the BMWED and General Chairman Ingersoll of the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen late last year.
Frank Wilner did get one thing straight in his recent article. We are seeking the same wage and benefit package recently negotiated on the freight railroads. This package is better than the wage and benefit package that has been agreed to by some of the other Amtrak unions. While Frank Wilner apparently believes he has been elected to represent Amtrak workers, all of the Unions who have previously settled on Amtrak have offered support and have wished the BMWED and the BRS good luck in our current endeavor. We are seeking the national freight pattern because this is the pattern that has governed our bargaining relationship for forty years in voluntary agreements with management. It is also the pattern that has been recommended, by three different Presidential Emergency Boards, as the appropriate pattern we should use to settle our disputes. These emergency boards have been appointed by both Republican and Democratic Presidents.
The agreements reached with Amtrak over the past forty years have been negotiated during a period of time when by any measure used Amtrak has become a healthy and vibrant company. Frank Wilner’s premise that good labor agreements are a threat to Amtrak’s existence is simply not proven by the facts. We believe that we are entitled to more than the freight patterns because of the unique dangers that we face on the Northeast Corridor which are not faced by any other railroad worker in the country. However, we also recognize that we have made this argument to the same three Presidential Emergency Boards that have recommended our national freight pattern as the settlement and have lost it. We should be way beyond the hysterical nonsense written by Frank Wilner. It is time for everyone to behave like adults and settle our contracts using the same formula that has served the parties well for forty years, or agree to be released from the services of the National Mediation Board so that a process can begin and we can ultimately obtain help from a Presidential Emergency Board to settle our differences.
Finally, Frank Wilner’s premise that Amtrak workers should further subsidize the Amtrak operation with substandard compensation is bad public policy. Passenger Railroads do not make money, but they do contribute greatly to the economic success of the nation. Passenger Railroads are also expensive to maintain and operate efficiently and safely. Congress is entitled to a correct accounting of what it will cost to operate the railroad. In terms of labor costs, it has been determined by overwhelming precedent that the costs of maintenance of way and signal work should be governed by those agreements reached voluntarily in the private sector. Once Congress understands the correct costs of operating the railroad they can elect to fund it or not fund it, but the men and women who have made Amtrak successful with our blood, sweat and tears should not be asked to also subsidize the operation with our paychecks.
The Real Terrorists are the Corporate Execs Who’ve Bought the Regulators
By Dave Lindorff
The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US this week. The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple days later in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues.
It’s pretty clear that the Boston Marathon bombing was an act of terrorism, with police making arrests and having killed one of the two suspects who had earlier been captured on film and video at the scene of the bombings.
The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be much more easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.
West Fertilizer was built starting back in 1962 in the middle of the small town of West, TX, a community founded in the 19th century and named after the first local postmaster, T.M. West. It makes no sense, of course, to locate such a facility that uses highly toxic anhydrous ammonia as a primary feed stock (a compound that burns the lungs and kills on contact, and that, because it must be stored under pressure, is highly prone to leaks and explosive releases), and one that makes as its main product ammonium nitrate fertilizer, around lots of people. Ammonium nitrate, recall, is the highly explosive compound favored by truck bombers like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was the fertilizer, vast quantities of which were stored at the West Fertilizer plant site, which caused the colossal explosion that leveled much of the town of West.
Building such a dangerous facility in the midst of a residential and business area, and allowing homes, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and playgrounds to be built alongside it, is the result of a corrupt process that is commonplace in towns and cities across America, where business leaders routinely have their way with local planning and zoning commissions, safety inspectors and city councils. Businesses small and large also have their way with state and federal safety and health inspectors too.
We know that the EPA, back in 2006, cited West Fertilizer for not having an emergency risk management plan. That is, a dangerous and explosion-prone plant that was using a hazardous chemical in large quantities, and that was storing highly explosive material also in large quantities, had made little or no effort to assess the risks of what it was doing. Indeed, it has been reported that the company had assured the EPA, in response to the complaint, that there was “no risk” of an explosion at the plant! An AP article reports that the company, five years after being cited for lacking a risk plan, did file one with the EPA, but that the report claimed the company “...was not handling flammable materials and did not have sprinklers, water-deluge systems, blast walls, fire walls or other safety mechanisms in place at the plant.”
Yet the AP article goes on to say that “State officials require all facilities that handle anhydrous ammonia to have sprinklers and other safety measures because it is a flammable substance, according to Mike Wilson, head of air permitting for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.”
