Ever see a construction worker hanging off a bridge while making essential repairs and wonder what it takes to do a job like that?

The same rare skills, along with many others, also are necessary to build and maintain the nation’s growing number of wind turbines—and the Ironworkers’ training and apprenticeship program is ensuring workers across the nation have the skills they need for 21st century green energy projects.

Rhode Island Local 37 Ironworkers member John Bacon and his crew were among those taking part in a recent Ironworkers training on wind turbine construction and tower safety, part of a carefully crafted program to meet the industry’s growing needs. At the Francis Tuttle Training Center in Oklahoma City, they joined a four-day class that focuses on two specific areas identified as a critical need for the wind turbine industry: bolt torqueing and tensioning, and tower climbing and rescue. Those who complete the course get four nationally recognized certificates from industry leaders Capital Safety, Snap-On Industrial and HYTORC, Inc.

The union and its labor-management component, IMPACT (the Ironworker Management Progressive Action Cooperative Trust), developed the program with the nonprofit accredited technical training facility, which already was providing wind turbine training, according to Harvey Swift, IMPACT assistant director of education and training.       

Swift says some of the newly certified workers already have found work in the wind energy industry, while others are back on construction sites, using their finely tuned skills.

For Indiana-based White Construction, the value of the customized training is clear. Ironworkers Local 444 in Joliet, Ill., regularly supplies White with wind turbine workers.

“I have seen a significant difference in the Local 444 workers that we have received out of the hall,” said Ryan Dodge, White’s field operations manager. “The increase in productivity in Local 444’s area is a direct reflection of the positive results from the IMPACT wind turbine training.”

Bacon and his crew, who are employed at a family-owned business, H.B. Welding, now are certified and hope to land jobs when construction on the wind farms planned for Rhode Island’s Block Island Sound get under way. Meanwhile, their sharper skills already are in use on traditional Ironworkers projects—most notably, construction of the replacement Sakonnet River Bridge, which links Portsmouth and Tiverton, R.I.

Bolt tightening is a constant for Ironworkers, Bacon said. “Having the credentials to back up our experience is great, even on regular construction jobs.” And the high-elevation rescue training needed for wind turbine work transfers well to bridge work, he said. At heights from 100 to 300 feet, it requires more than typical fall protection.

“Everyone is always fully tied off at those heights, so impact isn’t a problem, but the Ironworkers training prepared us for rescuing a worker who falls into his harness,” Bacon said.

Suspended out of the reach of cranes or other equipment, a fallen worker’s entire body weight is carried around his or her thighs, where pressure from the harness on the femoral artery poses a critical danger. In those situations, co-workers are the key to a safe rescue.

Those with certifications are ready to help by using special rope-grab and reel equipment, using just a few pounds of pressure to reel a fallen worker in. H.B. Welding purchased the same kind of rescue equipment kits apprentices practiced with during the training—and Local 37 sent additional members to get the new training.

IMPACT also received a Department of Labor grant to create a union-based turbine training program in five locations: Buffalo, N.Y.; Salt Lake City; Dallas/Fort Worth; Los Angeles; and Joliet, Ill. Each of the five centers is equipped with tools and equipment as well as a mobile training trailer that could move the gear directly to wind farms or other training sites. Ironworkers instructors participated in the Oklahoma City training to learn the ropes—and help refine the curriculum that would guide the local union-based training.

“With the five regional centers, the mobility of the equipment and its introduction into all local union training, we are able to meet the demands of every project for skilled, safe and productive Ironworkers,” said Ironworkers President Walter Wise. The goal of the DOL grant was to train 510 workers. With 620 trained, the union surpassed that by 21 percent—and local unions can continue to send members for training as needed in the future.

Even as construction jobs nationwide continue to lag, many who have participated in IMPACT trainings now are back on the job “because they upgraded their skills,” Swift said, through a labor-management partnership that emphasizes job safety, high skills and quality work.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka yesterday described the upcoming elections this way:

This election is about economic patriots, and it’s also about corporate traitors.

