News Guild planning moves vs. Wall Street Journal cuts. The News Guild local that represents Wall Street Journal workers is brainstorming over its response to management plans to cut jobs at the business daily.
Citing declining ad revenue, WSJ/Dow Jones management proposed buyouts to workers, and 48 people took them. However, that wasn’t enough, and the company said it will lay off about 19 others.
The WSJ Guild local (the Independent Association of Publishers Employees) represents more than 1,000 workers, and it will challenge the cuts, but leaders are unsure what approach they’ll take.
The layoffs come as union negotiators continue to try to reach a new contract with the Journal. The two sides have apparently agreed on Dow Jones’ plans for 2 percent yearly raises, for early termination options once a year and for continued health care coverage for a year with no premium or cost increases.
Activists turn from election to stopping TPP. Still reeling from Donald Trump’s victory, activists from unions and allied groups quickly turned to stopping the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact, from phone banking and rallies to calls to Congress and an open letter to lawmakers from all 51 state union federation presidents.
“We are teachers and miners, firefighters and farm workers, bakers and engineers, pilots and public employees, doctors and nurses, actors, painters and plumbers, and more, including 3.2 million people who do not have a union at work,” the letter said. “We urgently request that you reject any attempt to pass the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement during the lame-duck session of Congress.”
Rallies with unions including the Steelworkers, Teamsters, Fire Fighters, Teachers, and Auto Workers were joined by members of Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution group and activists from Black Lives Matter, which notes past agreements led to job losses that disproportionately affected African-American workers.
Organized labor was obviously disappointed in the percentage of unionists who voted against Clinton, but unions also point to down-ballot successes. Voters passed increases in the minimum wage in Arizona, Colorado, Maine and Washington, and rejected a host of regressive measures: a utility-backed amendment to limit solar-energy in Florida, expanding Massachusetts’ charter schools, a Virginia amendment enshrining Right To Work laws in its constitution, and a South Dakota measure for a SUB-minimum wage for youth.
Many causes of gender wage gap, study shows. The gender wage gap, which has persisted for decades and leaves working women short-changed, has many causes that don’t always show up in pay stubs, a new Economic Policy Institute study says.
The median pay for a female worker is 80 cents for every dollar a white man receives, in yearly wages, or 83 cents per dollar in weekly pay. That’s because “women’s occupations” such as teachers and nurses are devalued, women are channeled in college into lower-paying majors, and millions of women are in the lowest-paying jobs in child care and elder care, the report notes.
“The number-one way ‘to close the gap’ would be to create a unionized workforce,” said Sarita Gupta from Jobs With Justice. With unions, “you are setting standards that say a job is paid a certain amount. It gives” woman workers “wages and bargaining power to set standards for equality.”
Corporate tax avoidance close to $700 billion. Another EPI report shows that U.S. corporations have stashed so much of their profits in overseas subsidiaries that they evade almost $700 billion in U.S. taxes.
The companies could easily invest in this country and its workers with the $2.4 billion overall that they’ve stashed overseas – without having to pay increased taxes, adds the report, based on federal and corporate data. But the report’s main point is that such tax evasion – legal under the tax code – means everyone else has to pick up the tab for schools, fire fighters, infrastructure, the military, etc.
“While the statutory tax rate on corporate income is 35 percent, estimates of the rate corporations actually pay put the effective rate at about half the statutory rate,” EPI reports. “Multinational corporations pay taxes on between just 3 percent and 6.6 percent of the profits they book in tax havens.”
News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper