UAW hires public relations firm to sell Fiat Chrysler deal
UAW hires public relations firm to sell Fiat Chrysler deal
By Eric London
13 October 2015
The United Auto Workers has hired New York City-based public relations firm BerlinRosen Public Affairs to conduct a propaganda campaign aimed at securing the passage of its new contract proposal with Fiat Chrysler. The goal of the $115,000 campaign, complete with online graphics and Facebook postings, is to rebrand a product that has been exposed as dangerous to workers’ health.
The Detroit Free Press, a mouthpiece for the auto bosses and the UAW, praised the move, noting that “the UAW is devoting resources to providing more details and controlling the message this time—before someone else does.”
“Controlling the message” has nothing to do with telling the truth. On the contrary, it means attempting to reassert the monopoly over information by the UAW and the corporate-controlled media, which was broken when rank-and-file workers used Facebook, Twitter and other social media to exchange information from the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter and other sources to defeat the first sellout by a two-to-one margin.
BerlinRosen is made up of several former Barack Obama campaigners and administration officials and has previously worked for a host of Democratic Party campaigns, including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. In 2014, it helped the Ford Foundation push through a union-backed “Grand Bargain” during the Detroit bankruptcy, which slashed the pensions and health benefits of thousands of retirees.
According to federal labor records, the PR firm did $4 million in business with “labor clients,” such as the Service Employees International Union and the Communication Workers of America.
The company’s website boasts: “we are quick, discreet, and experienced, helping clients prepare ahead of time for potential crises, and, when that’s not an option, jumping on board in urgent situations to get the story under control with our disaster recovery specialists.”
In the eyes of the UAW and the auto bosses, the resounding defeat of the sellout contract was certainly a “disaster.” Now they are scrambling to provide a new spin on the deal because if workers knew the truth, they would reject this deal as they did the first. As one FCA worker at the Toledo, Ohio Jeep plant told the WSWS, “If the UAW were about protecting the workers and telling the truth, then why would they need to hire a PR firm?”
It is worth reviewing some of the lies contained in the UAW’s new Madison Avenue campaign.
UAW Lie #1: “A clear path to traditional wages”
Under the proposed deal, a second-tier worker would have to wait eight years before reaching $29 per hour, or roughly the same rate in nominal terms that a first-tier worker makes right now. By contrast, in 1970 it took a newly hired UAW worker 90 days to reach standard pay.
The aim of the company and the UAW is to set a new, permanently lower “traditional wage” after higher-paid older workers are driven out of the industry. Moreover, any promises of increases four years after the expiration of the contract are not worth the paper they are written on. This was shown by the worthless pledge by the UAW to restore caps on the percentage of second-tier workers in 2015, and countless other promises over the last four decades that were dropped due to “economic circumstances.”
UAW Lie #2: “Huge progress toward eliminating the gap”
The new deal actually creates many different tiers. New hires will be brought in at $17 per hour, reaching just $22.50 by the end of the contract. There will then be a different tier for each “years of service” bracket, with only those with over four years reaching the pay cap.
What’s more, according to pages 256 and 257, new Mopar hires will top out at only $21 at the end of the contract, with axle workers reaching only $19.86. Page 277 of the contract notes that temporary workers will max out at $21 and new temporary hires at $18.41 after four years.
UAW Lie #3: “Health Co-op eliminated in this tentative agreement”
The UAW took the health co-op out of the deal while promising the company it will help enforce a similar cost-cutting program after ratification. The UAW has agreed to help FCA “reduce costs” in line with the imposition of Obama’s Cadillac Tax on supposedly over-generous insurance plans.
This includes the introduction of first-ever deductibles of hundreds of dollars for workers who refuse to sign up for inferior health plans. Second-tier workers already pay high out-of-pocket costs. The deal also includes an agreement between the UAW and FCA to transfer the health care plan for workers from Blue Cross Blue Shield to some other provider, with the clear intention of reducing costs and coverage.
