Worker Notes by Tom Crofton

Aspirational vs Pragmatic: Why My Radicalness Is Getting More Radical

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (4/6/20) Setting aside the pain and suffering of the infected for a moment, the most amazing part of the pandemic is its pulling back the curtain on the fragility and venality of the economic/political system in the “greatest country on earth”. Yah, sure. Some of those hybrid “planned economies” had better resources, and quicker responses, when their nationally supported professionals did the jobs they had trained lifetimes for: So What? We have better bombers. In fact, a bipartisan committee (that means Dems are in on it) is insisting, in the midst of the health…

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Continued Surge In Strike Activity Signals Worker Dissatisfaction With Wage Growth

By Heidi Shierholz & Margaret Poydock Economic Policy Institute (2/11/20) What this report finds and why it matters Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show that there was an upsurge in major strike activity in 2018 and 2019, marking a 35-year high for the number of workers involved in a major work stoppage over a two-year period. Further, 2019 recorded the greatest number of work stoppages involving 20,000 or more workers since at least 1993, when the BLS started providing data that made it possible to track work stoppages by size. After decades of decline, strike activity surged in 2018, with…


Up Close & On The Ground: Retail Politics Iowa Style

Bernie has said repeatedly that we need to build a movement, elections by themselves are not enough. He is absolutely right about that. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (2/5/20) While watching the travesty in Washington the last few weeks I decided that my best action was to volunteer for change. The closest and most immediate opportunity was working for Bernie in Iowa. I signed up for canvassing in nearby Dubuque for caucus day. I received a request from a Bernie staff person on the east coast to instead be a precinct captain for Bernie. The Iowa caucus system has…


Biden, Buttigieg & Klobuchar Rake In Big Bucks From High-Priced Union-Busting Lawyers

  By Andrea Beaty Economic & Policy Research / Revolving Door Project (1/29/20) The Iron Workers Union endorsed Joe Biden last week, citing his dedication to “defend rights and jobs of American workers”, and calling him “a friend to union ironworkers.” The union endorsement marks one of many that Democratic candidates are fighting for by unveiling detailed labor plans and promising to overturn “right-to-work laws” that weaken unions. While they seek union endorsements, several of the candidates are also seeking direct contributions from wealthy individuals. And therein lies a largely hidden tension. Attorneys at law firms with notable histories of anti-worker actions…


Bernie’s Decorah Rally Last Friday Revealed A Secret Corporate Media & The DNC Don’t Want You To Know

“A campaign by the working class, of the working class and for the working class.” — Bernie Sanders, Decorah, Iowa (3/2/20) By Mark L. Taylor The Commoner Call (1/6/20) Last Friday my pal Tom Crofton and I headed off to Decorah, Iowa to help with the Bernie Sanders rally that evening. The event was at the Winneshiek County Fairgrounds in a large, cavernous room decorated with 4-H quilts from area clubs. One proudly proclaimed: “We Pledge our … Hearts, Hands and Health.” Looked like just the right spot for a Bernie campaign rally. I will confess that when I walked…


Citing Dangerous Focus On Profits Over Patients, UW Hospital Nurses Call For Much-Needed Union Recognition

“We’re at the bedside — the eyes and ears on the patient all the time. [But] we’re not supported. We’re not given any sort of voice to make any changes.” By Erik Gunn Wisconsin Examiner (12/19/19) Five-and-a-half years after their collective bargaining rights were stripped in the aftermath of Act 10, registered nurses working for the University of Wisconsin Hospital & Clinics Authority (UWHCA) on Thursday confronted the board of directors demanding recognition for a new union. “Unacceptable changes to staffing levels, nurse/patient ratios and the dissolution of key nursing departments have left thousands of professional nurses without tools they need to…


‘Injury Mills’ — Amazon’s Internal Warehouse Injury Records Expose The True Toll Of Its Relentless Drive For Speed

