New Study: unionization pays off for community college instructors

A recently released study found that "being represented by a union pays big financial dividends for full-time instructors at community colleges." 

Peter Schmidt writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Depending on the size, location, and public-financing sources of their institution, unionized full-time instructors earn from about 5 to 50 percent more in pay and benefits than do their nonunionized peers at similar community colleges, says a paper summarizing the study’s results.

"The differences are stunning," says Stephen G. Katsinas, a professor of higher education at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa who is one of the study’s three co-authors.

Among the forces influencing how much community colleges pay their instructors, "collective bargaining, in itself, matters," says Mr. Katsinas, who plans to present the study’s findings in New York on Sunday, at an annual conference held by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions.

Other research on the impact of collective bargaining on faculty pay has struggled to quantify how much differences in instructors’ earnings were attributable to unionization versus other contributing factors, such as differences in institutional size or in the regions that colleges served.

Mr. Katsinas and other scholars reached conclusions similar to the new study’s in a 2006 analysis of community-college data, but that effort was hampered by a reliance on outdated data on where unions existed. It also failed to take into account 113 institutions — among them, large community-college districts such as Miami-Dade — that could not be factored into an analysis of community colleges under the classification scheme used by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The new analysis uses a modified classification scheme to factor in the previously excluded institutions, which include community colleges that either offer four-year degrees or are offshoots of four-year public institutions, as well as public baccalaureate colleges that primarily offer associate degrees. It uses federal data on faculty earnings from the 2010-11 academic year, the last for which the Education Department collected information on benefits.

"There are amazing differences in monetary compensation of full-time faculty across the landscape of community colleges when geography, collective bargaining, and local appropriations are all accounted for," the new study concludes.

On average, it found, unionized full-time faculty members annually received pay and benefits amounting to about $95,000 at community colleges that received a significant share of their funds from local governments and about $77,000 at community colleges that lacked such a local source of financial support. Nonunionized faculty members received less than $68,000 in pay and benefits, on average, regardless of where their community college derived its tax revenue.

The size of the community college where a faculty member worked and the type of community it served also made a big difference.

At the top of the pile, full-time faculty members at suburban, multicampus, locally financed community colleges annually earned an average of nearly $106,000 in pay and benefits. At the bottom, such faculty members at small, rural, locally financed community colleges earned total compensations averaging just over $61,000.

The other authors of the new study were Nathaniel J. Bray, an associate professor of higher-education administration at the University of Alabama, and Barry R. Mayhall, a doctoral student in higher education at Alabama and a mathematics instructor at Snead State Community College, in Boaz, Ala. The paper on their findings will be released after next week’s conference.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.

Decline of Unions Redistributes Income; Corporate Profits Soar

By Jillian Berman

Corporate profit has been soaring for years at workers' expense and a decline in union membership is to blame -- not a rise in technology, a new study found.

The jump in corporate profit over the past few decades can be explained largely by a decline in union membership over the same period, according to a study by Tali Kristal, a sociologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. The boost in companies’ bottom line comes at workers’ expense, Kristal wrote in an email to The Huffington Post.

“It’s a zero sum game: whatever is not going to workers, goes to corporations,” Kristal said. “Union decline not only increased wage gaps among workers, but also enabled capitalists to grab a larger slice of the national income pie at the expense of all workers, including the highly skilled.”

The findings, published Thursday in the American Sociological Review, add a new dimension to the debate over income inequality in the U.S., suggesting that policies aimed at boosting unions may help. Corporate profit soared to a record high share of the economy earlier this year, according to Bloomberg, while workers' wages have remained largely stagnant. The rise in profit comes as union membership has dropped to a record low.

Kristal’s findings contradict claims that increased computerization largely accounts for the boost in corporate profit at the expense of workers. Kristal argued that the rise of machines is only indirectly to blame, because technology has reduced union workers by replacing some union jobs with automation, directly increasing corporate profit.

“If we want all workers to benefit from the economic growth, then policymakers can initiate some steps to strengthen unions, such as pro-union reforms of labor law, and deterioration with employers' illegal anti-union tactics that increasingly spread over the last decades,” Kristal wrote.

