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Talk about quality, union-made work. When Cedar Point, an amusement park nestled on the banks of Ohio's Lake Erie, wanted to add to its stable of roller coasters a 4,164-foot monster called the GateKeeper, it turned to quality union labor to get the job done. The Sandusky Register reports that Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), standing before the coaster's blue tracks, not only said he was proud that so much of its construction used labor from his home state of Ohio, but that it was union labor.
What if when you had a question or a concern about your workplace, you could go somewhere and get answers? Our friends at Working America, AFL-CIO's community affiliate, are launching a new site, www.fixmyjob.com, where every worker will have a resource to get more information or privately raise concerns about workplace issues.For fixmyjob.com to be successful, more information needs to be collected about people who work. Can you take a few minutes to answer some quick questions about your current job, or the last job you had?Fill out the quick survey now to share your story of work and to make sure fixmyjob.com becomes a powerful tool to support workers:go.aflcio.org/fix-my-job
When learning that she would be classified by her employer not as an employee, but as an "independent" contractor, Sara Horowitz decided to do something, not just accept denial of benefits and security from her job. She grew up in a labor-oriented family and even though her position didn't qualify her to join any existing union, she decided to form her own. Horowitz and her work with the Freelancers Union were recently covered in a New York Times article.
A new study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) shows states that cut tax rates do worse in terms of economic growth than other states. Numerous Republican governors have pushed for tax cuts under the premise that lower tax rates lead to greater economic growth, but the CBPP study concludes that this premise is wrong.
Over the past 40 years, some of the nation’s biggest and most profitable companies have not only moved America's jobs and manufacturing overseas, but by taking advantage of a U.S. tax code that encourages companies to shift their income overseas, they have cut the taxes they owe by more than half. The result, writes Jia Lynn Yang in The Washington Post,is lower revenue here that could pay for infrastructure, education and other services that support domestic growth—and that make life easier for U.S. firms.
Imagine 2050 sends us the following story from its blog.The AFL-CIO and the SEIU are standing up to Republicans and business groups for fair wages in federal immigration reform. While the group of bipartisan senators, called the “Gang of Eight,” working on the immigration bill say that the bill is 90% done, much contention remains around the "guest" worker provisions in the bill. [In fact, the so-called “guest” worker provisions in the bill are not “guest” worker provisions at all. The AFL-CIO has insisted that any new foreign workers be allowed a road map to citizenship and portability between employers so that they are not indentured to a single employer as a condition of remaining in the United States —as is the case under most existing temporary worker programs.]
Wonkblog's Ezra Klein published 21 charts yesterday from the International Federation of Health Plans that illustrate just how ridiculous our health care prices are in the United States.Klein writes:This is the fundamental fact of American health care: We pay much, much more than other countries do for the exact same things. For a detailed explanation of why, see this article. But this post isn’t about the why. It’s about the prices and the graphs.
The AFT and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been working on finding a better way to evaluate and develop teachers, using research to determine the best ways to train teachers and ensure that students get the best educational experience possible. Although the AFT and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation don’t always agree on everything, they share the firm belief that students have a right to effective instruction and that teachers want to do their very best.
Source: NYTimes