Economic patriotism resonates among working people and the millions ofAmerica’s jobless workers–and corporate traitors is an all-too apt description of many in Big Business, such as anti-patriotic corporations moving jobs out of this country. A graf buried in an a New York Times article on Wall Street this week me hard:

Just last week, Paul S. Otellini, chief executive of Intel, said at a dinner at the Aspen Forum of the Technology Policy Institute that “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”

Mr. Otellini has overseen two big acquisitions in the last two weeks — the $7.7 billion takeover of the security software maker McAfee and the $1.4 billion deal for the wireless chip unit of Infineon Technologies. If he is true to his word, those deals will most likely lead to job cuts in the United States, not job creation.

Otellini is not an outlier. Reports this week say Citigroup–which received $45 billion in taxpayer bailout funds–now is creating 12,000 jobs. In China.

Also this week, a new report shows that between November 2008 April 2010, the CEOs of the top 50 job-cutting companies made $598 million in compensation. The top 50 layoff firms reported a 44 percent average profit increase for 2009, the Institute for Policy Studies report said.

Calling out such behaviors and casting them for what they are–unpatriotic, anti-American–can help us take back the ground grabbed by reactionaries for so long, with the Tea Party just the latest manifestation of such warped usage of the red, white and blue.

Patriotism means more than lip service. It means taking action to ensure that working families have the good jobs they need to support their families–creating an environment that’s worthy of our American Dream.

This is a crosspost from AFL-CIO Now blog.

AFL-CIO Now blogger Mike Hall lets President Obama tell it like it is.

After President Obama finished delivering his speech to the AFL-CIO Executive Council this morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka had this question for the president.

We’re going into a congressional election three months from today, and I think it’s fair to say that workers’ hopes for congressional action to protect workers’ rights and to create jobs have been frustrated by a Republican minority that has filibustered every matter in front of them, every single thing that’s been good for us.

I just want to ask you, what advice do you have for workers as the election approaches, particularly for workers who are trying to organize to have a voice on the job?

We couldn’t have answered any better. Take a look at Obama’s response.

Well, you guys don’t need advice from me, but let me tell you what I see out there. We were hurt by this recession, badly hurt. This is going to take some time to recover. Unemployment is at unacceptably high levels.

But as I said before, we’d had challenges before the crisis hit. A lot of your membership had been hurting long before, partly because we just live in a more competitive world. There’s nothing we can do about that, that’s just the truth. But a lot of it also had to do with the fact that we put policies in place that were not good for working families. There’s a reason why incomes, wages, were stagnant for average workers, even while the costs were going up. And part of it had to do with the fact that we had a philosophy that said that providing help to workers, allowing them to collectively bargain, allowing them to negotiate for better benefits, that that all was something of the past instead of something we need for the future.

So on the one hand, I think everybody here understands we’ve got to be competitive in America. We’ve got to have competitive price structures. We’ve got to make the best products possible. Workers have to be invested in trying to help the companies they work for succeed. With respect to public employees, we’ve all got to work together to make sure that whatever we’re doing, whether it’s as firefighters or as teachers or postal workers, whatever it is, that we’re providing the best possible service. I think everybody understands that there’s no operation in the United States of America that shouldn’t be efficient and effective in doing what it does.

But it is my profound belief that companies are stronger when their workers are getting paid well and have decent benefits and are treated with dignity and respect. It is my profound belief that our government works best when it’s not being run on behalf of special interests, but it’s being run on behalf of the public interest, and that the dedication of public servants reflects that.

So FDR I think said–he was asked once what he thought about unions. He said, “If I was a worker in a factory and I wanted to improve my life, I would join a union.” Well, I tell you what. I think that’s true for workers generally. I think if I was a coal miner, I’d want a union representing me to make sure that I was safe and you did not have some of the tragedies that we’ve been seeing in the coal industry. If I was a teacher, I’d want a union to make sure that the teachers’ perspective was represented as we think about shaping an education system for our future.

