Farmers Get the Shaft Under Chumph’s Immigration

This is a common sight in the fields around where I currently live. Immigrants, mostly undocumented, picking the crops. These guys disappear…Say goodbye to your spaghetti sauce and pizzas. The pick tomatoes green, and then turn the red by gassing them with nitrogen. Otherwise the tomato is so soft it rots before getting to market. Last year, the tomato field was planted with cantaloupes –  the same crew (rounded up by an entrepreneurial ex-illegal – now citizen) was out there to pick them.

The Chumph’s Immigrant crackdown is getting ready to cost Americans greatly, and where it hurts – at the grocery store. We have become spoiled since the 50’s days to terrible TV Dinners and certain fruits and vegetables only being available during certain parts of the year. You don’t realize that until you go to a country which doesn’t have the agricultural infrastructure the US has.

A number of crops cannot be picked by machine. Tomatoes are too delicate. Add spinach, kale, cucumbers, lettuce, grapes, oranges, apples, pears, and a host of other fruit and vegetables which have to be picked by hand. Since the 60’s, and almost elusively now those crops are picked by undocumented immigrants.

That may be fine out there in the mid-west, where the principal crops of wheat and corn can be picked by machine. But unless you plan to subsist on a diet of popcorn and wheaties…

If the undocumented disappear, so do the strawberries, blueberries, and and damn near anything except bananas (they are gown in Latin America) to go with your cereal.

What happens to the independent farmer who provides those crops?

One last note…

Black folks don’t pick cotton anymore…

 

The New Tech Revolution – Politics

Seems a lot of time and energy was spent last election cycle on people who are not working. Not much about the 95% who are. A little known fact due to the antique ways the Government Economists draw up the numbers is the technology related services and non-manufacturing portion of America’s GDP is larger than Manufacturing. The Tech Industry employs over 6.7 million people. The U.S. tech industry is a major driving force in the overall economy, accounting for 7.1 percent of overall GDP and 11.6 percent of total private sector payroll. While roughly 12.3 million are involved in manufacturing, the oversize impact on the percentage of US payroll is driven by higher wages – A U.S. tech industry worker averages an annual wage of $105,400 compared to $51,600 for the average private sector wage. That isn’t readily apparent by looking at the Government numbers because the Tech Industry is split across hardware manufacturing and services.

The US has lost about 5 million manufacturing jobs since 2010, since the Great Recession that number is about 7 million.. The truth is that America has lost some 7 million manufacturing jobs and added some 53 million jobs in services. Further, of those 53 million new jobs some 62% of them were in higher paying occupations than those “high paying good jobs” in manufacturing we lost.

The canard that somehow “regulations”, as well a bringing manufacturing jobs back to America…Is total “Vaporware”. Robots have, and will continue to replace humans, especially in heavy manufacturing – meaning those new “factories” will be empty of people.What the impact of removing those regulations and seriously tilting the landscape in favor of the corporation over the workers will be has yet to be seen.

However, with 6.5 million tech works, and perhaps another 10-15 million jobs dependent on the tech industry. Tech workers are a powerful political force. Life is about to get really tough for those wanting to roll back worker protections, pursue antiquated social agendas, and operating to the benefit if the 1% …

“The Matrix” is organizing into a political leviathan to oppose Trump and his backward thinking political party. This is war.

The Tech Industry Joins the Political Fray

Across the sector, employees are asking their companies and top executives to engage in policy battles in a way that departs from long-standing precedent.

However expansive its ambitions to change the world might be, the tech industry is not known as a hotbed of activism. Historically, tech employees went to work, got the job done, and didn’t talk much about politics.