The article says:
“Records reviewed by The Associated Press show the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration fined West Fertilizer $10,000 last summer for safety violations that included planning to transport anhydrous ammonia without a security plan. An inspector also found the plant's ammonia tanks weren't properly labeled.”
Then the article gets to the crux of the problem, saying:
“The government accepted $5,250 after the company took what it described as corrective actions, the records show. It is not unusual for companies to negotiate lower fines with regulators.”
Aside from the ridiculousness of West Fertilizer management’s reported assertion that the plant wasn’t handling flammable materials (a claim that the current deadly catastrophe has demonstrably proved was false), consider the incredible response of the EPA to this incredible assertion: The agency, emasculated by the Bush administration, and still a joke under the Obama administration, levied a pathetically small fine, but did nothing to shut the operation down until it put in place critical safety measures.
The other agency that could have acted, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), is even more of a paper tiger than the EPA. Despite their inherent risks and hazards, it is reported that OSHA has made only six investigations of fertilizer plant operators in Texas in the last six years. West Fertilizer was not one of them. In six years, it has not been visited by OSHA inspectors!
How can this be so? Because the entire health and safety regulatory apparatus of the US, from the federal level to the states and right down to local government, has been effectively neutered by corporate interests, who have used everything from threats of relocating to campaign contributions and outright bribes of officials and elected representatives to buy or win the right to basically operate as unsafely as they like, free of supervision.
As a result, regulation of dangerous plants and factories in the US these days is essentially nonexistent.
That, to me, is a kind of terrorism, and it is far more dangerous to the health and safety of the American people than any foreign or domestic terrorist or terrorist organization.
Yet the bulk of the American people are focusing their fears on terrorists from abroad, or in some cases here at home, not on the corporate suites where the real evil and the real danger lies.
Until we Americans wake up and insist that our elected officials and the regulatory bureaucrats they appoint, actually act in the public interest and not in the interest of the moneyed corporate elite (booting out those that betray us), we will increasingly all pay the price as plants blow up or leak toxic gas, as oil and gas companies wantonly pollute our water tables with carcinogenic toxins, and as nuclear power plants dump isotopes into our environment, all in the interest of profits.
The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they are the mostly white men (and women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage, causing common-sense safety and health precautions to be ignored, or getting those laws watered down or outright cancelled.
Of course, a classic terrorist is trying to kill while the corporate executive is often “just” putting concerns about profits ahead of concerns about the safety or workers and people who live nearby, but in the final analysis, the victim of an exploded fertilizer plant is just as dead or as maimed as the victim of a terrorist’s bomb. The difference is that we won’t see the FBI or the local police tracking down and arresting the killers and maimers in the case of a fertilizer plant explosion. The people responsible for that type of outrage typically just hide behind the immunity of their company's corporate "personhood," collect their insurance payments (maybe paying some token fine), rebuild, and go on making their dangerous product as before -- usually in the same location.
4/22/2013 9:30:00 AM
U.S. Class I workforce grew wider in March
The U.S. Class I workforce continued to grow last month. As of mid March, the large roads employed 163,059 people, up 0.5 percent from February's level and 0.7 percent from March 2012's count, according to Surface Transportation Board data.
On a month over month basis, three workforce segments posted gains and three registered declines. The gainers were the maintenance of way and structures segment, up 1.3 percent to 36,742; transportation (train and engine) sector, up 0.7 percent to 65,581, and professional and administrative staff, up 0.2 percent to 14,165. The decliners were the transportation (other than T&E) force, down 0.7 percent to 6,753; executives, officials and staff assistants sector, down 0.6 percent to 9,779; and maintenance of equipment and stores segment, down less than a tenth of a precent to 30,039.
On a year over year basis, only the transportation (T&E) workforce decreased, and by a small margin at that: 0.06 percent. The professional and administrative staff grew 2.6 percent; executives, officials and staff assistants sector climbed 2.4 percent; maintenance of equipment and stores force increased 1 percent; maintenance of way and structures staff ratcheted up 0.6 percent; and transportation (other than T&E) ranks inched up 0.3 percent.
