By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Michigan's new Emergency Manager Law is already forcing major
concessions from unions. The law gives the governor the power to declare a
city insolvent and appoint an emergency manager with virtually unlimited
power to reorganize every aspect of city business, including dissolving
the city entirely. The emergency manager even has the power to terminate
collective bargaining agreements.
As a result of these expanded new
powers, public employees unions in some Michigan municipalities are
already making large preemptive concessions to keep their cities from
tripping any of the "triggers" in the new law that might give the governor
an opening to send in a union-busting
emergency manager, Eartha Jane Melzer reports in the Michigan
Messenger.
In Flint, the firefighters' union agreed to increase
contributions to health insurance and give up holiday pay and night shift
differentials. Flint Firefighters Union President Raul Garcia told the href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704360404576206603444375580.html">Wall
Street Journal that these concessions were driven by fear of a state
takeover of Flint. "I would rather give concessions that I would like than
have an [emergency financial manager] or something of that magnitude come
in and say this is what you are going to do," Garcia said.
The new
law also gives the Emergency Manager the power to href="http://bit.ly/i84FDl">privatize prisons, Melzer notes.
Detroit grows green
The citizens of Detroit
aren't waiting around for an emergency manager to take over. The city's
industrial economy is dying, but its grassroots economy is stirring to
life, Jenny Lee and Paul Abowd report in In These Times. Detroit
residents have been growing their own
food in town for decades, but recently activists and the city have
joined forces to link many small producers into a network that will
provide food security for the city.
Wal-Mart and wage
discrimination
Next week, the Supreme Court will take up
the case of 100 women who are suing Wal-Mart for wage discrimination. As
Scott Lemieux explains in The American Prospect, the Court will
decide whether these women can band
together to sue the nation's largest retailer, or whether each must
sue the firm individually.
Lemieux argues that, for the sake of
women's rights at work, it is very important that these Wal-Mart employees
be allowed to sue together instead of one at a time:
Given the compelling stories these individual women can
tell, does it matter whether they can file suit collectively? Absolutely,
for at least two reasons. First of all, only a class-action suit can
properly create a record of the systematic gender discrimination
at Wal-Mart. Any individual case can be dismissed as an anomaly or a
misunderstanding, but the volume of complaints makes clear that gender
discrimination was embedded deeply within the culture of the corporation,
a very relevant fact for a discrimination suit.
Litigation is expensive and time-consuming, for the individuals and for
the court system. Forcing victims of discrimination to sue one by one
makes it less likely that they will seek justice, especially if they're
suing because they were underpaid in the first place. Wal-Mart claims that
the class is too large to be allowed to proceed, and that the women
couldn't possibly have similar enough claims. But as Lemieux points out,
the class is huge because Wal-Mart is huge.
War and the
deficit
Jamelle Bouie writes at href="http://bit.ly/iew5pr">TAPPED, in response to the United States'
new military commitments in Libya:
I just wish we could
at least acknowledge the obvious truth: conservatives don't care about
deficits but will use them to cut spending on poor people. When it comes
to things they like -- wars, for instance -- they're willing to pay any
price.
The U.S. fired 110 Tomahawk Missiles at Libya
on Saturday, at an estimated total cost of $81 million, or 33 times the
annual federal funding for National Public Radio.
Sally Kohn of
TAPPED notes that the United States scraped together href="http://bit.ly/hDhDYs ">$2.3 million worth of "blood money" to
pay off the families of the victims of Raymond Davis, a rogue CIA
operative who shot and killed two men who tried to rob him in Pakistan.
Laura Flanders of GRITtv calculates
that $2.3 million ransom for a single killer would have paid the salaries
of 45 Wisconsin public school teachers
for a year.
Public pensions 101
We often
hear that public pensions are unfunded.
On the Breakdown, Chris Hayes of The Nation asks economist Dean
Baker what this actually means. Baker explains that s0-called "defined
benefit" pensions have become rare in the private sector, but remain
relatively common in the public sector. A defined benefit pension
guarantees the pensioner a certain income. Most private sector pensions
are so-called "defined contribution" plans, which means that employer puts
aside a certain amount of money each month for the employee, but there's
no guarantee how much return the pensioner will eventually get on that
investment.
A state pension fund is considered unfunded if the
assets the fund has today aren't sufficient to cover the defined benefits
that are due to workers over the next 30 years. Baker notes that many
funds are a lot healthier than they look because their values were
calculated at the nadir of the stock market in 2009. The market has since
made up a large percentage of that ground. A handful of states were
mismanaging their pension funds, but most states have been
responsible.
Ethical outlaws
Bea is a
manager of a big-box chain store in Maine. The company pays her staff
between $6 and $8 an hour and many are struggling. Even as she tries to
keep a professional atmosphere in the store, Bea has been known to href="http://bit.ly/eoXVPX">bend the rules to help an employee in
need, as Lisa Dodson describes in YES! Magazine:
When one of her employees couldn't afford to buy her
daughter a prom dress, Bea couldn't shake the feeling that she was
implicated by the injustice. "Let's just say ... we made some mistakes
with our prom dress orders last year," she told me. "Too many were
ordered, some went back. It got pretty confusing." And Edy? "She knocked
them dead" at the prom.
Andrew, a manager in the
Midwest is quietly padding his employees' paychecks because he knows their
wages aren't enough to live on. Andrew knows he might be accused of
stealing, but he does it anyway because the alternative is
unthinkable.
Dodson interviewed hundreds of low- and middle-income
people about the economy between 2001 and 2008. Along the way, she
stumbled on what she calls "the moral underground," a world where managers
bend the rules at corporate expense to enable their low-wage staff to get
by. It is legal to pay people less than a living wage, but increasing
numbers of people like Bea and Arthur have decided that the situation is
morally unacceptable, and quietly acted accordingly.
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