When disaster struck at one Indiana warehouse, Amazon’s economic might may have helped the company evade accountability.  By Will Evans Reveal / Center For Investigative Reporting (11/25/19) When Candice Dixon showed up for her first day of work at an Amazon warehouse in Eastvale, California, she stepped into a wonder of automation, efficiency and speed. Inside the sprawling four-story building in Southern California’s Inland Empire, hundreds of squat orange robots whizzed across the floor, carrying tall yellow racks. As a stower, her job was to stand in a spot on the floor, like hundreds of others in that million-square-foot warehouse,…


A Good Start: Impeachment Next Steps

Every fact witness had amazing moments. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (11/25/19) The testimony of professional foreign service officers in the Trump Impeachment Investigation has been stunning. Setting aside for a moment the truth that they are operating in an unnecessarily destructive, cold-war clash of economic empires, they are proof that our country has very skilled and dedicated people overseas representing the policies of our country. The fact that political hacks are guiding them, and working next to them, is the sad reality of our times, when incompetence, self-service, and intentional sabotage are now prerequisites for political positions in…


‘Talk About Direct Labor Action Getting Results’: Bankrupt Blackjewel Agrees To Pay Over $5 Million To Laid Off Coal Miners Who Blocked Train Tracks

“When workers stand together, fight back, and demand an end to corporate greed—they win.” — Sen. Bernie Sanders. By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams (10/25/19) Progressives on Friday highlighted the power of direct action following a series of federal court settlements this week that will provide coal miners who blocked train tracks in Kentucky for nearly two months this summer to protest against unpaid wages from their bankrupt employer, Blackjewel LLC, with over $5 million in back pay. Congratulating the laid off coal miners on their victory, longtime labor advocate and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) tweeted Friday, “When workers stand together, fight…


Will Fewer Migrant Workers & Robotic Pickers Change The Quality Of The Fruit We Eat?

The Food Chain / BBC (10/19/19) Across the world, as fruits ripen, teams of pickers set out across the fields. Without them, produce would be left to rot and farms profits would plummet. But in many countries, population shifts and changes to immigration laws have left farmers struggling to find enough people to do the work. The effect has been particularly pronounced in the US where President Trump has cracked down on immigration, and the UK with its plans to leave the EU. Enter the robots. Over the past few years, interest and investment in machines that can pick fruit…


Madison Willy Street Co-op Workers Vote In Favor Of Union

As grocery co-ops expand, co-op workers across the United States have increasingly pushed to unionize their workplaces.  By Alice Herman The Isthmus (9/12/19) Bjørn Thorson says that in 2014 management at the Willy Street Co-op asked him to help fight an effort by workers to unionize. “I was asked to keep my ears out and my eyes out and see if I could sway people away from unionizing,” says Thorson, a produce stocker and clerk at the westside Willy Street Co-op store. Thorson agreed to push back against the campaign led by United Food and Commercial Workers. “If someone would…


If Workers Take Advantage Of The Moment They Can Turn Things Around To Benefit Labor

Workers are the 99%. We have the votes. This time we need to use them together. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (9/2/19) Working people in America are waking up to the fact that they need unions. The most progressive aspects of the workplace have all come from banding together and standing together for worker rights, and as the erosion of those hard-won gains has accelerated, interest in rebuilding the union movement is finally reviving. Besides stagnant wages and dissolving benefits, the most obvious loss is the 40-hour week. Mandatory overtime, and conversely, the less than 35-hour week that avoids…


Labor Unions Were Among The First Targets Of Nazis & Their Conservative Corporate Enablers

The struggle for labor rights continues, as we see daily in our own country. Peoples World (5/2/14) On May 2, 1933, Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers occupied all trade union headquarters across Germany, and union leaders were arrested and put in prison or concentration camps. Many were beaten and tortured. All of the unions’ funds – in other words, the workers’ money – were confiscated. Former union officials were put on blacklists, preventing them from finding work. This was one of the first acts of Hitler and the Nazis, who had just come to power in Germany a few months earlier,…


A Commoner Writes: Now Is The Time To Redouble Our Efforts

The doom and gloom from recent political events being shared by many of us is valid, but not a new development. I take you back to the rose colored glasses many of us wore when we first heard Obama speak and the disappointment watching each promise fade into double speak. I also take you back further to the coup that we were warned about by Eisenhower, and that manifested in the early 60’s with the JFK assassination, and proceeded all the way through Oklahoma City bombing, Granada, Central America,  9/11, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen etc. The world’s policeman became the…