But in the wake of Donald’s Trump’s election, political talk is nearly everywhere—at company-wide meetings, in discussions among coworkers in the cafeterias, and in employee resource-group meet-ups. For obvious reasons: Many of the policies and views of the Trump administration are anathema to most of the tech industry. In particular, the sector is heavily populated by immigrants—many founders and senior leaders are immigrants, and 60 percent of STEM employees in Silicon Valley are foreign-born (for comparison, only 17 percent of the overall American labor force is foreign-born)—and Trump’s immigration policies (both proposed and enacted) constitute a clear threat to both the industry’s profits and its meritocratic ideology. His brand of politics—“closed borders,” “alternative facts”—is at odds with the primacy the industry places on data, openness, and the free flow of talent around the globe.

Trump’s victory in November stunned many tech employees. Barrie Segal, a senior program manager at the database company MongoDB, said, “There was a lot of confusion and sadness. People were openly weeping in the office. I’ve never seen that before at work.” As one senior manager at a major tech company described it, “It was like a bomb dropped and people died.” (Despite the outpouring of anti-Trump sentiment in the industry, many people I spoke with and the companies they work for asked not to be identified on the record, citing sensitive political times. Such concerns indicate that there are limits to just how public and forthcoming the industry will be with its activism.)

In response, an uptick in activism is evident throughout the industry: Attendance at meetings of advocacy groups like the Tech Workers Coalition have spiked. New organizations like Tech Solidarity have emerged. Last week, at a rally held by a new group called Tech Stands Up, around 1,000 people showed up over the course of the afternoon in downtown Palo Alto to show their support.

Back in late January, in the days after Trump’s first executive order on immigration barring refugees and stopping all entry of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, more than 2,000 at eight Google offices walked out to protest the order. There was thunderous applause when Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, and its co-founder, Sergey Brin, spoke at the walkout. “It was a powerful moment,” said one senior manager at Google who attended. “I’ve never been to anything like that at work before. The walkout was definitely in support of what the leadership is doing. But not so subtly, it was also a challenge not to compromise.” Noting that the leadership team at Google would be exposing the company to risk by actively opposing Trump, the manager said that employees have been given assurances that executives are “using [their] influence behind the scenes” to stand up for what they believe is right. “But there was an unstated message at the walkout,” the manager said. “‘Don’t fuck this up.’”

Inspired by those Google employees, workers at Comcast organized their own protest. To coordinate logistics and share information, an internal channel on Slack, an instant-messaging app, named “Walk Out” was set up. Within days, 1,700 people had joined the Slack channel and about a thousand Comcast employees at offices in several states walked out. After the walkout, employees wanted to keep up their political engagement and extend their reach beyond their company, so they created another Slack channel, a public one called “Innovation Activism,” for connecting with people across the tech industry in Philadelphia, where Comcast is headquartered. Internal company Slack channels have been created so that employees can keep each other updated with political information about things like which organizations to support and the phone numbers of congressional representatives.

“Workplace politicking of this kind is highly unusual,” says Sarah Soule, a professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University (and a colleague of mine). “Typically, workplace activism is focused on issues internal to the firm. Workers go on strike because they are unhappy with pay or working conditions. They push companies to offer domestic-partner benefits or improve their environmental practices. The goal is to get the company itself to change its practices in some way.”

What is happening right now in tech is different: Rather than advocating for internal policies, employees are putting pressure on their companies to become vocal opponents of the Trump administration—by having CEOs make public statements, by turning down certain government contracts, by signing on to legal briefs contesting Trump’s policies. Of the 127 companies that signed onto the amicus brief filed in support of Washington state’s legal challenge to the immigration executive order, the majority are tech companies.

Coworker.org, a digital platform designed to give workers more of a voice at their companies through online petitions and internal social networks, has seen a substantial increase in engagement since election day. “For the past few years, most of the campaigns have been in the retail and service sectors among front-line workers like baristas and bank tellers,” says Michelle Miller, a co-founder of Coworker.org. “But since the election, a greater variety of industries are reaching out to us. We could double our staff and put one person just on tech and we still would not be able to meet the demand.”

