U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks to the press after meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House in Washington, April 1, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing
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NEW YORK/SEATTLE
Tom Wroblewski, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District Lodge 751, enters the union headquarters to announce that a vote narrowly passed by 51% in support of Boeing’s contract with the machinists’ union to construct the wings for the 777X jetliner in Seattle, Washington January 3, 2014.
Credit: Reuters/David Ryder
NEW YORK/SEATTLE (Reuters) – Angry Boeing machinists have filed eight unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board alleging their union’s top leaders manipulated a recent contract vote, and demanding that ballots be recast.
The NLRB has launched an investigation into the charges, filed by individual members against the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said Anne Pomerantz, an attorney with the NLRB regional office in Seattle.
The charges stem from a January 3 vote that approved Boeing’s contract offer by just 600 votes, ensuring its latest jetliner, the 777X, will be built in the Seattle area.
The vote divided the union because, to gain the work, machinists had to agree to eliminate their pension after 2016.
If the push for a recount fails, which appears likely, Boeing will resume the rocky relationship with the city and region it helped to build, although it is less of a force.
Union members allege their international leaders timed the vote to coincide with the holidays, when many members were on vacation, and “disenfranchised” them, Pomerantz said.
The members also allege leaders held the vote over objections from the local district, which considered the new offer too similar to a November proposal to merit re-balloting.
“All the charges we have seen are against the international, not Boeing,” Pomerantz said.
The “international,” an umbrella organization, oversees local districts, such as District 751, which represents more than 31,000 machinists in the Puget Sound area.
FAIR OR NOT?
“We were not fairly represented by the international,” said Robley Evans, 51, a local union steward and 28-year employee at Boeing, who filed one of the unfair labor practice charges.
“When you have a vote that was razor thin and you influence it like that … It changed the election in my opinion.”
But R. Thomas Buffenbarger, international president, said workers had every opportunity to vote, and 500 applied for electronic absentee ballots, which could be cast from anywhere.
“This contract vote was probably as accessible to everyone in that bargaining unit as any I’ve ever seen,” he said in an interview.
The ballots were counted at union halls where workers cast them, he said, “in eyesight of everyone who wanted to watch.”
Pomerantz said the NLRB will interview all sides and determine if there is merit in moving forward with a case that the leaders did not provide fair representation. If so, the NLRB General Counsel could file a complaint.
Boeing noted that none of the charges have been filed against it, but declined to comment further.
“Boeing has no authority over the voting process or scheduling,” spokesman Doug Alder said.
Bryan Corliss, spokesman for District 751, said no local leaders were involved in filing charges.
“This is all being member-driven,” he said.
One of four lodges, or local groupings of workers, passed resolutions on Tuesday calling for an audit and a revote, he said. The others were expected to meet this week, their first opportunity to talk since the vote last Friday.
“We’re going to hear a lot from our members,” he said.
MILITANT PAST
Seattle staged the first U.S. city-wide general strike in 1919, and that militancy lives on. Boeing has been hit with four major strikes in the past 25 years, halting 200 days of production in Seattle-area plants.
In an effort to assert independence from the region, Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001. In 2011, it opened a 787 production line in South Carolina, a state much less friendly to unions, and has acquired land there for expansion.
Fear that the new widebody aircraft and its new carbon-composite wing factory would leave the state gave the company leverage on its workforce and the local government. Boeing received offers from 22 states interested in the factory.
If “the 777X was not built in the region, it would have been a big hit to Seattle,” said Roque Deherrera, a business advocate at Seattle’s Office of Economic Development.
A ‘no’ vote by the union, “would have sent a clear signal that further models would not be built in Puget Sound, which would be tremendously significant,” said Alex Pietsch, who works for Washington’s governor promoting aerospace.
“The 777X was really the watershed moment.”
Boeing’s commercial aircraft operation contributes $ 70 billion to the state economy through aircraft sales, buying local goods and paying wages, according to a recent study by aerospace industry boosters.
Younger tech workers, who flooded the city over the past two decades, might earn and spend more, and the economy now includes Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc, Costco Wholesale Corp, Starbucks Corp and other big companies. But the loss of Boeing would wipe out part of the region’s middle class and gut blue-collar jobs, especially around Boeing’s plants in Everett and Renton.
HIGH BAR
To spur a revote, however, the facts would need to show that the actions of international leaders were discriminatory, arbitrary or in bad faith, a relatively high bar, said Jeffrey Hirsch, a former NLRB lawyer who is now a professor and associate dean at the University of North Carolina.
“If in fact it really disenfranchised folks, that may be an issue,” he said.
But the standard is not whether the election could have been done better. It is whether the actions were arbitrary.
“A lower turnout doesn’t necessarily mean people were disenfranchised,” Hirsch added.
He also noted that with trial and appeals, the case could last three years or more. By then, Boeing would have built the factory for the 777X, which is due to enter service in 2020.
The machinist have been successful before. In 2011, the NLRB filed a complaint against Boeing, alleging the company built a new factory in South Carolina as retaliation against the machinists for striking.
The complaint quoted Boeing Chief Executive Jim McNerney as saying he was “diversifying (the) labor pool and labor relationship,” and moving 787 work because of “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.”
The case went to trial, Pomerantz said, but settled when Boeing and the machinists struck a deal to extend their current contract until 2016, in exchange for work on the 737 jet staying in the Puget Sound region.