Koch Brothers to Pursue Control in the Media
By Elizabeth Miller We know the Koch Brothers, Charles and David Koch, as deniers of climate change, billionaire oil moguls, and environment destroyers, but now we may know them as major newspaper controllers. Until now Koch Industries has avoided investments in media. However at a recent annual seminar in Aspen, it was discussed that Koch Industries purchase the entire Tribune Company or at least the bundle of eight newspapers, valued at $623 million. The purchase would put the Koch brothers in charge of a large chunk of America’s largest print media, including newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, and the second-largest Spanish-language daily newspaper, Hoy.
The plan to finally invest in media is part of the Koch brothers’ plan to influence media narrative and convince Americans that a smaller government is better. Currently they feel that “the conservative voice is not being well represented” in the media. Acquiring power in the media comes with a three-pronged strategy that was unveiled in Aspen three years ago. The plan has three prongs, educating grass-roots activists, influencing politics, and media, in order to push the country towards a smaller government in which there is less regulation and taxes. The first two have already began to be dealt with, as we have seen from the millions they have poured into getting their own legislative agendas passed and their funding of ALEC . They have even gone as far as warning thousands of their employees of the consequences they will face if they didn’t vote Republican in the latest election.
According to unnamed sources that attended the seminar, the goal is for the Koch brothers to have “their voices being heard.” Koch Industries wants to change the way the mainstream media portrays them, feeling that they have been unfairly covered due to their political beliefs. They are not fans of how the freedom of press has allowed for them to be represented and the easiest way to change this is to control the media itself.
If the Koch brothers succeed in the large purchase of all, or parts, of the Tribune Company we can be sure that there will be significant changes to the major print sources they will control, creating another significant outlet for their conservative agenda.
April 22, 2013
Only an Accident
By BRUCE MACHART JUST after lunch break one infernal Houston afternoon in 1995, I slammed the door of the company truck, cranked the engine, and punched the gas so hard that the truck fishtailed onto Jensen Drive. Beside me sat my co-worker Charlie. In his lap, he clenched a blood-drenched wad of paper towels over what had been, minutes before, his left thumb. The severed thumb, packed hurriedly on ice in a cup, rode in the center console.
“No more hitchhiking for me,” Charlie said, deadpan, a shiver running through him.
Just two years before, another pale-lipped co-worker — my good friend Tim — had made the same trip in the same truck for the same reason. The two accidents had been all but identical.
Both men had been using the “slitter,” a mammoth machine used to cut 10-ton rolls, or “slabs,” of rubber conveyor belting to custom widths. Slabs came from the factory measuring 7 feet wide by 1,200 feet long. A customer at a concrete plant might have a gravel conveyor that requires a belt measuring 2.5 feet wide by 200 feet long. The slitter made this simple work. It also made ripping one’s thumb meat off the bone exceedingly possible. Hence the truck rides, the cups of ice, the surgical reconstructions.
In my 10 years selling hose and conveyor belting in Houston, I heard many stories about industrial accidents, and I confess to a guilty fascination with them. There was the sugar refinery laborer who fell asleep in a freight car while taking his lunch break. The man was still asleep when the conveyors above cranked back to life, and he was buried — suffocated — in sugar.
Then there was the grisly story of the debarking drum, which is effectively a giant, spinning, kilnlike pipe into which one puts logs to strip them of their bark. Imagine a machine violent enough to tumble logs clean. Now imagine that machine loaded with a grown man. Who knows how such mistakes are made, but, so the story goes, he was still inside when the machine turned on. He was lost.
I often came back to that word — lost. It implies a certain negligence, a certain culpability, but it also suggests that what is lost might be found again. In those days, I routinely called on manufacturing facilities and mines and sawmills and petrochemical plants, and on company marquees all over town was the following phrase: “___ days since the last L.T.A.” L.T.A. stands for “lost time accident,” meaning an accident that caused an injured employee to miss future “time” at work.
It’s the time that’s lost, but what else? The loss of productivity, the loss of blood, the loss, perhaps, of a life itself. Something twisted in me still wants to make light of it, to imagine, when I hear the phrase “lost time accident,” a collision involving a time machine. And this is true even though I’ve held a man’s severed thumb in my hands.
On that blistering Houston day that smelled of carbon black and blood, the emergency room doctors could not reattach the meat to Charlie’s thumb. Instead, they made an incision in his pectoral area and sutured the bony stub of his thumb up inside his chest. In six weeks, they cut it out, new meat and all, and grafted on some skin. It was a “lucky accident” the doctor told us. Had the bone, too, been severed, things would have been far more complicated.