Not only is this form of workplace activism rare, but this kind of rapid political mobilization is also rare. It usually takes place only under certain circumstances, like when people feel that their way of life is under threat. Such was the case after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. Prior to the accident, environmental activism in the surrounding area was minimal. But afterward, many of the middle-class residents living nearby, who had no previous history of political protest, came out en masse.

Called “suddenly imposed grievances” or “moral shocks” by researchers, events like Three Mile Island and the 2016 presidential election are galvanizing political forces because they generate intense concern, and people who become the most politicized are those most outraged and directly threatened by the grievance. Since tech is uniquely under threat both ideologically and economically, it is exactly the industry one might expect to take on a new activist vigor. This also sheds light on the lack of response in other industries. Notably, no old-school car companies, finance or insurance companies, food conglomerates, or large retailers signed onto the amicus brief or saw employees at corporate go off the job in protest—perhaps because under Trump they are less at risk.

For many in tech, this is the first time they’ve taken part in political activism in their lives. Aaron Martin-Colby, a Comcast engineer who helped to organize the walkout there, said, “I’ve never done something like this before. I’ve been reluctant to invest anything emotional into politics because of the gridlock. But Trump has the power to do a great deal of unjust harm. I’ve realized it’s important that I make noise.”

Taking their activism a step further, other companies are putting their own proprietary tools to work in opposing Trump. After the executive order on immigration, the social-gathering platform Meetup decided to hold a “resist-a-thon.” The company’s business operations stopped for two days and during that time employees launched over 1,000 “#Resist” Meetup groups in 1,000 cities. To lower the barrier to entry, they made joining these groups free and enabled anyone in the group to schedule an event. They promoted these groups to their 30 million members and partnered with organizations like Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union to distribute ideas for promoting activism, such as hosting an emergency meetup to talk about how to protect Planned Parenthood or meetups to provide training on how to organize. The “#Resist” Meetup groups launched on February 6. Within a week, they had 50,000 members. As of last week, they had over 120,000 members involved, 6,500 related events scheduled, and more than 45,000 people who had RSVP’d….Read the rest here…

 

How “Outsourcing” Has Killed the Middle Class

The twin demons destroying the American Middle Class are Offshoring, and “Outsourcing”. They call it the “Gig economy”, and to be honest it is pretty f’cked up for the employees.

Offshoring is responsible for the massive growth of the Chinese economy. Back during Clinton and Bushit American companies off shored all of the computer chip Foundries. This resulted in a massive growth in the Chinese economy, and left America without a foundry on American soil capable of producing the high density chips used in everything from TVs to our most advanced weapons systems. No wonder the Chinese Military has been able to upgrade their weapons systems and  launch Astronauts into space. We gave them the technology, all because of Wall Street greed and corporate avarice.

A sweatshop call center in Nicaragua.

Worse was the loss of American jobs, manufacturing through the movement of factories off shore, and high tech through a combination of H1b Visas enabling companies to bring cheap workers over from India and other countries to displace American Graduates, and second “Outsourcing” where either American jobs were shipped overseas, or to sweat shops on American soil. This is the driver behind Trump, and Sanders, Unfortunately in Trump’s supporter’s case they would rather cling to their racism and blame minorities – than blame who is actually screwing them. Stupid is and Stupid does.

Surge in outsourcing wipes out middle-class jobs

For nearly 20 years Alfredo Molena made a middle-class living repairing bank ATMs in Los Angeles, despite being a high school dropout and immigrant from El Salvador.

By 2000 he was earning about $45,000 a year, enough to support his wife and two children in a spacious apartment and take periodic vacations to El Salvador and Hawaii. He had health insurance, a matching 401(k) plan, and a company-supplied cellphone and vehicle. But it all unraveled in 2005 after his employer, Bank of America, subcontracted the work to Diebold Inc., a firm specializing in servicing ATMs.

Today Molena drives a truck long-haul for about $30,000 a year, putting him in the bottom third of household incomes. He has no medical insurance. “I cannot afford it,” he snapped.