Forget Trump’s Carnival Show Fourth: A Lincoln Remembrance Appropriate To July 4th

  “In March 1864, a decade after Alvan Bovay founded the Republican Party in Ripon [WI], a delegation from the New York Workingman’s Democratic Republican Association came to the White House to offer the country’s first Republican president an honorary membership  in their labor organization, “None are so deeply interested to resist the present rebellion as the working people,” Abraham Lincoln told them, after accepting the honor. “Let them beware of prejudice, working division, and hostility among themselves. The most notable feature of a disturbance in your city last summer was the hanging of some working people by other working…


Climate Crisis & Environmental Risk Is The Externalized Cost Of A Rigged Energy Industry

We need a new politics that creates a new economy. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (2/25/19) Now that the Green New Deal has been widely discussed the naysayers are lining up to trash the idea. This has been expected. Outside of the climate crisis deniers — fortunately an increasingly small group — the largest push is coming from the “free market” advocates who do not want to lose their gravy train of “return on investment” on fossil fuels and its related industry. When modern capitalists bring out the old saw about markets being the best way to regulate business…


Medicare For All Is The First Way To Sift Out The 2020 Dems Candidates

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (2/7/19) Affordable Health Insurance vs Health Care… This is really the crux of the issue and is the divide we need to emphasize in our next round of fixing the Democratic Party. There is no such thing as affordable health insurance, because on a purely moral basis, no one should have to pay for administration costs to deny coverage, and to generate a profit for such a universal basic human need. Insurance 101 teaches us that making small regular payments to build up a buffer for a large emergency expense is a good and…


Tom Crofton: Time To Draw The Best From The Past And Forge A New Vision For The Future

A new understanding, organically grown from the best of our American values that makes peace with our past errors, and joins the rest of world in being stewards of our planet is needed now. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (1/28/19) The era of new frontiers to claim for an expanding American Manifest Destiny are long over. We live in a time where the exploitation of the eco-system is blowing back in a climate crisis teetering past the tipping points of repair. The Military Industrial Complex we were so clearly warned about 50 years ago has run amok, and placed…


It’s Really Quite Simple: Two Questions To Quickly Sift The Growing Gaggle Of Dem Presidential Candidates

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (1/24/19) The large and growing field of Democratic candidates for President offer a wide range of personal histories, beliefs, and issues to run on. This is good for the country. There seems to me to be a very simple way to narrow the field quickly. My two simple, straightforward questions to each and every one: Do you support single payer health care for all instead of any plan based on insurance, and do you see that the enormity of the climate crisis requires a massive federal response? All other issues are really quite dependent on these…


The Climate Crisis: We Already Have What We Need To Begin The Transition To Sustainability Now

  We need to grow inward and find value in what we have been ignoring. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (1/21/19) Combating climate change will definitely mean changing some of our regular activities. We need to start making different choices. Our society has been based on carving up a new frontier, draining the resources and moving on to virgin territory. That era of outward growth is over. We need to grow inward and find value in what we have been ignoring. A new sustainable society needs to be fashioned from where we are and what we have been wasting….


Still Waiting For State Democratic Party Leadership To Listen To The Grass Roots

Fixing the problems of money hijacking our democracy will not be done with money. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (1/14/19) The leadership of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW) is traveling the state to discuss the recent elections. Unfortunately the lessons the grassroots have learned are not on the agenda. The listening sessions are advertised as a chance to get feedback from the activists, but are really a chance for the activists to listen to the leadership. We have heard the message before, “raise more money”. Those of us who have run grassroots campaigns in rural areas know how…


As Union Membership Falls Almost 80% Of US Workers Struggle To Survive Paycheck To Paycheck.