What was notably uncomplicated, for me, was how readily I put the accident behind me. I left Charlie at the E.R., drove back to the warehouse, and fired up the slitter.
I was thinking of all this recently. On Friday, I flew from my adopted city of Boston, where a bomber was on the loose after leaving four people dead and around 200 injured, to my home state of Texas, where a fertilizer plant explosion in a small town called West had left more than a dozen dead and around 200 injured.
That morning, while watching the live coverage of the Boston manhunt, I had also been searching the Web for news about West. In the first hours after the fertilizer plant explosion, many commenters had wondered about the likelihood of foul play or terrorism. But once it was deemed an industrial accident, the hysterical coverage tapered off. We had nothing to fear from West; we could stop paying attention.
We tend to discount that which is accidental as somehow less tragic, less interesting, less newsworthy than the mayhem of agency. Lives have been “lost” in Texas, but in Boston, by God — lives have been “taken.”
But this distinction means nothing to the victims or, I imagine, to their families. In Boston, in West, whether by sinister design or by accident, whether on a television-ready stage or hidden away in a rural factory, when people are hurt, when lives are lost, the essential human cost shouldn’t be lost on the living.
4/23/2013 9:30:00 AM
USDOT to provide $474 million in TIGER grant program's fifth round
On April 19, the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) released a Notice of Funding Availability for the fifth round of the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) program, according to the National Railroad Construction and Maintenance Association Inc. (NRC) .
The TIGER V program will provide a total of $474 million in discretionary grants to help fund freight and passenger rail, transit, port, bridge and highway projects the USDOT believes will achieve critical national and regional objectives. Congress previously allocated $1.5 billion for TIGER I, $600 million for TIGER II, $527 million for TIGER III and $500 million for TIGER IV.
TIGER grants can range from $10 million to $200 million. The FY2013 Appropriations Act requires that TIGER funds be obligated before Oct. 1, 2014. Applications for TIGER V grants are due to the USDOT by June 3.
The grant application process is highly competitive: In the first four TIGER rounds, the USDOT received nearly 3,000 applications requesting more than $105 billion in grants and awarded a total of $3.1 billion to 219 separate projects, NRC officials said in a news bulletin.
"However, rail related projects have fared well throughout the four rounds, garnering $1.6 billion out of the available $3.1 billion for 85 rail related projects, including short line and Class I projects, port/rail infrastructure projects, intercity passenger rail projects, grade crossings, rail transit and commuter rail upgrades, and streetcar construction," they said.
4/23/2013 10:30:00 AM
CN: Extreme winter weather put chill on Q1 income, operating ratio
Yesterday, CN reported first quarter revenue of $2.5 billion and adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.22, up 5 percent and 3 percent, respectively, compared with the year ago period (all figures are in Canadian dollars). In addition, carloads increased 2 percent year over year to 1.23 million units.
But net income fell 29 percent to $555 million, operating income dropped 2 percent to $780 million, operating expenses climbed 9 percent to $1.69 billion — primarily because of higher labor/fringe benefits, purchased services and materials, and fuel costs — and CN's operating ratio worsened 2.2 points to 68.4. The primary culprit: a very chilly and snowy winter.
"CN faced a number of operational challenges in the first quarter, including extreme cold and heavy snow in Western Canada, which hampered operations, congested the network and constrained volume growth," said President and Chief Executive Officer Claude Mongeau in a prepared statement. "We've turned the corner since then, improving train velocity and reducing freight car dwell times in yards across the network to restore the service level expected by our customers. CN will emerge stronger from this first quarter experience."
The 5 percent revenue gain was attributed mainly to rate increases and higher freight volumes, due in part to growth in the North American and Asian economies, partly offset by the operational challenges that constrained volumes, CN officials said.
Petroleum and chemicals revenue climbed 17 percent to $457 million; intermodal revenue rose 7 percent to $492 million; metals and minerals revenue ratcheted up 3 percent to $282 million; forest products and automotive revenue each grew 2 percent to $336 million and $132 million, respectively; and grain and fertilizers revenue inched up 1 percent to $401 million. Coal revenue declined 1 percent to $165 million.
CN also announced plans to maintain its 2013 financial outlook issued in January and increase 2013 capital spending by $100 million to $2 billion. The additional capital will be targeted at track infrastructure improvements and projects that support a number of productivity and growth initiatives.