Globalization and the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing jobs to China and other cheap-labor countries are commonly blamed for driving down the wages and living standards of ordinary American workers, but there is another, less-known factor behind the shrinking middle class: domestic outsourcing.

Many jobs have been farmed out by employers over the years. No one knows their total numbers, but rough estimates based on the growth of temporary-help and other business and professional service payrolls suggest that one in six jobs today are subcontracted, or almost 20 million positions, said Lynn Reaser, economist at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego.

Separate Labor Department data show that some of these occupations have seen a significant decline in inflation-adjusted, or real, wages over the last decade.

In 2005, there were 138,210 workers nationwide who repaired ATMs, computers and other office machines, earning a mean annual salary of $37,640.

Ten years later, the number of such jobs had shrunk to 106,100, with most of them subcontracted at annual pay of $38,990. But after accounting for inflation, that’s a drop of about 15 percent from 2005.

By contrast, real wages for all occupations rose 1.3 percent between 2005 and 2015 � itself a tiny gain over the last decade, but still significantly more than those hit by domestic outsourcing.

“If a firm wants to save labor costs, outsourcing is just a way of resetting wages and expectations,” said Susan Houseman, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Unlike the effect of offshoring, with its relocation of jobs and plants abroad, economists know relatively little about the extent and effects of decades of subcontracting production and services to third parties in the U.S. But what research has been done suggests the practice has played a significant role in the nation’s troubling trends of stagnating wages and rising inequality.

Rosemary Batt and other researchers at Cornell University found that large employers at subcontracted call centers, for instance, paid their workers about 40 percent less than comparable workers employed in-house at large firms, not including the value of health and retirement benefits…Read the Rest Here…

 

The CH-trump Has Stiffed Thousands of Workers on Moneys Owed

The sleazebag Chumph has stiffed literally thousands of small businesses and blue collar workers out of their well earned pay.

Indeed in one case, the Chumph was ordered to pay $32,000 to a painter at his Doral Gold Resort, or have it foreclosed and sold to pay debts! No wonder the PGA moved their tournament from there to Mexico!

What Trump is doing, is legal blackmail. And it is legal under the corrupt US Legal System. It works like this – big, wealthy company refuses to pay subcontractor (or any other excuse) $200,000. Big company sues – or waits fro small company to sue to get it’s money. Small company cannot afford to pay lawyers to defend itself, a legal cost which can easily go north of $100,000 for a simple suit. Small company goes bankrupt, or is forced to settle at a loss. Big company (Chumph) can afford to keep full time layers on staff, and only spends $50,000 basically stealing $150,000 in profit, knowing full well little guy can’t afford a reasonable defense in court.

That is what the 3,500 Chump lawsuits are all about. It is using an effed-up legal system, set up to massively favor the rich, to screw the middle class small businessman and poor.

The Trump Dump in Florida – Just last month, Trump Miami Resort Management LLC settled with 48 servers at his Miami golf resort over failing to pay overtime for a special event. The settlements averaged about $800 for each worker and as high as $3,000 for one, according to court records. Some workers put in 20-hour days over the 10-day Passover event at Trump National Doral Miami, the lawsuit contends. Trump’s team initially argued a contractor hired the workers, and he wasn’t responsible, and counter-sued the contractor demanding payment.

USA TODAY exclusive: Hundreds allege Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills

Donald Trump casts himself as a protector of workers and jobs, but a USA TODAY NETWORK investigation found hundreds of people – carpenters, dishwashers, painters, even his own lawyers – who say he didn’t pay them for their work.

During the Atlantic City casino boom in the 1980s, Philadelphia cabinet-builder Edward Friel Jr. landed a $400,000 contract to build the bases for slot machines, registration desks, bars and other cabinets at Harrah’s at Trump Plaza.

The family cabinetry business, founded in the 1940s by Edward’s father, finished its work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization, the resort’s builder.