And that’s why my administration has consistently implemented not just legislative strategies but also, where we have the power through executive orders, to make sure that those basic values are reflected.

Donald Trump knows a few things about making money. The first step: You need a job. But a job is something more than 17 million of America’s workers don’t have.

In a recent CNN interview, Trump says one big way this country can create jobs is by heavily taxing China’s exports, which would result in the creation of much-needed manufacturing jobs here at home.

When it comes to manufacturing, China is making all these products. They could be made in North Carolina, they could be made in Alabama, they could be made in lots of our places and right now they’re not.

Personally, I’d tax China because it’s not a free trade country. I would tax China very, very heavily…it would create jobs in this country.

The truth is, if we tax China, fairly substantially…you would have so much money in this country, you wouldn’t have the trade deficits…you have trading deficits that are enormous in the United States….What will happen now, is other areas of the country will start manufacturing products, and that’s what this country needs. (H/t to Alliance for American Manufacturingfor Trump video clip.)

Some 2.4 million U.S. jobs were lost or displaced between 2001 and 2008 because of the U.S. trade deficit with China, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). And high-tech jobs are being outsourced faster than those in any other sector. The Alliance for American Manufacturing has a great chart breaking down this job loss state by state. The map highlights how every state is affected by the U.S. trade deficit with China, like Georgia, which lost 78,000 jobs, nearly 2 percent of its employment.

This country needs 11 million new jobs to get to the level of employment we had before the recession. And there’s no good reason why corporations aren’t creating them. Trump took on the false notion that U.S. tax laws discourage companies from locating here.

I think we’re the most [business] friendly country. This country is so friendly. The biggest problem we have is with China is they’re sucking money out of this country, and the horrible part is that they then loan it back to us. I know lots of folks in China. They think we are the dumbest son of [a blanks] in the world. They think our representatives don’t know what they’re doing. They laugh at us behind our back.

Maybe some of those lawmakers need to remember Trump’s signature phrase: “You’re fired.”

Cross posted from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog

Closing the New United Motors Manufacturing Inc. automotive plant in California will eliminate 25,000 jobs in the state and cost taxpayers $2.3 billion to replace the jobs lost, according to a March 3 report by University of California professor Harley Shaiken. The Daily Labor Report (subscription required) notes:

California and municipalities near the Fremont, Calif., plant will lose nearly a billion dollars of revenue in the decade after the plant closes, according to a blue-ribbon panel formed by state Treasurer Bill Lockyer (D). Using estimates by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, the report found that "just creating 4,700 jobs–the number lost at NUMMI itself–would cost $433 million."

Jobs lost. Lives destroyed. Communities weakened. Billions of dollars down the drain. All because companies can only improve their bottom line by going after the cheaper labor they can find in other countries, right? Not so, writes Ralph Gomory, president emeritus at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and former IBM senior vice-president of science and technology (h/t Alliance for American Manufacturing).

Cheap labor abroad is cited as the incurable handicap that explains why the United States cannot compete. But cheap labor doesn’t explain the fact that Japan and Germany, both high-wage countries, are successful in the automobile industry. Nor does it explain how semiconductors, a model of a high investment, low-labor content industry, are mainly made in Asia. The premise that the inescapable burden of competing against low wages means failure is simply not correct.

Even more disturbing than this big lie, says Gomory, is the unwillingness of our nation’s leaders to address the consequences of not competing.

Today our companies are motivated to take innovations abroad, produce there and import the goods into the United States. Increasingly we can expect services also to go overseas. We must produce here in the U.S.A., to employ the people of this country, and we must keep their activities effective by a steady stream of innovations in design and production. While other countries roll out a welcome mat of tax breaks and subsidies for our companies because their common sense tells them that their people being employed in productive work is the road to being a rich country, we provide no incentive for U.S. companies to produce here.