"To improve network resilience, particularly given our expectation of continued strong volume growth, CN is undertaking several capacity enhancement projects in its Edmonton Winnipeg corridor," said Mongeau.
In addition, CN announced the appointment of Robert Pace as vice chairman. He is expected to become chairman next year after David McLean retires at the age of 75.
Pace, who joined CN's board in 1994, is president and CEO of The Pace Group Ltd., a radio broadcasting, real estate and environmental services firm.
4/24/2013 9:30:00 AM
Norfolk Southern scored second-best ever revenue, operating ratio
Despite weak coal business and strong comparisons from record setting financial performance in the year ago period, Norfolk Southern Corp. registered a good first quarter, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Wick Moorman said during the Class I's earnings conference yesterday afternoon.
NS earned all time best net income and posted its second best ever revenue, operating income, income from railway operations and earnings, Moorman said. Net income — which included $60 million from a property sale — rose 10 percent to $450 million compared with first quarter 2012.
Railway operating revenue declined 2 percent to $2.7 billion, income from railway operations decreased 7 percent to $691 million, operating expenses remained flat at $2 billion and the operating ratio increased 1.5 points to 74.8, NS' second best Q1 mark. Volume rose 3 percent to 1.78 million units.
The first quarter results "illustrate our diverse customer base, superior operating performance, productivity initiatives and expense controls," said Moorman.
"The big story for the quarter was the quality of our service. The composite service index improved 50 basis points over last year to 83.3 percent and system average speed was 24.2 miles per hour, a 3 percent improvement," he said. "This increased velocity created additional capacity, and our network is running as fluidly as I have ever seen it."
In terms of revenue per commodity segment, general merchandise revenue rose 2 percent to $1.5 billion, intermodal revenue climbed 9 percent to $573 million and coal revenue fell 17 percent to $635 million. Coal business was hampered by a 14 percent drop in domestic metallurgical volume that supports steel production and a 9 percent decline in utility volume.
Looking ahead, coal continues to be a wild card, but there are some signs of stability, including gas and metallurgical coal prices, said Moorman.
"In general, we see an economy that will continue to grow, albeit at a slow pace," he said. "We believe that superior service, going hand in hand with a focus on safety and operating efficiency, are the best ways to grow our volumes and revenues. We're confident in our strategy and our ability to execute it, and our first quarter results are a strong indication that it's working."
4/24/2013 10:00:00 AM
Canadian Pacific registers best-ever Q1 financial results
Despite a very cold and snowy winter, Canadian Pacific "delivered the best first quarter results in its history," said Chief Executive Officer E. Hunter Harrison in a press release issued this morning.
The Class I generated record revenue of $1.5 billion, up 9 percent, and achieved a record operating ratio of 75.8, down 4.3 points compared with first quarter 2012. CP reported financial figures in Canadian dollars.
In addition, net income soared 51 percent to $217 million, or $1.24 per diluted share, operating income jumped 32 percent to $362 million and carloads rose 3 percent to 659,000 units.
"This is a true testament to the determination and perseverance of our outstanding team of railroaders," said Harrison. "[But] there remains a lot of work to do as we continue to make significant changes to our operating model."
The revenue gain was driven by an 25 percent leap in industrial and consumer products revenue (to $372 million) and a 21 percent jump in fertilizers and sulphur revenue (to $152 million). Grain and coal revenue each climbed 9 percent to $314 million and $149 million respectively, and forest products revenue rose 6 percent to $53 million, while automotive revenue fell 8 percent to $97 million and intermodal revenue dipped 4 percent to $322 million.
Operating expenses increased 3 percent to $1.3 billion primarily due to higher materials and depreciation/amortization costs.
"With a very strong start to the year and momentum quickly building, I am now even more confident that we are on pace toward the best year end financial and operating performance in CP's history," said Harrison.
Real Faces of the Minimum Wage
By Richard (RJ) Eskow
Corporate interests and their elected representatives have created a world of illusion in order to resist paying a decent wage to working Americans. They’d have us believe that minimum wage workers are teens from ’50s TV sitcoms working down at the local malt shoppe.
It’s a retro fantasy where corporate stinginess creates minority jobs, working parents can’t possibly be impoverished, and nobody gets hurt except kids who drive dad’s convertible and top up their allowances with a minimum wage job slinging burgers.