Edward’s son, Paul, who was the firm’s accountant, still remembers the amount of that bill more than 30 years later: $83,600. The reason: the money never came. “That began the demise of the Edward J. Friel Company… which has been around since my grandfather,” he said.

Donald Trump often portrays himself as a savior of the working class who will “protect your job.” But a USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found he has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past three decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them.

At least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings reviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK, document people who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them for their work. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.

Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according toU.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. Both cases were resolved by the companies agreeing to pay back wages.

In addition to the lawsuits, the review found more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work — since the 1980s. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y., air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by theNew Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing….More on This Story Here…

 

 

 

Elizabeth Warren – “Them That’s Got”, and Them That’s Been Had

One of the massive Catch 22’s post economic meltdown in the 00’s has been the FICA Score System. With the housing meltdown, millions of people went into either foreclosure or credit crisis. As jobs shrunk and people lost jobs, they were unable to pay their bills. Trying to get a job? In a go-round reminiscent of Ray Charles’ Song line “If you have to have something, before you can get something, How you get the first is still a mystery to me!” NOPE! Our HR Department has determined your credit is bad.

So if you got laid off, and can’t pay your bills, you can’t get a new job to pay your bills on time…Because you were laid off and can’t pay your bills.

Elizabeth Warren just launched her latest populist fight — and it impacts millions of American workers

Progressive populist Sen. Elizabeth Warren says checking prospective employees’ credit history is “discrimination” and is calling on American employers to end the practice, which she argues “bears no relationship to job performance and that can be riddled with inaccuracies.”

In a new Time op-ed, the Massachusetts senator, along with Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen (D) warned that the common practice of employers checking the credit history of potential employees was wrongheadedly discriminatory against “hard working people,” noting that “one in five job-seekers could be rejected by an employer because their credit report lists a medical debt in default—even when they’ve paid off the debt in full and on time”:

Credit reporting companies that sell Americans’ personal data to potential employers have pushed the narrative that a credit history somehow provides insight into someone’s character. But, as even a representative from the TransUnion credit bureau admitted, they “don’t have any research to show any statistical correlation between what’s in somebody’s credit report and their job performance.” In fact, research has shown that an individual’s credit has little to no correlation with his or her ability to succeed in the workplace. Credit reports are not a way to screen out bad potential employees; they are just a way to discriminate against people who have fallen on hard times.

Not only are credit reports poor indicators of job performance, but in many cases they aren’t even accurate. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported in 2013 that as many as 1 in 5 consumers could identify at least one error in their credit reports. That’s compounded by the difficulty in correcting errors—not only are consumers often unaware an error exists in the first place, but credit reporting agencies can be frustratingly slow to respond when it comes to fixing those mistakes.

A credit history, Warren suggested, was no proper indicator for a potential employees capabilities, and using it to help weed out candidates amounted to legalized “discrimination”:

For hardworking people struggling to make ends meet, the only way to get back on their feet is to find a good job and earn a paycheck. But even when they are able to sell their homes—often at a loss—or after they are forced to close their business’ doors or find temporary work, that bad credit history continues to haunt them.

And despite the often-desperate effort to find a job, many employers are unfairly shutting the door on applicants with less-than-stellar credit. We should call this what it is: discrimination.

As the Huffington Post noted, both Warren and Cohen have reintroduced the Equal Employment for All Act, which would ban employers from checking the credit reports of potential employees with a few exceptions. The legislation, the two lawmakers wrote, “makes sure that hiring decisions are based on an individual’s skill and experience—not on past financial struggles.”

“This is an issue of basic fairness,” Warren argued. “Americans should be able to compete for jobs on their merits, not on whether they have enough money to pay all their bills.”

“Much of America—hard-working, bill-paying America—has damaged credit,” the fierce Wall Street watchdog observed. “It is wrong to shut them out of the job market.”

