Tom Sgouros: Short Takes

Tom Sgouros: Short Takes

Occupy votes to leave, for a while

On Wednesday night, the Occupy Providence group voted to leave Burnside Park when the city opens a day center for homeless people. (If you're poor, there's really nowhere to go during the day when emergency shelters close.)

The setting in of winter has always made the suspension of the Occupy protests all but inevitable, at least in cold climes like ours. There is no shame in going in where it's warm in order not to die. The movement has accomplished a lot so far, though. It has reasserted the importance of justice in our economy, and created a language that reporters and politicians can use to talk about these issues. (And I've witnessed both using them in informal conversation in the last month.)

It is beyond debate that the economic roulette table of this country is tilted heavily to favor the 1% over the 99%. These issues are not going away just because it's getting colder outside. Because of that, I expect much more going forward from the corps of committed activists forged in the last few months. I've been honored to be involved in some of the discussions about moving forward, and I have been consistently delighted by the intelligence, perception, and sense of purpose I've witnessed there. Not only am I certain they will find ways to push the movement forward, I expect the supporters they have who could not join them in camping will find ways to help them in those fights.

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I also expect huge helpings of scorn and condescension to be heaped on these activists, largely by those who don't see a problem with the rampant injustice that stains our economic system, and also by those who can't be bothered to address it. (Probably beginning in the comments below.) This is a badge of honor, and the Occupy protesters should wear it with pride.

NLRB issues a pro-union ruling, go figure

In what will likely be its last actual act for the next year or so, the National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling recently designed to forbid employers from pointless delays of union certification elections. The current situation is that when a group of employees can demonstrate support enough to force a union certification election, it is possible for an employer to delay that election by weeks or months, in order to pressure employees to vote no, in order to find ways to lay off the troublemakers who collected the signatures to force the election in the first place, in order to move production somewhere else, and dozens of other reasons.

This ruling reasserts that the point of collecting signatures is to have an election and a process that can't guarantee that will happen is a corrupt one.

Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce are shrieking about the issue, and it's likely that this means the Senate will stand firm in its refusal to consider the nomination of any Obama nominee to the NLRB. They've successfully done so to date, and the board is down to three members out of five. When one member's term expires at the end of the year, the board will have only two members, and thus will lack a quorum for any decision at all.

Before celebrating this situation, if your inclinations reflexively have you sympathize with management, consider that the whole point of establishing the NLRB was to bring strikes and labor issues under the rule of law. The bargain labor made (in 1947, with the Taft-Hartley act) was to consent to limit their strikes in exchange for legal protections for workers and the right to organize. The NLRB exists to make that bargain a reality, and its establishment was bitterly fought by Labor at the time. To the extent that the NLRB cannot protect the right to organize, let alone protect workers on the job, the whole bargain will become a dead letter. Would you rather have strikes and other labor disputes mediated by the NLRB or revert to the labor conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s? Your choice.

Negotiations about negotiating negotiations

It appears that House Republicans have caved on the two-month extension for the payroll tax cut that was part of President Obama's stimulus plan, and an extension of unemployment benefits. This past week Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor were full of calls to negotiate and offered to appoint members to a negotiating team for conference with the Senate, after the Senate had approved a deal and left town.

Two realities were unfortunate for the Republican leadership team, though typically only one of them made it into most news stories. First, the Senate seemed uninterested in negotiating at this point. Second -- the typically unreported part -- is why the Senate isn't interested. That's because the two-month extension on the table was already a compromise position. In other words, the reason this went through the Senate with the support of 89 senators is only that both sides had agreed to this short-term extension so they could continue negotiating about the long term.

The House position then, is that they wanted to negotiate about negotiations, and were apparently willing to cut off unemployment checks for millions of unemployed people in order to force exactly that. It is quite clear that Speaker Boehner isn't so stupid. But it is equally clear this Speaker doesn't speak for his majority.

At last: Documented voter fraud

It seems that the Indiana Secretary of State has been caught voting at the wrong address.

Tom Sgouros is the editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, at whatcheer.net and the author of "Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island." Contact him at [email protected].

 

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