UAW Lie #4: “Job security is strengthened and job growth promised”
The contract explicitly sanctions the destruction of over 3,000 jobs at the Warren Truck factory in suburban Detroit and other plants. The UAW has made a big deal of FCA’s supposed agreement not to “close, nor partially or wholly sell, spin-off, split-off or consolidate or otherwise dispose in any form, any plant, asset or business unit of any time constituting a bargaining unit.”
In fact, a letter of agreement between UAW Vice President Norwood Jewell and FCA executive Glenn Shagena nullifies this, adding an escape clause (page 129) that says:
“It is understood that conditions may arise that are beyond the control of the company such as acts of God, catastrophic circumstances, market-related volume declines or significant economic decline concerning the subject. Should these conditions occur, the company will discuss conditions with the union.”
UAW Lie #5: “Moratorium on outsourcing”
On page 196, the contract gives the company the right to determine sourcing actions based on “cost, technology, timing, quality, statutory requirements, proprietary rights, overall financial stability of affected facilities…” It simply requires the company provide “written notice” to the UAW for such plans, which the UAW will keep “confidential,” i.e., secret from workers. (Page 204)
The UAW can then force workers to accept massive wage cuts to keep work at the plant. “The National Job Security, Operational Effectiveness and Sourcing Committee, comprised of Company and Union representatives will act on requests from Local Committees to waive, modify or change National Agreement provisions when such action would result in the preservations or increase of job opportunities.” (Page 197)
These passages prove that the UAW is involved in a conspiracy to lie to the workers on the company's behalf. Nothing the UAW says can be trusted, and the above list is far from exhaustive.
As one worker said on the UAW International Facebook page: "This agreement is the same as the first. People, you have been shown fancy numbers to make your mouth water. The UAW did listen to our complaints on the first tentative agreement. That's how they made the same agreement look a lot better and renamed it to the new agreement."
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MARK LEVIN on the GOP surrendering to Obama’s LA RAZA SUPREMACY:
"No more excuses. No more whining. No more lying to get you elected. No more crony deals with the U.S. Chamber of crony capitalism," Levin said, taking a political shot at the business community powerhouse U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
OBAMA MEX DRUG CARTELS BANKSTERS
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTER-DRIVEN ECONOMY
First he sabotaged America’s borders and then invited endless waves of illegals to grab America’s jobs and keep wages depressed.
Then he went after America’s pensions, medicare and social security towards his design of destroying the American middle-class.
AND IT’S WORKING!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-obamas-bankster-driven-economic.html
“Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America (ALL MAJOR DONORS TO BARACK OBAMA) and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.”
THE OBAMA ASSAULT ON OUR PENSIONS
BIGGER PROFITS FOR HIS WALL STREET DONORS IF PENSIONS ARE SLASHED
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-obama-doctrine-destroy-american.html
“Feinberg, who as the Obama administration’s “pay tsar” rubber- stamped multimillion-dollar executive bonuses to Wall Street banks bailed out with taxpayer funds, will now be given power to slash workers’ benefits at his discretion.”
OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class
"Obama expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay cuts, setting a precedent
for the transformation of the US into a low-wage economy."
"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."
OBAMA-CLINTONomics is a simple device - Serve the super rich and pass the cost of their looting and Wall Street crimes on to the backs of the last of the American middle-class!
"Of course, the wealth of the financial elite cannot come from nowhere. Ultimately, the continual infusion of asset bubbles is the form taken by a massive transfer of wealth, from the working class to the banks, investors and super-rich. The corollary to rise of the stock market is the endless demands, all over the world, for austerity, cuts in wages, attacks on health care and pensions."
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/obama-clintonomics-protecting-rich.html
“As a result, the share of wealth held by the richest 0.1 percent of the population grew from 17 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2012, while the wealth of the 400 richest families in the US has doubled since 2008.”
The government-union conspiracy to raid US workers’ pensions
The government-union conspiracy to raid US workers’ pensions
10 October 2015
This month the Teamsters Central States pension fund, one of the largest retirement funds in the United States, unveiled the details of its plan to slash pension benefits for over 400,000 current and retired truck drivers, parcel carriers and other employees. Workers received letters informing them that pension benefits for which they had worked for decades, and which had been guaranteed by law, had simply gone up in smoke.
While the pension cuts amount to an average of 23 percent of workers’ benefits, for many it will mean a reduction of 50 percent, reducing tens or even hundreds of thousands to poverty and destitution in their old age.
The move is the result of a conspiracy by the
Obama administration, Wall Street, major
corporations and the trade unions to slash
hundreds of billions of dollars from multi-
employer pension funds.
In December 2014 Congress passed the Multiemployer
Pension Reform Act of 2014, with essentially no public
discussion, setting up a mechanism for slashing the pension
benefits of 1 million employees in “underfunded” multi-
employer pension funds. This year, the White
House appointed longtime Wall Street fixer
Kenneth Feinberg to oversee the benefit cuts, giving him the unilateral authority to impose cuts even if beneficiaries vote them down.
A multi-employer plan is a pension plan created through an agreement between two or more employers and a union, usually in the same or related industries. They are governed by trustees appointed jointly by the unions and management. These funds allow workers to accrue benefits even when they switch employers in the same industry, and were nominally protected by the federal government from corporate default.
But the funds have been systematically underfunded by major corporations,
with the direct collaboration of their union “partners.” The multibillion-dollar
funds were used not only to produce sinecures for union functionaries, but also
as bargaining chips in the unions’ haggling with corporations in their efforts to
shore up their income streams.
A case in point was the Central States plan, which was essentially given a deathblow when Teamsters officials allowed UPS to exit the fund in 2007, removing the largest base of active employees. In exchange, the Teamsters were given the privilege of extracting union dues from UPS’s recently acquired freight division.
As a result of this and similar deals, the fund now takes in one dollar for every three it pays out. The Teamsters’ response to shortfall was given in the title of a document it helped draft with major corporations in 2013: “Solutions, not bailouts.” Despite the fact that the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation was legally obligated to protect the pension benefits of workers in the plan, no money was to come from the government. Rather, it was workers’ benefits that would be cut, ensuring the continued existence of a capital stock that highly paid union functionaries see as their own personal property.
One can say without exaggeration that this government-sponsored robbery makes the days when the Teamsters union was run by the mafia look like a model of financial integrity.
The drive to dismantle employee pensions expresses the anti-working class character of the trade unions, which have been transformed from organizations that bargained for better wages and conditions within the framework of capitalism to junior partners of major corporations in slashing workers’ wages and benefits.
For decades, the unions have sought to shore up their declining dues base by taking on the management of workers’ retirement and benefit accounts, in the process becoming major players in the financial markets. A case in point was the Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA), set up by the auto companies in 2007 to give the United Auto Workers direct control over the multibillion-dollar health care benefit fund for retirees.
In the current contract being negotiated with Fiat Chrysler, the UAW is seeking to establish a health care “co-op,” modeled on the VEBA, to manage the health care benefits of active employees, further establishing the union as a health insurance business. Autoworkers should take a warning from the assault on the Teamsters pension plan: The UAW will have no qualms about slashing and ultimately eliminating workers’ health care benefits for its own financial gain.
The drive to cut multi-employer pension benefits is one component of the nationwide assault on pension benefits in the wake of the Detroit bankruptcy, which set a precedent for using a “financial emergency” to slash workers’ constitutionally protected pensions. The unions were key allies of Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr in imposing a significant reduction in workers’ pension benefits as part of an overall restructuring of the city in the interests of the rich.
In the wake of the bankruptcy settlement last year, states throughout the country, most notably Illinois and California, launched campaigns to slash retiree pensions without having to go to the trouble of a bankruptcy proceeding. At the same time, the assault on multi-employer pensions has kicked into high gear at the national level.