 

Jesse Jackson Brings the Old Fire in Wisconsin

Jesse Jackson recalls Martin Luther King’s last days in support of Memphis Workers, and the March on Selma –

Jesse Jackson invokes Martin Luther King Jr. in a blockbuster speech to Wisconsin protesters

On Friday afternoon, Jesse Jackson returned to Madison for the third time in two weeks to hurl thunderbolts at Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting budget bill. Jackson gave a hastily arranged speech to city employees on the steps of the City County Building, invoking Martin Luther King Jr.’s crusade for Memphis workers just before his 1968 assassination.

“His last act on Earth was marching for workers’ rights,” said Jackson, who accompanied King during his final march in Memphis.

If Wisconsin workers were looking for moral authority to bolster their fight against Walker and the Republican legislators, they couldn’t have done much better than this.

Jackson was in town to meet with Mayor Dave Cieslewicz, who introduced him to the throng of people spilling out onto Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. (What better street for this speech?) Wearing a trench coat and a determined expression, Jackson spoke forcefully for about 20 minutes, without notes, in his patented preacher’s cadences. He engaged the crowd in call-and-response, hoping to keep them motivated in this weeks-long battle with no end in sight.

“I’d like to congratulate you for having the staying power to hang on,” he said.

Jackson has clearly been keeping up on breaking news from the Capitol, judging from his intimate knowledge of the issues. He referenced the governor’s cuts to education and public transportation, his voter ID bill, and his proposal for selling off the state’s public utilities in no-bid contracts.

Most powerfully, he noted this week’s anniversary of Dr. King’s civil-rights march in Selma, Alabama, when another governor – George Wallace — stood in opposition.

“This is the weekend we marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge for the right to vote in 1965!” he said.

And then, devastatingly:

“We’ve gone from Wallace to Walker!”

 

 

Israel And Child Deportation

Now that the strategy of importing foreign workers to drive Palestinians out has worked, Israel wants to drive out the replacements…

"Don't Want Your Kind Livin' Here"

“Jewish character of the state of Israel”? Over here we call it “Anchor babies” and “English Only”…

Israel to deport hundreds of migrant workers’ children

Israel moved Sunday to deport the offspring of hundreds of migrant workers, mostly small children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew and have never seen their parents’ native countries.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the new policy was intended to stem a flood of illegal immigrants, whose children receive state-funded education and healthcare benefits, and to defend Israel’s Jewish identity.

“On the one hand, this problem is a humanitarian problem,” Netanyahu said during a meeting Sunday of the Cabinet, which had debated the move for nearly a year. “We all feel and understand the hearts of children. But on the other hand, there are Zionist considerations and ensuring the Jewish character of the state of Israel.

 

Pot Workers Unionize!

First off, an actor whose roles I enjoyed – Dennis Hopper passed away today. His role in the fil m Easy Rider made him an Icon of the Boomer Generation.

RIP Dennis! And don’t Bogart that joint!

Mary Jane Farm

San Jose union begins organizing pot workers

A major California labor union is organizing medical cannabis workers in Oakland, a move that analysts say will help efforts to legalize marijuana and open the door for the union to organize thousands more workers if state voters pass a measure in November to allow recreational marijuana use by adults.

The 26,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5 in San Jose is believed to be the first union in the country to organize workers in a marijuana-related business. It is considering new job classifications including “bud tender” – a sommelier of sorts who helps medical marijuana users choose the right strain for their ailment.

“Union bud tender,” said Carl Anderson, executive director of AMCD, an Oakland nonprofit medical cannabis dispensary that is going through the city’s permitting process. The dispensary has 15 freshly minted union employees as it readies for an expected opening in December. “With full union health benefits and a pension,” Anderson said.

With roughly 100 cannabis industry workers in Oakland now in the process of unionizing, the move is mutually beneficial for labor and marijuana advocates.

The union, whose membership is dominated by commercial grocery store workers, retail clerks and some agricultural workers, gets to establish a toehold in a growing new pool of cannabis workers…