Page 7 - Union Density News Today

Today on TAP: We need to get a lot better at political language.

One of the guys involved here, talks to someone working for him. in an interview he says, quote, ive always looked out for their best interest. were like a family. theyre like my children. im like the jewish more than telling them to seat their spinach and vote for romney. maybe this worked once, but referring to his grownup adults, male and female, working hard and taking care of their real families at home who need the food and the education money and all the other stuff, they call them your c...

Best interest. were like a family. theyre like my children. im like the jewish more than telling them to seat their spinach and vote for romney. maybe this worked once, but referring to his grownup adults, male and female, working hard and taking care of their real families at home who need the food and the education money and all the other stuff, they call them your children is weird. >> its weird and its insulting. these are human beings, adults who have taken a job and probably sweated hard t...

We live in a different era now. unions, much weaker. we dont have the union density we had in 1996 when bill clinton was running for re-election. workplaces, much less stable, much less secure. so when your boss comes along and says, boy, if you dont re-elect -- you dont elect romney there could be real trouble around here, i think it has resonance. i think it does scare some otherwise strong people, who may be deeply insulted but at the end of the day, they do think about it. >> the smart move ...

Anything but that unions are on the decline, median wages have stagnated. inequality have gone up. corporate profits have gone up. those are the facts on the table. whether you think the balance is still out of skew with 8% union density and stagnating median wages, you can make that argument. but you cannot make an argument that unions have been in assent or that corporate wages have been declining. >> its a question of fundamental fairness, why should the corporations and the bosses on the one...

I mean, the growth of income inequality tracks very closely the decline of labor. we have seen a massive decline in whats called union density. now only about 7% of the private sector workforce is unionized. thats about where we were at the start of the new deal. >> but how do you -- you say that and the sort of, the stigmaization of unions in this country is quite broad. look at whats happening at the state level, the idea youd want to strengthen the unions seems like an anathema to some folks....

Eight-hour workday. ows is calling this a day without the 99%. marina i know youve been active in working on what may day is going to look like? >> i will talk about how the movement is envisioning it. and to help give a sense of occupy and may day and the concept of general strike. theres a phrase by walter benjamin, this thinker, decades ago he wrote something about revolutions being this locomotive in history. benjamin said maybe we need to rethink that and maybe we need to think about revolu...

By which a union is officially formed and recognized by the government. it would have reformed the national labor relations board is processed. its very hard to win an election when the other side can essentially con script the voters, put them in a room, drill them with propaganda. >> delay everything. >> fire the organizers. >> threaten to move to china. >> lets keep brainstorming the ways in which the process is pretty broken and part of what you see in the decline of union density is in fact...

Because if you look at the core of what a vision of a healthier democracy would be, i think some kind of inconstitutional power for working people as a counterveiling force, to the interest you talked about. just to set things up, heres a chart and this shows the relationship, which is incredibly profound between essentially union density and the middle class share of aggregate income. youve seen those two lines decline in tandem. this is one of the big stories of the political economy of americ...

Republican party essentially adopted the same changes. what we looked at, though, was high latino population, as chuck said its very different demographic, that these are mostly of mexican descent who tend to be more democratic versus florida, which is a different mix. we also were looking at union density, which is the people who work on the strip. one of the things i note the for tonight, they arent making any special accommodations for the waitresses, the folks who work along the strip. >> i ...