Seven years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the assessment made by the World Socialist Web Site that the ruling class would seek to use the financial meltdown as an opportunity to restructure class relations and make the working class shoulder the burden of the capitalist crisis has proven to be correct. While the wealth of the richest 400 people in the US has doubled since 2009, the income of a typical household has fallen by more than 5 percent, on top of a 7 percent decline between 2007 and 2010.
Now, with the International Monetary Fund predicting the slowest global growth this year since 2008-2009, and with mounting signs that the latest financial bubble is on the verge of collapse, the ruling class, working with its trade union allies, is doubling down on its drive to impoverish the working class.
Andre Damon
"Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of
employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious
for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-
Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson
Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4
billion fortune is extracted from his international network of
sports apparel-producing sweatshops."
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS
“Calling income and wealth inequality the "great moral issue of our time," Sanders laid out a sweeping, almost unimaginably expensive program to transfer wealth from the richest Americans to the poor and middle class. A $1 trillion public works program to create "13 million good-paying jobs." A $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. "Pay equity" for women. Paid sick leave and vacation for everyone. Higher taxes on the wealthy. Free tuition at all public colleges and universities. A Medicare-for-all single-payer health care system. Expanded Social Security benefits. Universal pre-K.” WASHINGTON EXAMINER
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS ON HILLARY’S SERVITUDE TO OBAMA’S CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS… their looting continues unabated.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/08/sen-bernie-sanders-accuses-hillary.html
"I think that the business model of Wall Street is fraud," said Sanders. "I think these guys drove us into the worst economic downturn in the modern history of America and I think they're at it again. I believe that when you have so few banks with so much power you have to ... break them up. That is not Hillary Clinton's position."
Wealth of America’s super-rich grows to $2.34 trillion
Wealth of America’s super-rich grows to $2.34 trillion
By Nick Barrickman
3 October 2015
The wealth of the 400 richest Americans
continues to soar, according to the results of
the new Forbes 400 list, published annually
by the business magazine of the same name.
At $2.34 trillion, the total net worth for the multi-billionaires on the list set new records, displacing last year’s all-time high of $2.29 trillion.
In 2009, the total net worth of the Forbes 400 was $1.27 trillion. Today, nearly six years into the so-called economic “recovery” fostered by the Obama administration, the wealthiest Americans have nearly doubled their hoard. The total wealth of the richest 400 Americans managed to reach new heights even while financial markets have been roiled by tumultuous swings.
The Forbes report notes that in 2015, “It was
harder than ever to join the 400. The price of
entry this year was $1.7 billion, the highest it’s
been in the 33 years that Forbes has tracked
American wealth.” Forbes makes note that
the wealth threshold was so high this year that 145 billionaires failed to make the list.
While a majority of billionaires have prospered, their wealth underwritten by the massive government bailouts of financial institutions and near-zero interest rates from the Federal Reserve, a significant fraction of the wealthy elite have lost ground in the turbulent stock markets of recent months.
The ratio of winners and losers among the billionaires was ten to one last year, but this year was much closer to 50-50. Forbes noted that the top three position-holders on the list, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, each saw a drop in their total net worth of at least 5 percent in the last year. This did nothing to threaten the position of Gates, number one at $76 billion, or Buffett, number two at $62 billion, but Ellison’s third-place position, with $47.5 billion, left him “only” $500 million ahead of the fourth-place multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com.
The majority of those on the Forbes list were associated with some form of financial speculation, or with computer software and the Internet. According to the industry breakdown supplied by Forbes, its 400 include 126 engaged in investment, real estate and finance, 81 from computer technology and media, 36 from food and beverage, 32 from retail and fashion (including five members of the Walton family, owners of Wal-Mart), 31 from oil & gas, 20 from health care, 19 from miscellaneous services (including six members of the Pritzker family, owners of Hyatt Hotels), and 19 from sports and gaming.