Indeed, other analyses, including one from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, have found that that the drop in union membership in recent decades correlates with the rise in inequality during the same period.
“The decline in union members is directly related to the stagnation of wages for working people,” Brandon Rees, acting director of the Office of Investment at the AFL-CIO, an umbrella labor organization for many unions, told HuffPost. “Economic growth has been going somewhere and its been going to the top 1 percent.”

That dynamic could be problematic for the U.S. economy as a whole, Rees said, as middle-class Americans burdened by debt and slow wage growth buy less and hold back the recovery.

“One of the reasons why we are suffering from anemic growth today is because consumers have been reducing their debt levels, but wages are not keeping up with productivity growth,” Reese said. “The rights of workers to join a union has helped create the middle class in this country and the middle class has been hammered in the past 20 years as unions have declined.”

This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post on June 9, 2013

Union workers save lives and power Hurricane Sandy recovery

The recovery from Hurricane Sandy is going to require time, money and effort. And, like so many of the heroic rescues that happened during the storm, much of the effort is going to come from union members, and especially from the unionized public workers that the Republican Party has worked so hard to hurt over the past couple of years.

Already we've seen fire fighters, police, EMTs, nurses and other health care workers saving lives.

They've gone into flooded streets to rescue people, fought fires, carried patients down flight after flight of stairs to evacuate them. New York City fire fighters belong to the Uniformed Firefighters Association. Many of the health care workers carrying patients out of NYU Langone Medical Center as it was evacuated belong to SEIU1199.

Now the hard work of getting back to normal has begun. Garbage collectors are out clearing debris from city streets. Bridges and tunnels are being inspected for safety. Railroad tracks and roads are being assessed and repaired. New York City buses will begin running again Tuesday afternoon, driven by unionized transit workers. Members of more than a dozen unions were involved in rescue or are involved in recovery.

These union members are people whose jobs Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans would cut, whose pensions and benefits have been slashed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose right to bargain has been under attack across the country.

Make no mistake about it: The fact that these are union workers is important. Unions bargain for the tools their workers need to do the best job possible, from having enough workers on the job to having adequate equipment and training. The wage and benefits improvements union members get help keep workers on the job for longer, so that they develop the skills and experience to handle worst-case scenarios like the one we're seeing now. Having health care keeps them healthy enough to do physically taxing jobs like carrying patients down 17 flights of stairs.

If someone you love was rescued from a flooded area, chances are it was a union member who rescued them. When your power goes back on, chances are a union member will have done the work. Mitt Romney will probably once again encourage you to embrace the line that we like workers, but just hate their unions. But the workers are the unions, and the collective power of unions helped individual workers rescue people or restore power or mobility by making sure they had the tools to get the job done and the pay and benefits such important work deserves.

For more see the Daily Kos.

We're #1 ..........in low wage jobs!

The United States used to pride itself on having the world's largest middle class.

Following World War II inequality declined and the blue collar middle class grew. Economists call this period the Great Compression. It was a product of the New Deal,  labor and financial regulations, widespread unionization, and social investments in education, science, research and development and the infrastructure.

More than forty years of attacks on unions, deregulation, financial liberalization and privatization have undermined  the middle class and the nation's shared prosperity. Inequality has soared to heights not seen since the Gilded Age. Upward mobility, once a hallmark of the America promise, is less likely than in other industrial democracies.  The United States increasingly resembles a banana republic.

The nation's business class has waged a one sided class war against the unions, wages and benefits of private sector workers since the 1970's. Now they and their political spokeman like Scott Walker have turned their fire on firefighters, teachers and other public servants. Business Week put it bluntly in 1974 when it declared: "Some people will obviously have to do with less...it will be a bitter pill for many to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."

But are we are still number one ................in low wage jobs. Is this the America we want to leave our children and grandchildren?

Attacks on unions are political power play based on lies

The New York Times has a strong editorial against Republican led efforts to eliminate unions and workers protections. It notes that the attack on public sector unions that has now spread to the private sector is based on cynical lies and that the objective of these attacks is to consolidate corporate and Republican control over the nation's economy and politics.

