Politics: Labor USA: Obama again shows hand on anti-pluralist representation on shop floor; but he's R+tchus on credit cards

Obamatides:

Obamatides Update: May29,2k9 4:00 PM.

* Credit Card Companies, and consumer restrictions (Wall Street Journal, M25,2k9)

All credit to the credit-card holders' liberation from cruel oppression of usurious card companies, specialist companies devoted exclusively to their own h+end results required for profit monetization, misprioritization, and damn every other societal sphere of appropriate influence (any other "stakeholder"). They were proven to have planned the financial entrapment and ultimate ruin of holders addicted to debt by over-purchase.

* Obama Elaborates on "Empathy," What He Wants in a Supreme Court Nominee

The blog on which this entry originates is lawyers&economists &libertarianphilosophers of political economy or some such combo, perhaps.

*Employee Free Choice Act

would eliminate secret ballots for union elections. When she went before Congress for confirmation hearings, Obama’s choice to head the Department of Labor, California Congresswoman Hilda Solis, was grilled about her position on EFCA and other laws of interest to the labor movement.

But significant changes in White House policy can occur administratively as well as legislatively. Our cabinet-level departments, in particular, wield important administrative powers, and often what is done, or undone, by a new cabinet officer without the slightest legislative initiative is as significant as what gets debated and passed in Congress.

The new disclosure rules fall into that category. Since organized labor spent about $100 million of members’ dues helping to elect Obama and supporting Democrats in Congress, the AFL-CIO and other unions have provided Obama with a lengthy list of things they would like done for them in Washington. And high on that list is undoing some of the disclosure requirements put in place during the Bush years. Without any debate in Congress, an Obama Labor Department could rescind them. Or it could simply not enforce them. As any investigative reporter will tell you, businesses and nonprofit groups often fail to file their required documents without being held accountable.

How the Obama administration treats the disclosure requirements will say a lot about what kind of Labor Department it will run. The Bush administration liked to accuse the DOL of becoming the Department of Organized Labor during the Clinton years because of its pro-union rulings. Union groups, by contrast, accused the Bush DOL of acting like a tool of big business.

Left out of this debate were the interests of ordinary workers.

* Labour relations & Secretary of Labor USA

This piece in the r+twing USA websitesfeer WorldNetDaily: Prez Obama's appointment of Rep. Hilda L. Solis -- another Ayres-type case? Apparently she has close ties to US communist and socialist organizations. All of which opens before the investigator certain lines of questions to determine what this may mean for certain labor formations alrealdy existing the USA, such as the Christian Labor Association (see below).

* Steve Pearlson in WaPo

There is no denying that the big beneficiaries of the government's involvement are the active workers who will get to keep their jobs and the retirees who will keep their pensions and health insurance. But any fair analysis would also show that the net present value of wage, benefit and job-security concessions agreed to by the United Auto Workers amounts to tens of billions of dollars.

It is also not the case that the workers' gains have come at the expense of bankers and bondholders who had the bad judgment, or the bad luck, to lend money to these companies.

It is the job of the bankruptcy court to ensure that these financial creditors receive at least as much from any restructuring plan as they would have from a long and messy liquidation -- and they will. But there is nothing in the bankruptcy law, or the common law, requiring a government volunteering to finance a bankruptcy restructuring to divide its largess evenly or fairly between bondholders and assembly-line workers. That is a political choice that properly rests with the government.

* CLA-USA

The CLA-USA does not spell out the idea of labour representation where no one in the workforce is forced to be a member of a union. All unions, with legality within and loyalty to the USA, may be represented proportional to the number of workers in a given workforce who vote with individual particularity by means of a secret ballot for that particular union (pluralist workforce democracy -- not monophilosophical, not monoworldview, not monoreligion nor monononreligion -- but may be founded on the basis of a religious creed, better perhaps it should be termed a religious workview expressed secularly in the workaday world by a founding community of religious particularists gathered explicitly to revitalize the witness of 1934 regarding the necessity of a christian labor movement in America. In Canada, a sister union bases itself simply on "the Gospel social principles," is a founding member of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and welcomes members of any religion and "none."

These thawts bespeak only to recognize a "sphere sovereignty of the workforce" as a single and particular societal-entity composed of an ethically-bonded workforce-membership to constitute a work-community, related to a particular management, and ultimately to owners of the firm or company, whether thru publically traded stocks perhaps offered on the stock market or privately-held ownership, even communally-owned work co-ops perhaps (but represented by plurality, not a single union unless the workforce is 100% unanimous for one union representation with a monopoly on the workview representation of workers).