All that remains of the Mirro Aluminum Company manufacturing plant in Manitowoc, Wisconsin is the front entrance. Beyond is a city block or more of broken foundations and shattered concrete slabs. When my family moved to Manitowoc in 1970 Mirro was a major employer. Whole families and generations of skilled trades workers, assembly line workers and laborers spent their entire careers at Mirro, which was founded in 1909 and shuttered and business shipped off to Mexico in 2003, as the realities of NAFTA caught up with the loyal workers. I grabbed this photo in mid-July of this year. — Mark…


A Labor Day Reminder From American Socialist Icon Eugene Debs

“The capitalist who does no useful work has the economic power to take from a thousand or ten thousand working men all they produce, over and above what is required to keep them in working and producing order, and he becomes a millionaire, perhaps a multi-millionaire. He lives in a palace in which there is music and singing and dancing and the luxuries of all climes. He sails the high seas in his private yacht. He is the reputed “captain of industry” who privately owns a social utility, has great economic power, and commands the political power of the nation…


Worker Notes: A Rational, Sustainable Economy Is Key To Worker & Community Health

  By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (7/16/18) Recent talk of trade wars has been missing the critical discussion of how the needs of people around the globe could be met in the most sustainable way, and core to that discussion are clear agreements on what those needs really are. Pre-industrial societies met most of their needs locally, most often within a few days walking or riding distance. Locally scarce items — like salt for food preservation — were easy enough to transport. As ruling aristocracies developed tastes for more exotic items, their political and military power was used to…


Thank You, Scott Pruitt

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (7/9/18) Scott Pruitt resigns, so what? The appointment of an anti-environmental crusader to run the EPA was a disaster for sure, but the blueprint for fouling our Ecological nest has been in the DNA of our culture from Day 1. Pruitt’s narcissism and need for taxpayer funded perks is almost a caricature of the spoiled rich kid grown old and entitled, but how does that differ from the greed and avarice of the entire economic/political system we salute daily? Wall Street’s “Greed is Good”, Ayn Rand’s “producers”, Manifest Destiny, the War on Terror, and…


Cool New Gadgets Yoked To Tired Old Thinking Will Not Save Us

  By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (7/5/18) Can technology be the answer to saving our Eco system? Having grown up in the “plastics” age as showcased in the 1967 classic “The Graduate”, many of us were conditioned to think that technology would solve humanity’s problems. Clearly the green revolution fed a bunch of people, but that has also proven to be unsustainable as the technology to mass produce food has required multiple forms of fossil fuels and chemicals with their accompanying “side effects” of runaway pollution, genetic adaptation of weeds requiring stronger chemicals, and climate changes brought upon us by…


A Call For Peace

  By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (2/12/18) The militarization of our country has reached a boiling point. WE must turn down the flame. The propaganda for war overseas has overwhelmed logic and reason. Both sides of the aisle have increased the world’s largest defense budget by $70 billion more, than the $700 billion we had already planned to spend. This is more than the right wing wanna-be dictator asked for, And more than the rest of the world combined. So who’s the most dangerous? We are modernizing the nuclear forces instead of scrapping them. Even our beloved Bernie voted…


Labor Notes: Unless Workers Come Together, There’s A New Downward Trajectory For Labor

  By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (12/25/17) A brave new world for labor has been spinning up for years but the latest efforts to dismantle the New Deal have sent workers on a new trajectory. The concept of wage slave has been refurbished and sold as freedom to those who have no capital. Freedom to not pay union dues. Freedom to argue for a personal raise based on a piecework/merit mentality. Freedom to decide to not have health insurance. Freedom to invest by our ourselves in the stock market for our retirement. This is also the Freedom to be…


Are We Seeing A Sea Change Or A Rogue Wave?