The editorial entitled the Continuing Assault on Unions is reprinted in full below:

Along with their shameful campaign to curb the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers in Wisconsin and Ohio last year, Republicans in statehouses around the country are taking aim at private sector unions.

Twenty-two states, mainly in the South and the West, have long had “right to work” laws forbidding contracts that require workers to pay union dues. After a decade in which business has ignored the issue,

Republicans in more than 10 states over the last year have begun pushing similar laws. Indiana’s Legislature is expected to approve the antiunion legislation as early as next month.

Many Republican leaders are adopting model legislation proposed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national corporate-financed conservative organization that is also assisting the Republican push to require voter identification cards to suppress the vote of minorities, young people and other constituencies that tend to favor the Democratic Party.

There is little doubt that politics is also behind the Republicans’ push for right-to-work laws: they see an opportunity to further weaken unions, which are far more likely to support Democrats — as well as health care reform and a higher minimum wage — by slashing their funding and their donating power.

The G.O.P. and its allies, like the Chamber of Commerce and brethren organizations, are trotting out the charge that unions reduce economic growth and jobs.

It stands to reason that a union will reduce a company’s profits somewhat, by obtaining a higher share for workers. But over the last three decades, economists have found that unionization has a minimal impact on growth and employment in an entire state or country. In fact, six of the 10 states with the highest unemployment have right-to-work laws. North Carolina, a right-to-work state, has a private sector unionization rate of 1.8 percent, the lowest in the nation. It also has the sixth highest unemployment rate: 10 percent.

Unionized workers earn more and get more generous benefits. In 2010, wages of workers in unionized manufacturing companies in Indiana were 16 percent higher than in nonunion plants. One study concluded that the decline in unionization since the 1970s is responsible for one-fifth to one-third of the growth in inequality in this country. Voters, unionized or not, should recognize the new “right to work” push for what it is: bad economics and cynical politics.

  

The Triangle factory fire - when New York was "open for business"

In their attempt to strip public employees of their right to organize Governor Walker and the Republican dominated legislature have attacked public employees as slobs and attempted to divide us from the private sector workers that we serve. They have tried to rewrite history, a history written in the blood of workers who died because they did not have a voice on the job and who sacrificed their lives fighting for the right to be represented by a union.

As public servants fight to protect our rights we should never forget the debt we owe to those who preceded us like the 146 workers, mostly teenage Jewish and Italian immigrant girls, who perished in the Triangle Waist Shirt factory fire in New York City (NYC) one hundred years ago on March 25, 1911.

The Triangle factory was a militantly anti-union operation. Hundreds of girls and women working 12 to 16 hours a day earned $5 a week or less to help dress Americans in the white gauzy blouses called shirt waists. (New York Times, March, 25, 2011)

Factory foremen locked the exit doors to keep workers from taking breaks and stealing scraps of fabric and to keep union organizers out. Other doors only opened inward and were blocked during the fire by the stampede of workers struggling to escape. The fire started on the 9th floor and swept through the factory on the 8th, 9th and 10th floors. Within a half hour, 146 workers, all but 23 women, had died. 90 jumped to their deaths through the 9th floor windows. The others perished in the flames.

The largest public funeral march in the New York City’s history, more than 100,000 people, was held a few days later. Another 250,000 lined the route. Their grief built support for the right of garment workers to unionize. An enraged public demanded that industrial abuses be regulated.

Three weeks before the fire, NYC’s Fire Commissioner ordered sprinklers installed in the Shirt Waist factory. But the owners refused. Industry spokesman indignantly accused the Fire Department of seeking to force the use of cumbersome and costly‟ apparatus“ and warned that the new laws would drive “manufacturers out of the city and state of New York.” The New York Herald supported the owners claiming the order amounted to “„a confiscation of property…‟ (Stein, Triangle Fire, p. 25-26)

Following the fire Mr. H. F. J. Porter, a fire prevention expert who in 1909 had advised Triangle to organize fire drills, told the New York Times: “The neglect of factory owners in the matter of the safety of their employees is absolutely criminal. One man whom I advised to install a fire drill replied to me: “Let em burn. They’re a lot of cattle anyway.‟” (Stein, p. 29.)