Good move, then, by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who led a bipartisan group of 10 senators in sending a letter to President Obama urging the adoption of a national manufacturing policy. The letter states, in part:

The loss of manufacturing plants and jobs has stifled economic opportunity for middle class families and compromised our ability to compete in the 21st century economy. Indeed, for the last several decades, administrations have passed up critical opportunities to formulate a rational and comprehensive manufacturing policy. Continued apathy will undermine our country’s ability to achieve energy independence and place our military readiness at risk.

Meantime, you can take action. Sign the petition by American Rights At Work and tell Toyota: Don’t abandon your workers.

Jack Cafferty at CNN this week ]]> http://blog.ourfuture.org/20100205/danger-falling-middle-class/feed 0 http://blog.ourfuture.org/20100204/republicans-first-slime-then-maneuver-to-block-labor-board-nominee?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=republicans-first-slime-then-maneuver-to-block-labor-board-nominee http://blog.ourfuture.org/20100204/republicans-first-slime-then-maneuver-to-block-labor-board-nominee#comments Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:07:30 +0000 Tula Connell http://blog.ourfuture.org/?p=44218

Mike Hall on our AFL-CIO Now Blog staff wrote about the latest Republican maneuvering to kill a qualified nominee for the nation’s Labor Board and I want to share it with you.

Republican Senate leaders are so frightened that a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) might actually have an open mind about workers’ rights, that in two purely partisan maneuvers, they’ve blocked a majority vote on one of President Obama’s nominees for an NLRB seat.

Craig Becker is a highly respected and experienced labor law practitioner and scholar. He has an impressive 27-year record of advocating for and representing workers, especially low-wage workers. He is currently an associate general counsel for the AFL-CIO and SEIU.

That experience—as opposed to being the type of management stooge favored by the Bush administration—is what has driven Republicans into a mouth-foaming frenzy.

First, they’ve rushed to seat newly elected Scott Brown (R-Mass.) moving up his original Feb. 11 date to this morning in order to break the Democrats 60-vote filibuster proof majority. A vote to end the Becker filibuster was set for tomorrow, followed by a confirmation vote that only requires a simple majority—basic democracy. Brown’s seating scuttles that.

In addition, two Republican senators, Mike Enzi (Wyo.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who earlier had voted for Becker at the committee level last year, somewhere along the line had an epiphany that Becker was the devil incarnate with a union card and now say they will vote against Becker.

Of course, both the rush-job swearing in and see-the-light moments by Enzi and Murkowski came following a full-court press by a panicked U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate lobbyists that had an inside track and cozy relations with the pro-management Bush NLRB for nearly a decade.

Despite Republican and corporate attempts to paint Becker as a red-tinged radical, he is a mainstream labor lawyer, whom Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, calls “one of the pre-eminent labor law thinkers in the United States.”

Last month, 66 labor law professors from our nation’s top law schools wrote Senate leaders urging Becker’s immediate confirmation and attesting to his “integrity, fairness, and dedication to advancing Congress’ purposes in adopting federal labor law and to the role of the NLRB.”

How’s this for far-out, dangerous and crazed pro-union beliefs? Here are some excerpts for Becker’s opening state to the HELP committee yesterday.

As an attorney, I have sat across the table from management and also on the same side of the table, in both postures gaining an understanding of employers’ concerns and often finding common ground between labor and management….I have represented parties on both sides of unfair labor practice cases.

I fully understand that, if confirmed, I will occupy a position far different from the positions I have occupied as a scholar, teacher, and advocate…if confirmed I will have a duty to implement the intent of Congress as expressed in the law, to consider impartially all views appropriately expressed to the Board.

Pretty scary stuff if you’re a Republican senator, huh?

Massachusetts voters sent a strong signal to Washington lawmakers Tuesday that they want results—and aren’t seeing any. Not on health care reform, not on job creation and not on fixing the nation’s economy.

