Archive for the 'Labor' Category

Lincoln didn’t free all of the slaves

One of the nation’s largest food processors has been treating mentally handicapped workers as virtual slaves, paying them as little as 37 cents per hour:

Last month, FBI agents, social services and health department officials in Iowa converged on a 106-year-old bunkhouse. It’s where dozens of mentally retarded men lived when they were not working for as little as 37 cents per hour gutting turkeys in a processing plant, according to news reports and documents released by state officials.

Some of the men had been working at the plant and living at the company-owned bunkhouse since the 1970s. The arrangement grew out of a Depression-era federal law that allows employers to pay disabled workers less than the minimum wage. Roughly 400,000 workers are currently covered by the law.

The 21 men in question are Texans who work for a company called Henry’s Turkey Service. According to reports in the Des Moines Register, Henry’s took advantage of a section of the labor law that allows the company to pay lower than minimum wage to disabled workers – and to deduct their living expenses from their pay.

Henry’s, a Texas company, in the 1970s started taking the deinstitutionalized men to Iowa, where they worked at a plant owned by West Liberty Foods, one of the nation’s largest turkey processors.

West Liberty released a statement to the Register saying it had an “agreement” with the turkey service and played no role in housing the men or paying their wages. Turkey service owner Kenneth J. Henry declined to comment but referred ProPublica to his attorney.

Because we have laws that protect most workers from this kind of abuse, it’s easy to forget that there are still plenty of evil people who live among us, eager to take advantage of any legal loophole that would enable them to abuse and exploit their fellow men. And there are always blood-sucking lawyers willing to defend these demons:

The men were treated well and the bunkhouse was comfortable, Iowa attorney David Scieszinski said. Further, he said the furor over the men’s situation is simply “politics” on the part of legislators who have never set foot in the bunkhouse.

“[Politicians] don’t know,” Scieszinski said to ProPublica. “But they start making political statements.”

But the worst part of the story is that officials have known about abhorrent conditions for workers at West Liberty Foods for at least 10 years:

In 1997, the county social department fielded complaints that the men had sustained bruises and unhealed fractures. But officials failed to act, with one official noting in an e-mail that he didn’t want Muscatine County to be left “holding the bag” for Texas’ residents.

A Labor Department inspector general’s report (page 20) shows that department staffers knew that in 1998, Henry’s Turkey Service claimed to pay about 50 men $5.65 an hour, but after deducting rent and board, ultimately gave them each $60 per month.

The company’s justification? It had to keep $60,000 that year to recoup the cost of renovations to the men’s bunkhouse that had been completed in the 1970s.

Last month an Iowa fire marshal noted the profusion of space heaters in the building and declared it unfit for habitation. Iowa social services officials moved the men from the home.

So the loophole that allows handicapped workers to be paid less than the minimum wage isn’t the only problem here. If federal and state officials had enforced current laws, this sorry practice would have ended a decade ago.

This just in from Noida, India:

The Chief Executive Officer of an Italy-based auto components manufacturing company was bludgeoned to death allegedly by a group of dismissed employees inside its manufacturing unit here on Monday.

It all happened around noon when a group of former employees of the company who were dismissed a couple of months ago turned violent during a meeting with the management and allegedly attacked Lalit Kishore Chaudhury, CEO and Managing Director of Graziano Trasmissioni India Pvt. Ltd, at Udyog Vihar with lathis and rods. He was taken to a nearby hospital where doctors declared him dead.

“The management had invited the dismissed employees for talks to sort out the matter, but an altercation broke out between the employees and the members of the management over some issue. Following this, a security guard opened fire in the air and a mob of over 100 people waiting outside stormed inside the premises of the manufacturing unit. Mr. Chaudhury, who was in his cabin, came down on hearing the commotion and was battered to death,” said Superintendent of Police (Greater Noida) Baburam.

Fortunately, in this country we’re still a long way from the point where fired employees beat their CEOs to death. But if executives keep demanding multi-million dollar pay packages while they lay off thousands of workers, we might get there.

Love old Leo or loathe him, he was always true to old ‘traditional’ Labour values as well as to his personal principles … regardless.

He was a one-off.

It’s doubtful we’ll see his like again. And that’s a shame.

Oh, that we still had a some sincere, genuinely gentlemanly, honourable & honest, determined, dedicated and principled politicians such as Leo Abse.

Gay rights champion and former MP Leo Abse has died at the age of 91, according to a family friend.

The former Labour MP for Pontypool and then Torfaen died at Charing Cross Hospital, west London, on Tuesday night after a short illness.

Mr Abse guided a Private Member’s Bill through Parliament in 1967 that legalised sex between men.

He was also credited with helping to liberalise divorce laws through the 1969 Divorce Reform Act.

Leo Abse was seen as a crusading backbencher

Mr Abse, who was in the Commons for nearly 30 years, is survived by his second wife Ania.

Learn some more about this amazing ‘little big man’.

(Cross posted from How This Old Brit Sees It)

Deaths from workplace falls increased about 370 percent from 1992 to 2006. That’s not surprising in this era of lax government oversight. And given the concentration of Hispanics in dangerous jobs, it’s not surprising that they’re bearing the brunt of the increase. And given the unwillingness of Southern states to regulate employers, it’s not surprising that Hispanics are up to 4 times more likely to die on the job in Southern states than they are in other parts of the country.