Only a year before the fire, the Triangle workers had led a general strike of 20,000 to 40,000 garment workers demanding union recognition and fire safety regulations. Most of the city’s factories agreed to the demands of the Women’s Trade Union League. Triangle’s owners refused. A year later 146 workers were dead.

A surviving Triangle worker, Rose Sabran, said of that defeat: “If the union had won we would have been safe. Two of our demands were for adequate fire escapes and for open doors from the factories to the streets. But the bosses defeated us and we didn’t get the open doors or better fire escapes. So our friends are dead.” (Stein, p. 18)

Following this the fire, garment workers throughout the country, including in Milwaukee’s sweatshops, organized. In NYC the Factory Investigating Committee was established and succeeded in getting fire, sanitation, child labor and occupational health and safety regulations passed. Yet New York’s business leaders, like Wisconsin’s corporate leadership today, opposed the legislation, hysterically insisting that that changes to the fire code would mean “the wiping out of industry in this state.” They wanted to keep New York City, in the words of Wisconsin current Governor, “open for business”

George W. Olvany, the special counsel to the Real Estate Board could have been speaking for the Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) when he wrote: “The owners of real property are becoming terrified by the number of laws which have been enacted affecting real property…This compels the owner to expend…large sums of money, which…are absolutely needless and useless.”
( Op-ed by: “The Fire Hazard in Big Buildings,” NYT. May 3, 1914)

Laurence M. D. McGuire president of the Real Estate Board also weighed in declaring:”….The experience of the past proves conclusively that the best government is the least possible government, that the unfettered initiative of the individual is the force that makes a country great and that this initiative should never be bound…” (FIC Fourth Report, 1915, Vol. 1, p 76-83)

These are the same arguments used by the WMC and Governor Walker today in their fight to destroy public sector unions, cut corporate taxes and eliminate workplace, consumer and environmental regulations

Walker and company hope we will forget what the American workplace was like before we had unions, labor laws and public employees to enforce those laws.

They want us to forget about the 146 women who died in the Triangle fire because it was too expensive to install fire escapes and sprinklers and set up fire drills.

They want us to forget that unions civilized the American workplace by ensuring that workers have a voice at work.

As we fight to protect our right to organize, let’s honor the sacrifice of the Triangle Factory workers whose terrifying and horrible deaths we remember this week.

Labor Day 2010: not much to celebrate

In a Washington Post column Katrina vanden Heuvel writes:

Labor Day this year comes draped in mourning. More than half of all workers have experienced a spell of unemployment, taken a cut in pay or hours, been forced to go part-time or seen other such problems during and after the Great Recession. Collapsing stock and house prices have destroyed a fifth of the wealth of the average household. Nearly six in ten Americans have canceled or cut back on holidays. Amidst all this, workers increasingly don't even have labor unions as a potential answer to their insecurities -- despite the fact that, of all the institutions in America, they more often than not got it right on the big issues facing the country, generally in the face of a bipartisan political and elite consensus.


Unions are in trouble. They represent less than 13 percent of the workforce and less than 8 percent of private workers. Union workers still receive higher wages and are more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, pensions and paid sick leave than non-union workers. But when unions represented over 33 percent of all private workers in the 1940s, they drove wage increases for everyone -- non-union firms had to compete for good workers. Now, unions struggle just to defend their members' wages and benefits. Over the past decade before the Great Recession, productivity soared, profits rose and CEO pay skyrocketed, but most workers lost ground.

Unions face constant attacks from corporations and conservatives. The most recent campaign -- designed as always to divide workers from one another -- assails the pay and particularly the pensions of public employees. Why should they have pensions, when many workers have lost theirs and get, at best, a retirement savings plan at work? In fact, in a civilized society, we would ask the reverse question. How do we create pensions -- beyond Social Security -- for workers across the economy, leveling up, rather than down?

Indeed, if we had listened to unions more often in the past, America wouldn't be in the predicament it's in now.

The entire piece is worth reading and it is linked here.

Unions save miners' lives

An examination of recent mine disasters reveals that accidents happen far more often in non-union mines.