Voters also sent another powerful message for Democrats: Ignore the working class at your peril.

Some 79 percent of voters polled on election night said the most important issue for them was electing a candidate who will strengthen the economy and create more jobs. Controlling health care costs was next on their list, with 54 percent citing that issue as the main determinant of their vote.

The poll, conducted by Hart Research Associates among 810 voters for the AFL-CIO on the night of the election, also found that although voters without a college degree favored Barack Obama by 21 percentage points in the 2008 election, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley lost that same group by a 20-point margin.

And as AFL-CIO Richard Trumka has pointed out, Massachusetts voters have the same goals for reforming health care, creating good jobs and strengthening the economy as they did in November 2008—but President Obama and the Democrats have done too little.

Voters showed they don’t think Democrats have overreached—they think that the Democrats underreached.

In fact, voters were not worried about Democratic “overreach”—47 percent said their bigger concern about Democrats is that they haven’t succeeded in making needed change rather than tried to make too many changes too quickly (32 percent). Even voters for Scott Brown were more concerned about a lack of change (50 percent) than about trying to make too many changes too quickly (43 percent).

These results puts a lie to the corporate media spin that Democrats have gone “too far” in pushing a reform agenda.

Nor was the election result about health care reform. Brown actually lost among the 59 percent of voters who picked health care as one of their top two voting issues (50 percent for Coakley and 46 percent for Brown). Voters for Brown (55 percent ) were less likely to cite health care as a top issue than were voters for Coakley (66 percent).

The election also should be a wake-up call for those in Washington who support taxing working families’ health care. Voters who thought their health care would be taxed voted by 64 percent for Brown, while those who did not think their health care would be taxed voted by 54 percent to 40 percent for Coakley.

Our polling results show the election was not an endorsement of a Republican agenda or a call to abandon health care reform. Voters strongly disapprove of the job being done by congressional Republicans (26 percent approve and 58 percent disapprove), a much lower rating than they give to congressional Democrats (37 percent approve and 51 percent disapprove).

Other polls show the need for Democrats in Congress to take immediate action to create jobs, reform health care, stop catering to Wall Street and address the needs of America’s working class. As John Judis wrote, the election showed Democrats have lost ground primarily among white working and middle-class voters and senior citizens.

The Suffolk University poll in Massachusetts…singled out two white working-class towns, Gardner and Fitchburg, as bellwethers. Obama won Gardner, where Democrats hold a 3-1 registrations edge, by 59 percent to 31 percent in 2008. Brown won it by 56 percent to 42 percent. Obama won Fitchburg, with a similar Democratic edge, by 60 percent to 38 percent in 2008. Brown won it by 59 percent to 40 percent. That suggests a fairly dramatic shift among white working-class voters.

Summarizing the findings from election night polling conducted by Research 2000 Massachusetts Poll, MoveOn.org said the results show voters worry that Democrats in power “have not done enough to combat the policies of the Bush era.”

Both sets of voters wanted stronger, more progressive action on health care reform as well. In summary, the poll shows that the party who fights corporate interests—especially on making the economy work for most Americans—will win the confidence of the voters.

The working class has spoken. Will Democrats listen?

We often write about how China’s policy to devalue its currency, the yuan, has been a key factor in the U.S. trade deficit.

It’s not an easy issue to grasp. But economist Paul Krugman devotes an entire column to explaining why China’s devalued currency has such ramifications for our country. Here’s Krugman:

If supply and demand had been allowed to prevail, the value of China’s currency would have risen sharply. But Chinese authorities didn’t let it rise. They kept it down by selling vast quantities of the currency, acquiring in return an enormous hoard of foreign assets, mostly in dollars, currently worth about $2.1 trillion.

Many economists, myself included, believe that China’s asset-buying spree helped inflate the housing bubble, setting the stage for the global financial crisis. But China’s insistence on keeping the yuan/dollar rate fixed, even when the dollar declines, may be doing even more harm now.

Read the entire column here.