This left only 35 listed as making their fortunes in manufacturing, automotive, construction, and logistics. The largest manufacturing fortune is the $7.4 billion of Harold Kohler, whose company makes toilets and other plumbing fixtures. Perhaps that is symbolic, given the state of manufacturing in the United States, once the world leader in industry, but no longer.
The growth of financial parasitism has underwritten the wealth of many on the Forbes 400. In 1982, the first Forbes 400 list saw figures directly involved in finance making up only 4.4 percent of the total wealth on the list. As of today, this group now makes up more than 21 percent of billionaires on the list.
Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who has held the number one spot on the Forbes 400 for 22 years, has less than 13 percent of his fortune in stock in the company he founded. According toForbes, the majority of Gates’ wealth is bound up in Cascade, the software mogul’s investment firm, which specializes in “investing in stocks, bonds, private equity and real estate.”
Besides the well-known super-rich of Silicon Valley like Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin (with $33.3 billion and $32.6 billion, respectively) and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of the social media web site Facebook, the seventh wealthiest man in America with $40.3 billion in total assets, there are numerous other newly minted Internet billionaires, including the owners and co-owners of Uber, Airbnb, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, GoPro and GoDaddy.com.
Jeffrey Bezos, owner of the online retailer Amazon, saw the largest gain in wealth for the year, making $16 billion in 2015, placing his total net worth at $47 billion and catapulting him to fourth place. Nearly half of Bezos’ gains came within a single day last July, when his company announced gains in the second quarter, leading to a speculative frenzy which bid up stock values for Amazon by over 18 percent.
Amazon became a byword this year for savage treatment of
employees. Bezos joins several others in the top 15 notorious
for low-wage exploitation, including four heirs to the Wal-
Mart retail empire, James, Alice, Christy and Samuel Robson
Walton, and Phil Knight, chairman of Nike Inc., whose $24.4
billion fortune is extracted from his international network of
sports apparel-producing sweatshops.
While safeguarding the ill-gotten wealth of the Forbes billionaires remains an ironclad principle of both the Republican and Democratic parties, working people throughout the US continue to suffer the brunt of attacks on their living standards. A US Census report released earlier this month shows that 14.8 percent of the US population lives in poverty; a figure that is unchanged from a year earlier. The Census findings show that 6.6 percent of the population lives in “deep poverty,” or less than half of the already unrealistically low official poverty line in the US.
OBAMA-CLINTONomics and the final death of the American middle-class
"Obama expanded the Wall Street bailout, handing trillions of dollars to the criminals who wrecked the economy. He then utilized the financial meltdown to restructure the auto industry on the basis of brutal pay cuts, setting a precedent for the transformation of the US into a low-wage economy."
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/assault-on-american-worker-obama.html
"In the midst of the deepest slump since the Great Depression, the administration starved state and city governments of resources, leading to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of education and public-sector jobs and the gutting of workers’ pensions. Obama’s Affordable Care Act set in motion the dismantling of employer-paid health insurance and massive cuts in the Medicare insurance system for the elderly."
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTER-DRIVEN ECONOMY
First he sabotaged America’s borders and then invited endless waves of illegals to grab America’s jobs and keep wages depressed.
Then he went after America’s pensions, medicare and social security towards his design of destroying the American middle-class.
AND IT’S WORKING!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/how-obamas-bankster-driven-economic.html
“Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America (ALL MAJOR DONORS TO BARACK OBAMA) and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses, the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers, credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.”
IS THE UAW A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE OR SIMPLY IN BED WITH CRIMINALS IN THE WAR AGAINST THE AMERICAN WORKER…. their execs serve their Wall Street paymasters!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/09/uaw-united-auto-workers-organized-crime.html
“The United Auto Workers (UAW) is also complicit. The union has maintained a studied silence throughout the entire course of the affair. This is hardly surprising. As one of the largest stockholders of GM through control of a retiree health care trust fund, the UAW’s chief concern is ensuring maximum corporate profits.”
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