Therefore, having an interest in the firm, good communications all around. The latter contributing to healthy labour relations between management and the workers of the workforce, again represented plurally and proportionately, constituting an honest work-community that doesn't stiffle differences of workview -- viewpoint tolerance sufficient to the purpose of the fullest representation possible. Harmonious work relations lead to stability, thus vice versa contributing to stability of the workforce, even the workers financially -- if (1.) the banks, (2.) the lurid luring-loaners to buy-now-pay-later people who cannot keep up mortgage payments (credit cards too, etc) and must eventually be foreclosed upon, as the loaners planned / foresaw at the outset; but (3.) there's a third prime evil force in labor relations > misstepping government. The nation has the r+t to open elections in labor unions, via secret ballots, by all the unions that the nation's government certifies, not a government that enables and otherwise supports the herding of workers into a single union per workforce and, sometimes, divided by trade / guild with a h+ level of presumably tradeskill-based exclusivity.

As soon as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certifies a given union (of which CLA is only one small national labour association among many bohemoth such-organizations, associations, unions thru-out the nation); each particular union gets the responsibility of representing its proportion of the secret-ballot vote.

Unionization is an ethical bond of members of the workforce, recognizing as a principium that to be a force they must associate together in the implied ethical bond of that particular relation, that particular societal-sphere > labour-relations, a sphere uniquely situated within society (the societal relative-totality) to require healthy interaction between management and each union selected in a secret free vote of the members of the entire workforce (other than management) and each particular union represented proportionally in the all-union, pan-union, or multi-union committee (it may be again a single union, if the workforce is unanimous in a secret ballot), for its overall relations on behalf of all workers in the workforce, collectively, communally within a single sphere, with that firm's management; negotiations would include contract negotiations for salaries and wages, general labour standards of compensation for the workers.

Those in the workforce who exercize their r+t to representation by a union of their choice (according to differing world-, life-, and work-views) -- freedom of association within the workforce, for life-is-religion motives perhaps --these have a logically-reciprocal r+t (juriscientially speaking) not to pay union dues, thereby not belonging to any union and eschewing a work-relations representation, both negatives that go along with letting the represented (proportionately) do all the organizing, communal thinking, a kind catechumentate for work within the work-community of this firm somehow in tandem with this management.

Instead, these self-chosen non-represented workers outside the union system almost entirely must nevertheless contribute the equivalent of basic union dues to a charity acceptable to both that self-chosen non-member individual worker and the all-union committee representing the various unions of the membership-affirming institution of the workforce of different workviews but comitted nonetheless to interactive dialogue and decision-making, with certain proportionality. The individual unions represented may further charge their own members more than the all-union committee's standard of dues (which covers otherwise-freeloaders who would on these corrective terms still pay out the same monetary value compared to the basic dues of the workers who belong to one union or another, represented proportionately on the all-union council in dialogue with each other and with the management of the firm. The unions may charge more than basic dues, but not less. In the end, every worker pays (or charitably contributes the equivalent of) basic dues.

For instance, an all-union committee (for a firm with a total workforce, aside from management, of 100 employees upon a secret ballot of individual members of the work-community, may have a 30% of employees vote for representation by the CLA, not by the UAW; but of course the UAW-supporting union's membership by secret ballot proves to be 70%. The two unions split the committee memberships: 7 UAW to 3 CLA. There are, in our story, 10 members total on the all-unions committee. Shop stewards are further selected by the remaining 90 shopfloor- or secretarial-workers -- again, 70% of whom in both previous categories vote UAW and 30% of whom parallely vote CLA. The CLA's 3 members on the all-union committee, liaise with the CLA's shop stewards and elected negotiating committee members at contract renewal time.

I leave these matters for now.

Obama said he would bring change. Let him do so in labor reform that gives workview meanings in a plurality for unions each distinctively to develop their own social principles should conscience dictate. In any case, the quest for a christian workview that enriches the inter-unions dialogue is a most important one, that must not shy away from the fundamental theory of represenation in a plurality of worldviews in the civic situation. The Christian Labor Association, having been founded in America in 1934 (if memory serves), has been able to stir itself some in recent years; but seemingly, growth has not accrued in the percentages for new members under contract or negotiating at present that were projected as national CLA goals a couple of years back. A sad of example of stagnation is the latest date for a digital issue of CLA's Christian Labor Herald, if I recall correctly, that last date was 2k7 aka 2007.

-- EconoMix