But then, you probably need to resort to fantasy arguments when you’re arguing against a minimum wage increase supported by nearly three quarters of the voting public . That’s also why it’s important to demand that Congress allow an up or down vote on the Fair Minimum Wage Act, which would raise it to $10.10 and then index it to inflation.
Here’s the truth: Most minimum wage workers are adults, the majority of them are women, and many are parents who are trying to raise their children on poverty wages.
The Facts
Minimum wage workers are adults.
Nearly 80 percent of the workers who would be directly affected by a minimum wage increase are adults, as seen in an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center. When you include those who would be indirectly affected that figure becomes more than 92 percent.
Less than 16 percent of workers who would be affected by President Obama’s minimum wage proposal are teenagers.
Minimum wage workers are parents.
Many of those workers are parents. More than seven million children – nearly one out of every 10 kids in the United States – have parents whose income would go up under a new minimum wage. When you count the parents whose wages would be indirectly affected, that rises to more than 11 million (or roughly one in six) children whose households would benefit from the increase.
Most minimum-wage workers are women.
That’s not something the right wants to emphasize. Other than formally declaring itself “anti woman,” there’s not much more the GOP can do to lose the female vote. It certainly doesn’t want people to notice that this is one more policy that disproportionately harms women.
The Fantasy
This may not be a “Leave It to Beaver” world, but there are plenty of real life Eddie Haskells . Remember Eddie, the unctuous and untrustworthy high school self promoter? Think Mitt Romney – who supported raising the minimum wage, at least in principle, until he began a presidential campaign that was funded by his fellow millionaires and dependent on today’s radical right. Then he reversed himself quicker than a fella could say “You look lovely today, Mrs. Cleaver!”
Romney argued that the minimum wage should be tied, not to productivity or executive gains, but to world indicators. That would create a global wage race to the bottom, one that hurts everyone except the wealthiest corporate leaders worldwide. That’s the point, of course. (“You look lovely today, Frau Merkel!”)
Last month Republicans in Congress rejected a proposal that would have raised the minimum wage to $10.10. They’ve also indicated they would reject the president’s more modest proposal for a $9.00 minimum.
True to form, they keep trotting out that tired old “malt shoppe” argument. Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, for example, said she opposed a higher minimum wage because “you’re going to exclude a lot of younger workers.”
Remember, more than eight out of ten workers affected by a minimum wage hike are adults.
The Dirt
When it comes to the Right and the minimum wage, it’s not all malted milks and sock hops. There’s also their much beloved fantasy of the minimum wage as “racist.” Seriously. It’s a dirty argument to make – but then, there’s a lot of money at stake.
Roy Edroso is one of a hardy band of writers whose beat includes the ever growing body of “right wing lit.” (We owe them a debt of gratitude. They go spelunking in the dark caves of the human spirit so that we don’t have to.) Edroso points us to Jonah Goldberg’s assertion that the minimum wage’s original backers were racists who supported it specifically because it harms black people.
Bizarrely enough, this is a common right wing stratagem. The Wall Street Journal even calls an increased minimum wage “ The Minority Youth Unemployment Act. “ While it’s touching to note the editors’ new found solicitude toward nonwhite kids, they’re ignoring the fact that the vast majority of minimum wage workers aren’t “youth.”
They aren’t minorities , either. Awkwardly enough for race baiters like Goldberg and the Journal, most minimum wage workers are white. There are more minorities among minimum wage earners (who are 57.9 percent white) than in the overall workforce (which is 67.9 percent white). But that doesn’t support the “race” arguments against raising the minimum wage.
The Trip
Neither do the economic analyses, unless you rely on the highly selective economic studies employed by the Journal and other anti minimum wage advocates. Some rely on “meta studies,” or analyses of earlier studies, which selective pick and choose from earlier works. Others rely on the work of economists with a pronounced ideological bent to the right.
The short answer to their job creation argument is this: The minimum wage has dropped 30 percent in real dollars since 1968. Where are the jobs?
Meanwhile, the right keeps projecting its liquid illusions onto the walls of their political reality like a low rent psychedelic show in well, in 1968, when the minimum wage was much higher and the economy was doing much better than it is today. (The official unemployment rate that year was 3.6 percent.)
Here’s another mind bending image: We’re told that raising the minimum wage would harm small companies – but most low wage employees work for large corporations.
We’re also told that employers can’t afford to raise their pay, but these corporations are experiencing record level profits. (We deal with these last two arguments in greater detail here .)
