Rep. Jack Williams and the AFL-CIOs Al Henley respond to my questions on the prevailing wage destruction bill (see another video below).
by Glynn Wilson
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Republicans in the Alabama House of Representatives voted to move two bills out of committee this week that would outlaw the state government and any local government from establishing prevailing wages for skilled work on public works projects as required by federal law under the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 on one hand, but provide prevailing wages for convicts working for private industry on the other.
“It’s rotten politics and it’s very insulting to regular old working folks to put middle class construction workers in a race to the bottom and it’s just totally unacceptable,” said state AFL-CIO President Al Henley. “They voted to pay prevailing wages to convicts doing work inside the prison and then voted to take prevailing wages away from construction workers. That is just beyond belief and I don’t think they’ll ever be able to explain it.”
Richard Franklin, president of the Birmingham chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said the bill was just another in a long line of bills this year being passed by tea party Republican legislatures across the country at the behest of the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC, a corporate-funded organization based in Washington that provides training, support and other services to conservative state legislators all over the country, according to Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
“One of its prime functions is to draft (big) business-friendly ‘model legislation’ that is then disseminated to state legislators around the country to be introduced and enacted,” Bookman reported. “When you see a spate of similar bills suddenly pop up almost simultaneously in legislatures around the country, ALEC is almost always behind it.”
While millions of Americans among the 99% continue to be unemployed or underemployed and the nation’s unemployment rate hovers around 8.3 percent, chief executive officers of the nation’s largest corporations received a 2 percent pay raise last year.
While that may not seem like much of an increase, it came on top of a 27 percent hike in 2010, according to a report in USA Today.
The median, or mid-point, pay of top executives was $9.6 million in 2011, USA Today reported, based on 138 companies in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 largest companies whose pay data has been disclosed.
While CEO pay rose, USA Today noted, average weekly earnings of workers, adjusted for inflation, fell 1.2 percent from the October 2010 peak through February 2012, the latest data available. The article was based on data from GMI Ratings of companies that had the same CEO in 2010 and 2011.
The Top Issues Include Unemployment Compensation, Wage Floors and Charter Schools
The Alabama AFL-CIO announced its agenda for the second half of the legislative session today in a press release, challenging Republicans on bills related to Unemployment Compensation, Worker’s Compensation and Charter Schools.
“SB 300 and HB 285 will make Alabama’s Unemployment Insurance, ranked 49th out of 50, the worst in the nation,” said Al Henley, President of Alabama AFL-CIO.
Alabama Workers are entitled to Unemployment Insurance when lose their job through no fault of their own. Maximum benefits are $265/week.
A delegation representing civil rights and labor leaders will be in Berlin, Germany, on Wednesday April 4 to urge Daimler AG and its shareholders to seek repeal of Alabama’s racial profiling law, H.B. 56, according to a press release sent out in an e-mail blast by the Service Employees International Union.
The law denies fundamental civil rights to immigrants and minorities and impacts trade union activities between and among union members, inhibiting freedom of association, according to a complaint being filed today with the International Labor Organization of the United Nations by the SEIU and its affiliate, the Southern Regional Joint Board of Workers United.
Daimler, which produces Mercedes-Benz vehicles in Alabama, is a founding signatory of the United Nations Global Compact, which calls on businesses to “make sure they are not complicit in human rights abuses.”
Until now, Daimler and Mercedes-Benz have been silent on this law which violates human rights, even though one of its German executives was arrested under the Alabama law.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Obama highlighted his administration’s focus on a sustained, “all-of-the-above” approach to developing American energy in speeches around the country this week. He talks about doubling renewable electricity generation, increasing oil and gas production on federal lands and waters, and reducing reliance on foreign oil through fuel economy standards which will nearly double the efficiency of vehicles in the U.S. and save families $1.7 trillion at the pump.
As part of the president’s comprehensive strategy for a secure energy future, he is outlining steps to promote the development of necessary infrastructure and accelerate the pace of innovation of clean and cost-effective alternatives to traditional fuels, according to a White House press release.
Fulfilling a commitment the president made in his State of the Union Address and building on a series of recommendations from the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, Mr. Obama will travel to Cushing, Oklahoma to announce a new Executive Order on speeding up the approval process for projects, requiring agencies to make faster permitting and review decisions for “vital infrastructure projects” — while protecting the health and vitality of local communities and the environment.
“The Executive Order will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes the Federal government to make permitting and review decisions for infrastructure projects such as roads and surface transportation, aviation, ports and waterways, water resource projects, renewable energy generation, electricity transmission, broadband, and pipelines,” the administration says.
Are Republican leaders attacking women’s rights to distract us from their lack of a jobs plan? Jennifer Granholm takes on the latest battle in the “War on Women,” suggesting that this renewed focus on an “old, reliable issue” like women’s rights is merely to deflect attention from their inadequacies. Granholm suggests that now is the time for the GOP to stop fixating on what women do with their bodies and “obsess about something else,” like job creation: “It’s time for you to apply a little of your laissez-faire, hands-off economic theory to your approach to us. Leave us alone.”
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich address a sympathetic crowd at the Alabama Theater (click here to see more photos)
by Glynn Wilson
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich came out swinging against President Obama on energy policy at the Alabama Theater Monday night, the day before the primary election in the state, due to comments by the president’s press secretary responding to Gingrich’s provocative statement on the campaign trail: “I’ve been talking about the need for an American energy policy, and the idea that we should develop our capacity for oil to the point where no American president would ever again bow to a Saudi King.”
That’s a great applause line for the Republican base, like those gathered at the theater in downtown Birmingham, but it also suffers the same problem with most of Rick Santorum’s rhetoric and that of Mitt Romney as well. Those kinds of oil reserves do not exist on American soil even if we sent drillers in places even they do not want to go and to depths that cannot be reached. New Gingrich knows this, or he should.
He also knows this: The only way we are ever going to get past our dependence on oil from the Middle East is to develop alternative energy sources. That strategy also just happens to be in our national interest to reduce air pollution to improve our health, and to reduce our dependence on burning fossil fuels for energy that leads to global warming and climate change.
But the Republican base believes in God and in bringin’ on the “End Times,” so not only do they not “believe” in global warming, they are not interested in saving the planet. According to their book, the earth is going to be destroyed anyway so why worry?
A couple of days after a federal jury in Montgomery found six defendants, including dog track and casino owner Milton McGregor and three current or former state senators, not guilty of corruption charges for illegally promoting the legalization of gambling, I stopped off at the Birmingham Race Course to get some public reaction to the verdict. Check out the video and share.
Meanwhile, McGregor attorney Joe Espy said publicly the prosecution failed to prove McGregor’s guilt after two trials, and they believed from the beginning that federal authorities targeted McGregor in a politically-motivated attempt to prevent voters from deciding the fate of electronic gaming. Republican lawmakers cooperated with the FBI and were recorded on tape saying that if gambling appeared on the ballot in 2010, that could bring out more black voters to the polls, and they tend to vote for Democrats.
Several of the defendants and defense attorneys bashed the Department of Justice for prosecuting two trials ending with no convictions against nine defendants, and said millions of taxpayer dollars was wasted.
In this RSA Animate, renowned academic David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just and humane?
It is a must see for policy makers, labor unions, journalists, occupy protesters and anyone who wants to gain a quick understanding of our financial crisis.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