Docks all along the west coast were idle today, as workers took the day off to protest the Iraq War. Today is the international Labor Day, and the fifth anniversary of Bush’s declaration that the United States had won the Iraq war.

Funny old world ain’t it?

Isn’t it interesting (wacky, weird and wonderful even), the way so many things ‘wealth-wise’ work out and all?

Or don’t.

Especially, across in the States.

And isn’t it simply astonishingly surprising, how so many of those people least able to afford to, so often seem set on needlessly losing themselves (still more), money by blindly buying into so many politician’s (so often so patently), phony packaging, posturing, promises, premisses, philosophies, and ….

Oh, never mind …..

Clintons made nearly $109M since 2000

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Clinton made nearly $109 million since they left the White House, capitalizing on the world’s interest in the former first couple and lucrative business ventures.

Money magazine estimates John McCain’s net worth at $40 million.

If the media were to apply the same standards to John McCain that they applied to John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, they would report (endlessly) that John McCain, a very rich man, is embracing tax cuts that even John McCain has said unfairly benefit the very rich. And they would be demanding that he release his tax returns so voters could see how much money John McCain would…

Measuring Wealth of the ‘08 Candidates

Perhaps only one word can be used to describe all of the leading presidential contenders: multimillionaire.

Not only that. With one exception among the three leading Republicans and three leading Democrats, the contenders each appear to be worth tens of millions.

The exception: Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Huge Job Losses Set Off Recession Alarms

WASHINGTON

It’s no longer a question of recession or not.

Now it’s how deep and how long.

We wonder which of the presidential candidates pictured will eventually be elected as the one most wanted to move into the White House this time? Elected by hundreds of millions of Americans, in the belief that ‘that‘ particular person is much more likely (than either of the other two), to do the right thing by them - and the best thing for them - and for their families of course. Eh?

Well, we certainly know which contender we’re (completely), convinced will. And their name definitely doesn’t begin with an M. Nor does it start with a C.

But as we said at the outset, isn’t it interesting, wacky, weird …

*(Cross posted at How This Old Brit Sees It)

102 Iraqis Killed, 120 Wounded

Several bombings and other violence left 102 Iraqis killed and 120 wounded. The figures include new casualties from a previous reported bombing in Samarra. Among today’s dead and injured are a woman and children, who were accidentally targeted by British troops in Basra.

Iraq court acquits Shiite officials over death squads

An Iraqi court has acquitted two top Shiite officials charged with orchestrating death squads which stormed into hospitals to snatch Sunni Arab patients and murder them, a court spokesman said Tuesday. It was the first time two high-ranking Shiite officials had been charged over a wave of sectarian killings that exploded across Iraq after the bombing of a Shiite shrine two years ago. A three-judge panel on Monday found Hakim al-Zamili, a former deputy health minister, and Brigadier General Hamid al-Shammari, who headed the ministry’s security forces, not guilty of kidnapping, murder and corruption charges.

The two were alleged to have formed a private Shiite militia that would storm into Baghdad hospitals and snatch wounded and sick Sunni Arabs from their beds, issue death threats to doctors and gun down family members visiting patients. Their trial was marred by the absence of several prosecution witnesses who failed to show up after reportedly receiving death threats.

(It seems like the courts have no trouble convicting and executing Sunnis who are accused of atrocities against their fellow Iraqis. Our new Sunni allies in Anbar are *really* not going to like this. –g)

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Hard work never killed anybody.

How many times have we all heard that hollered?

Isn’t it sad that so many souls still swallow such codswallop?

Such as a certain late lamented, Toyota motor maker.

Trivia question: what commodity provides al Qaeda with most of its revenue?
(hint: the answer is not ‘fake handbags’)

The New York Times has now blown the lid off of the terrorists’ secret revenue stream. As it turns out, the evildoers are making their money by selling cheap knock-offs of designer clothes and accessories:

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Richard Frankensteen (R) with Walter Reuther

The inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 ushered in a new era for the labor movement. The economy began growing and the unemployment rate began falling. Also, for the first time in 25 years workers could go on strike and picket their employers without fear that the federal government harass, beat, and imprison them. Labor organizers like “Big Dick” Frankensteen thought they were seeing the dawn of a new era for the labor movement. Frankensteen set out to organize Ford Motor Corporation, the largest automaker in the world.

Of course, Ford had other ideas. His security chief, Harry Bennett, hired goons to beat and intimidate strikers and labor activists. At one point, they even firebombed Frankensteen’s house. Bennett and Ford managed to keep Ford union-free until 1937, when they made a fatal mistake. Frankensteen and a few assistants, including a young Walter Reuther, gathered at Ford’s River Rouge plant for a photo-op. And in front of several news reporters and photographers, dozens of Bennett’s goons beat the union organizers mercilessly. Some were thrown down flights of stairs, and one suffered a broken back. It was all caught on film, and Americans woke the next morning to see this photo in their newspapers of Frankensteen being beaten:

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