And so the debate rages on, fueled by the cheap hallucinogenic deceptions of the corporate funded right. Corporate profits continue to soar. CEO pay keeps skyrocketing. Suburban skylines are being reshaped by the megamansions of our New Gilded Age.
And meanwhile the Real Faces of the Minimum Wage – the mothers, fathers, the young and the old – struggle to survive and raise their children in an increasingly harsh world, far from the media spotlight and invisible to the powerful interests arrayed against them.
4/25/2013 10:30:00 AM
RTA: Tie purchases, production ticked up in March
After falling in February, crosstie production inched up 1.4 percent in March to 1.7 million units, according to the Railway Tie Association's (RTA) monthly market report.
And after a "dramatic" gain the previous month, tie purchases climbed another 6 percent in March to 2.2 million units, RTA officials said in the report. Inventories dropped 2.2 percent to 19.3 million ties.
In the first quarter, tie production declined 9 percent to 5.5 million units and purchases fell 10 percent to 5.6 million units on a year over year basis.
"Compared with the fourth quarter, production was off 6.6 percent while purchases were up 22 percent," RTA officials said.
Meanwhile, 12 month rolling data showed production was leveling off, yet increased 5.4 percent versus March 2012 to 24.7 million units. Purchases totaling 22.5 million were falling at a 1.5 percent annual pace, RTA officials said. Inventories increased 13 percent during the 12 month period and the inventory to sales ratio rose from 0.75 to 0.86.
Justice Department appeals recess appointments ruling to Supreme Court
Published April 25, 2013 Associated Press advertisement
The Obama administration on Thursday urged the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court decision that found the president's recess appointments to a labor agency unconstitutional.
In its appeal, the Justice Department said the decision undermines a key presidential power that has been used for more than a century to appoint hundreds of government officials while the Senate is out of town.
The government asked the high court "to remove the resulting constitutional cloud over the acts of past and present recess appointments and to restore the president's capacity to fill vacant offices temporarily when the Senate is unavailable to give its advice and consent."
If the Supreme Court agrees to hear the administration's appeal, it is unlikely to hold arguments until the next term begins in October.
The petition challenges the decision of a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which ruled in January that President Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate to fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board. Since then, Republicans have claimed the board lacks any legitimacy to act.
But the ruling went far beyond a single agency. The court said recess appointments can be made only during the once-a-year break between sessions of Congress. Two judges on the panel also ruled -- for the first time -- that a vacancy must actually occur while the Senate is away in order to be filled during the same break.
If it stands, the government argues, the decision would mean that more than 500 recess appointments made by Republican and Democratic presidents alike since 1867 were invalid. It would threaten all 32 recess appointments that Obama had made during his presidency, including that of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The lower court ruling conflicts with other appeals courts and could threaten hundreds of opinions issued by the labor board and a host of other federal agencies, the petition argued. It would also "allow the Senate to disable the president from making recess appointments even when the Senate is unavailable to give its advice and consent." And it "creates periods of potentially significant duration in which there is no power to fill vacant offices, not even temporarily, no matter how long the recess or how great the need that an office be filled," the petition said.
Business groups and Republican lawmakers challenging Obama's recess appointments have said they welcome the chance for the Supreme Court to rule on the case. Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said his boss remains confident the Supreme Court will affirm the ruling.
Obama made the recess appointments last year to keep the labor board functioning after Senate Republicans protesting what they say is the agency's pro-union tilt vowed to block any of his future nominees from being confirmed.
The president recently asked the Senate to confirm a package of three Democrats and two Republicans to fill the five seats on the labor board. Two of those nominees are currently sitting on the board as recess appointments.
TEAMSTERS REACH TENTATIVE AGREEMENTS COVERING 250,000 WORKERS AT UPS, UPS FREIGHT Proposed Five-Year Contracts Protect Strong Health Care Benefits While Significantly Increasing Funding For Pensions, Health And Welfare Funds (WASHINGTON) – The Teamsters Union announced today that it has reached tentative agreements with UPS [NYSE: UPS] on new five year national contracts for package and freight workers that protect their health care benefits, provide substantial wage increases and significantly raise contributions to pension and health and welfare benefits.
The tentative agreement covering UPS package employees moves 140,000 workers into Teamster controlled health plans from company plans to maintain current strong benefits for all UPS Teamsters while growing the funds for Teamsters in all industries into the future.