As United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, whose union is one of two major U.S. unions representing mine workers, said:"This is another series of fatalities at another non-union mine."

"I can absolutely say that if these miners were members of a union, they would have been able to refuse unsafe work in our collective agreements, and they would have been able to refuse that work, and would not have been subjected to that kind of atrocious conditions."

Gerard blasted the culture "that developed during the Bush years that was against regulation, against enforcement," and noted, "we’ve seen a marked improvement since the appointments of the Obama administration into Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Mine Safety and Health Administration, despite the holds placed by some Republicans.

But that’s only part of the story, as Gerard noted:"The CEO of Massey promotes himself as a union buster, promotes himself as having a record of fighting unions wherever they show up in his work place. If he spent as much time helping the workers get a union and helping us clean up his workplace we wouldn’t have these fatalities, we wouldn’t have these fines."

Massey’s accident is hardly the first that falls into this category.

Following the death of 12 miners at an explosion in January, 2006 at West Virginia’s Sago Mine, which had been cited for 200 safety violations during the prior two years, a hearing was held by the House Education and Workforce Committee.

Among those testifying were miners who had worked at both union and non-union mines.

"So I got a good taste of both sides of the spectrum," Randy Duckworth of Farmington, West Virginia told the committee. "When I was at a union-represented mine, I was greeted with a safety committee appointed by the union to oversee the health and welfare of those employees."

At a non-union mine Chuck Knisell of Morgantown, W Va., was ordered to do several things he regarded as unsafe. "I didn’t like to do it, but (my boss) said, ‘if you don’t like it, there’s the track... You’re not going to have a job. We’ve got a stack of applications this thick."

As Rep. George Miller put it, "people are in a situation where they can be intimidated if they speak out because they really don’t have the security of a safety committee" and "union representation."

In a commentary April 29, 2006 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, titled "Stopping another Sago. There’s no question that union mines are safer," writer Charles McCollester was even more emphatic:

"A union presence at the Sago mine might well have prevented the disaster."

McCollester cited the numerous safety precautions won by unions in mines they represent, and added that union mines do a better job resisting efforts by cutthroat employers to slash safety standards or install "dubious products."

Ultimately, the key difference, he noted, is the voice union representation provides for the workers, he wrote:

"Critically, workers in a union mine are not afraid to speak. In a non-union operation, asking questions or challenging company mining practices or safety procedures can lead to termination. The company’s fear of knowledgeable, independent inspects was illustrated in their attempt to bar the entry of UMWA at Sago."

Murder in West Virginia coal fields-miners deserve justice!

The nation's coal mining safety laws are written in miners’ blood.

Twenty-five miners died in the non-union Upper Big Branch Mine owned by the Massey Energy Company.

Twenty-five men are dead because of the Massey Energy Company's ruthless pursuit of profit, zeal for deregulation and blatant disregard for the welfare and safety of the hard working men it employs.


When Massey's anti-union chief executive Don L. Blankenship arrived at the mine at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning, escorted by at least a dozen state and other police officers, the crowd of miners and their families screamed at him about caring more about profit than miners' lives. One miner threw a chair, a surviving father and son stormed off screaming they were quiting the mine and others yelled at Blankenship that he was to blame, before he was quickly escorted away.

The Massey Energy Company, the biggest coal mining business in central Appalachia has been subject to sharp scrutiny and fines from regulators over its safety and environmental record. Several of its violations have been for improperly ventilating methane which is suspected to have caused the blast.

Cecil Roberts, President of the United Mine Workers of America, called for a serious investigation of the Massey Energy Company's operations: “Every year, like clockwork, at least one person has been killed since 2000 on the property of Massey or one of its subsidiaries. With those already known to be dead at Upper Big Branch, it’s now up to 45 people in the past 11 years, and four more missing at this point. No other coal operator even comes close to that fatality rate during that time frame. That demands a serious and immediate investigation by MSHA and by Congress.”

While the cause of Monday’s disaster is under investigation, the deadly blast raises serious questions about Massey’s attention to safety under the leadership of Don L. Blankenship, and also why stricter federal laws, put into effect after a mining disaster in 2006, failed to prevent another tragedy.