That contract is the one machinists voted last week to extend to 2024.
(Reporting by Alwyn Scott and Bill Rigby.)
WASHINGTON
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about the economy at an event hosted by the Center for American Progress in Washington December 4, 2013.
Credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Technology company executives pressed President Barack Obama on Tuesday to rein in the U.S. government’s electronic spying after a court dealt a blow to the administration’s surveillance practices.
Top executives from Apple Inc, Google Inc, Yahoo Inc, Netflix Inc, Comcast Corp, AT&T Inc, Microsoft Corp, Twitter Inc, Facebook Inc and other companies met privately for more than two hours with Obama and top White House aides.
The session came as Obama and his national security team decide what recommendations to adopt from an outside panel’s review on constraining the activities of the National Security Agency without compromising U.S. national security.
The White House had trumpeted the meeting as a chance to talk up progress made in repairing the government’s healthcare website after its botched rollout generated a political firestorm and sent Obama’s job approval rating tumbling.
But in a brief statement released after the session, the tech companies focused solely on government surveillance, not healthcare.
“We appreciated the opportunity to share directly with the president our principles on government surveillance that we released last week and we urge him to move aggressively on reform,” the technology companies said in their statement.
The NSA’s practices essentially made the companies partners in sweeping government surveillance efforts against private citizens.
Separately, Obama’s nominee to be chief legal counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency said on Tuesday she disagreed with a judge’s ruling that the NSA surveillance programs are likely unlawful, citing a 1979 case often used as precedent in privacy cases.
“I have a different view about the Fourth Amendment,” nominee Caroline Krass said at a Senate hearing. “I think that under Smith v. Maryland, which I still consider to be good law, there is not a reasonable expectation of privacy in telephony metadata.”
A federal judge ruled on Monday that the U.S. government’s gathering of Americans’ phone records is likely unlawful.
PROTECT PRIVACY
Eight tech companies launched a campaign a week ago asking for governments to reform surveillance practices to protect privacy, writing an open letter to Obama and Congress on the issue.
They said revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden had highlighted an urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide.
A representative from one of the companies, who asked not to be identified, said the White House had wanted to meet to discuss the HealthCare.gov website. The invitations were sent before the White House received the tech companies’ letter.
The main draw for the tech companies was the opportunity to press the case on the need for more transparency on the bulk data collected.
A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the meeting as constructive and “not at all contentious.” Obama and a clutch of his top advisers – including national security adviser Susan Rice and counterterrorism aide Lisa Monaco – listened closely to the company executives’ ideas and concerns, the official added.
Documents provided by Snowden showed that a U.S. surveillance court had secretly approved the collection of raw daily phone records in the United States. Other revelations have included reports that U.S. monitoring extended to some foreign leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Obama is due to announce next month what steps he will take to roll back the sweeping surveillance practices.
The White House said after the tech meeting that the president and the executives discussed the national security and economic impacts of unauthorized intelligence disclosures as Obama nears completion on his intelligence review.
“The president made clear his belief in an open, free and innovative Internet and listened to the group’s concerns and recommendations, and made clear that we will consider their input as well as the input of other outside stakeholders as we finalize our review of signals-intelligence programs,” the White House said in a statement.
(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Will Dunham and Lisa Shumaker)
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(NaturalNews) The implications of the so-called Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, are apparently so drastic that as many as 83 percent of private physicians have considered calling it quits. This is according to a new survey recently released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association (DPMA), a nationwide physicians group dedicated to maintaining and protecting individualized care for all patients.
The survey, which included nearly 700 doctors from at least 45 U.S. states, revealed that most doctors and care providers are incensed by the nationalization of medicine, and believe that the transition from privatized care to government-run care will further erode the quality of healthcare in America. Not only will demand for patient care increase dramatically as a result of the Affordable Care Act, but pay for doctors will also decrease, which will drive many practices out of business.
“Doctors clearly understand what Washington does not — that a piece of paper that says you are ‘covered’ by insurance or ‘enrolled’ in Medicare or Medicaid does not translate to actual medical care when doctors can’t afford to see patients at the low-ball payments, and patients have to jump through government and insurance company bureaucratic hoops,” said DPMA co-founder Kathryn Serkes to The Daily Caller about the survey results.
Out of the 36,000 doctors surveyed, only 4.3 percent actually responded, according to DPMA. The vast majority of those who responded work in solo or small group practices, and are office-based rather than hospital-based, representing a true cross-section of America’s most personalized physicians. And more than three-quarters of respondents are considered to be mid-career, meaning they have been practicing for between 11 and 30 years.
A whopping 65 percent of respondents indicated that their existing problems are a result of too much government involvement, and that more government involvement in the form of the Affordable Care Act will make things work. 95 percent of doctors also said that private practice is already suffering as a result of “corporate medicine,” which will only get progressively worse under the Affordable Care Act.
Interestingly, nearly 75 percent of the doctors surveyed said less government, rather than more government, would help fix the existing problems with the medical system. These problems presumably include things like government oppression against so-called alternative and non-mainstream medical treatments and procedures, as well as the persistent dilemma of “too many hands in the financial cookie jar,” which raises medical costs for everyone.
You can view the complete results of the DPMA survey here: http://www.doctorsandpatients.org
Sources for this article include:
http://www.doctorsandpatients.org
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA606.html
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