“These are solid tentative agreements that all Teamsters at UPS and UPS Freight can be proud of,” said General Secretary Treasurer Ken Hall, Co Chairman of the Teamsters National Negotiating Committees and Package Division Director. “I am pleased to announce that we have achieved our members’ priorities of preserving their excellent health care benefits and protecting them into the future while also strengthening their pensions and providing pay raises.”
The tentative agreements were reached well in advance of the July 31, 2013 expiration dates for the current, five year contracts, which cover nearly 250,000 workers at UPS and UPS Freight. The UPS contract is the largest collective bargaining agreement in North America.
“This is a great day for the Teamsters Union,” said General President Jim Hoffa, Co Chairman of the Teamsters National Negotiating Committees. “At a time when workers and their pay, benefits and working conditions are under attack by corporate America, we have succeeded in improving the lives of our hardworking and dedicated UPS and UPS Freight Teamsters for years to come. These tentative agreements are shining examples to the entire country of a hugely successful unionized company that thrives because of its workers.” In the UPS tentative agreement, workers will get substantial pay raises, including a significant increase in the starting wage rate for part time employees. The union also won the creation of more than 2,000 full time jobs from the ranks of part time workers.
For UPS Freight, the tentative agreement resolves subcontracting issues by putting all laid off road drivers back to work. UPS Freight workers will receive substantial wage increases and lower co pays for health insurance. The agreement provides the ability for more part time workers to become full time.
More details about the tentative agreements will be available to Teamster members at www.Teamster.org/UPS in the coming days. Representatives from UPS and UPS Freight Teamster Local Unions will meet soon to review the tentative agreements. Following that meeting, members will vote by mail on the tentative agreements, with results expected in mid June. Upon ratification, the agreements will take effect on Aug. 1.
Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents more than 1.4 million hardworking men and women in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Visit www.teamster.org for more information. Follow us on Twitter @Teamsters and “like” us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/teamsters.
FRA Announces $2.2 Million Grant for Central Florida Rail Upgrade
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) today obligated a $2.2 million grant for the City of Tavares, Fla., to help with upgrades along a 57-mile stretch of Florida Central Railroad (FCEN) track between Orlando and Umatilla, Fla.
“President Obama has challenged us to build the kind of transportation infrastructure that businesses need and local communities want,” said Secretary LaHood. “Improving rail service promotes economic growth as new rail shippers take advantage of faster and more reliable service.”
The funding from the Federal Railroad Administration’s Rail Line Relocation program is part of an $18.4 million undertaking that will include improvements to tracks, ties, bridges and grade crossings. The railroad currently is only able to operate at 10 mph, but the improvements will allow it to travel at up to 25 mph.
“Investing in freight rail means moving the economy better and faster,” said Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph. C. Szabo. “This will not only stimulate the local economy because of better transportation options, it will help reduce congestion on local roads as good are shipped on cost-effective rail.
The project is a joint effort between FCEN; the Lake-Sumter Metropolitan Planning Organization; Metroplan Orlando; the Florida Department of Transportation; the Cities of Tavares, Eustis, Umatilla, Mount Dora, Apopka, Winter Garden, Ocoee and Orlando, and Orange and Lake counties. Together, they are funding the $16.2 million non-federal share of the project cost.
Construction is expected to begin in July 2013.
4/26/2013 9:30:00 AM
U.S. rail traffic trend held true in year's 16th week
For the week ending April 20, U.S. carloads totaled 276,662, down 2 percent, and intermodal volume totaled 240,698 units, up 0.6 percent compared with volumes from the same week last year, according to Association of American Railroads data.
Total U.S. traffic for the week dipped 0.8 percent to 517,360 units. Four of 10 carload commodity groups posted increases, led by petroleum and petroleum products at 40.1 percent, while grain volume declined 21.8 percent.
Canadian railroads reported weekly carloads totaling 83,540, up 1.2 percent, and intermodal volume totaling 55,564 units, up 2 percent year over year. Mexican railroads' carloads rose 2.5 percent to 15,107, but their intermodal volume fell 5.2 percent to 9,018 units.
Through 2013's first 16 weeks, 13 reporting U.S., Canadian and Mexican railroads handled 5,896,891 carloads, down 0.9 percent, and 4,767,446 containers and trailers, up 4.4 percent compared with the same 2012 period.