Representative Nick Rahall II, a Democrat from the district in West Virginia where disaster struck pointed out: “This is the second major disaster at a Massey site in recent years, and something needs to be done.”

The rescue efforts and the state and federal inquiries that are sure to follow will tell more about how and why at least 25 coal miners died. But anger is building against the mine’s owner, the Massey Energy Company's, which has long been accused by its critics of putting profits before the welfare of its workers. The mine owner’s dismal safety record, along with several recent evacuations of the mine, suggest that Monday’s explosion and the carnage that followed were preventable,

The Upper Big Branch mine, according to federal records, was an accident waiting to happen.

It was cited for 458 violations in 2009, double the amount from any previous year, many involving poor ventilation of dust and methane, failure to maintain proper escape routes and the accumulation of combustible materials.

Massey’s chief executive, Don Blankenship, has long invited criticism. He spent an extraordinary $3 million to buy the election of a Supreme Court judge, who then returned the favor by throwing out a major damage award against the company. He is a deregulation zealot who has contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican Party.

Blankenship also authored a controversial internal memo instructing mine superintendents to put coal production ahead of all other considerations.: Blankenship's memo concluded:"“If any of you have been asked...to do anything other than run coal (i.e. – build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever) you need to ignore them and run coal. This memo is necessary only because we seem not to understand that coal pays the bills.”

In the past two months, miners had been evacuated three times from the Upper Big Branch due to dangerously high methane levels, according to two miners who asked for anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

Representative Rahall II said he had received similar reports from miners about recent evacuations at the mine, which as recently as last month was fined at least three times for ventilation problems, according to federal records.

In 2008, one of Massey's subsidiaries paid what federal prosecutors called the largest settlement in the history of the coal industry after pleading guilty to safety violations that contributed to the deaths of two miners in a fire in one of its mines. That year, Massey also paid a $20 million fine — the largest of its kind levied by the Environmental Protection Agency — for clean water violations.

Kevin Stricklin, an administrator with the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, said the magnitude of the explosion — the worst mining accident in 25 years — showed that “something went very wrong here.”

“All explosions are preventable,” Mr. Stricklin said. “It’s just making sure you have things in place to keep one from occurring.”

One of those things is a union so that miners can report unsafe, even deadly working conditions without fear of losing their jobs. This isn't a matter a matter of speculation. If you're an underground coal miner, your chances of emerging alive at the end of your shift are better if you work in a union mine than if you don't.

A report from the March 28, 2007, hearing on Protecting the Health and Safety of America's Mine Workers released by the House Committee on Education and Labor contains the following statistics for the five-year period of 2002-2006:

Underground coal injuries: 19,282
In union mines: 5,362 (or 27.8% of total)
Underground coal fatalities: 109
In union mines: 22 (or 20.2%)

In 2007-2009, there were 45 underground coal-mining fatalities. Only six of these were in union mines. Thus, for the 15-year period, less than one-fifth of the fatalities occurred in union mines.

Another thing is the aggressive enforcement of the nation's mine safety laws. Yet Blankenship and Massey vigorously fought the enforcement of these regulations.

Twenty-five miners, grandfathers, fathers, sons, uncles, and nephews, are dead because Massey and its CEO have arrogantly flaunted the nation's mine safety laws.Investigations are sure to follow. But too often investigations are the only response. After the nation's attention fades, so do the demands for action. The twenty-five miners who died in the Massey mine and their families deserve more than speech-making and another study. So do future generations of coal miners who will continue to toil underground. They deserve justice.

The Massey Energy Company and Don L. Blankenship should be charged with murder.

New York unions take the fight for jobs to Wall Street

New Yorkers for Fiscal Fairness has just launched a media campaign all across the state aimed at urging the Legislature to help save New Yorkers from losing even more jobs during these tough economic times.

While Wall Street has largely recovered from the economic crisis and reaped record profits in the last year, Main Street continues to suffer from the fallout of the economic crisis. It seems like corporations are doing better than the rest of us.

Make Corporations Pay Their Fair Share! by NYFF from New York State AFL-CIO on Vimeo.