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (12/18/17) The latest chapter of resistance to Trumpism in particular, and society’s ills in general is the refreshingly feminist movement to “out” sexual harassment. This development is long overdue and parallels all other movements for social justice, whose progress often display a ratcheting quality of a couple steps forward, and a couple back. In many ways the latest round is built on the waves of social change going back to the original fights for emancipation and suffrage. The fact that feminists have reached public position and office, and are using those rostrums to speak…


Worker Notes: It’s Time For Unions To Assert A New Role For Leadership In The Economy

  By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (10/30/17) A recent statement from the AFL-CIO regarding a rejection of NAFTA and other corporate/globalist trade agreements unfortunately only skims the surface of the issues working people face. As the dominate union leadership in America, the AFL-CIO and its member unions need to take a deeper look at their historical behavior, and their role in enabling the evolution of the corporate state with its current right wing, anti-labor stance. American unions never were interested in taking responsibility for production. American unions developed to confront management but not to replace it. The International Workers…


Dems Are Well On The Way To Blowing It, Again

  By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (10/23/17) The recent purge of progressive dems from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) would be shocking if the DNC and Democratic Party of Wisconsin (DPW) were truly parties of the people; forces building a better world and safe harbors for those working in the name of basic common sense, humanity, or sustainability. But forgetaboutit. The DNC has a long, sordid history of selling out the base it pretends it has, but the statements of then DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wassermann-Schultz during the last presidential race were a transparent indictment of duplicity of a party…


Worker Notes: Unions, American Exceptionalism, White Supremacy, And The Well-Trod Road To Hell

  By Tom Crofton CounterPunch (9/13/17) A case can be made that the most direct path to prosperity for working families as a whole is one that has a collective basis creating benchmark standards for wages, conditions, and benefits; where energy otherwise spent on infighting and backstabbing among workers over compensation is harnessed into a common effort. The concept of creating a floor beneath which no one can go is at the heart of union organizing. The energy released from successful agreement to cooperate can go beyond worker compensation and build emotional solidarity among workers.  It can be used to…


Worker Notes: ‘Commoner Call’ Labor Writer Sends Out A Note Of Thanks To Health Care Workers

  (Editor’s Note: Commoner Call labor columnist Tom Crofton has been dealing with some serious structural re-engineering lately. He sends out a note of thanks to all the wonderful health care workers at the Richland Hospital who made his recent stay as comfortable as possible. While the two major parties don’t do their job of providing affordable health care to all, America’s health care workers act with the compassion and care far too few of our nominal ‘leaders’ display. Time for universal health care for all! – Mark L. Taylor)   By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (1/4/17) I’d like…


Worker Notes: American Workers Don’t Need Trump To Give Them A Voice. They Need Unions.

  By David Madland Talk Poverty (11/18/16) As this election made clear, a lot of Americans are angry. They feel left behind by the economy, and isolated and unheard in our democracy.  Some of this frustration is understandable—wages have hardly budged in decades, inequality is near record levels, and money dominates our political system (and those who don’t have much of it are usually ignored by politicians).  That’s a recipe for frustration and alienation, and President-elect Donald Trump seized on it. Trump promised economic security in part by scapegoating people of color and immigrants, and his supporters took the bait….


Worker Wages Flat, But Since 1978 CEO Pay Has Soared By ‘Outrageous’ 937%

  By Jake Johnson Common Dreams (7/20/17) Wages for most American workers have remained basically stagnant for decades, but a new report published on Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that the CEOs of America’s largest firms have seen their pay soar at a consistent and “outrageous” clip. Between 1978 and 2016, CEO pay rose by 937 percent, EPI’s Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder found. By contrast, the typical worker saw “painfully slow” compensation growth—11.2 percent over the same period. “We could curtail the explosive growth in CEO pay without doing any harm to the economy.” Mishel and Schieder also note…


Worker Notes: Bringing Democratic Representation & Independence To Unions

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (7/3/17) For all of the positives in joining with peers to develop solidarity there are areas where unions fail to realize their potential. The bargaining table at times has three sides, where the institution of the union creates a place separate from the workers. This reality has led to the creation of an organization to support union members in making their unions better. The Association for Union Democracy  (AUD) was created to be a pro-labor, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the principles and practices of democratic trade unionism in the North American labor movement. AUD…


Worker Notes: These Brave Workers Really Need(ed) A Union

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (6/26/17) In 2010 attention of the world was riveted when 33 miners were trapped 2,300 feet underground in the Copiapó Chilean mining accident. The miners were trapped underground for 69 days and were only freed after an international rescue effort. The 2015 movie entitled “The 33”, available on DVD in local libraries, tells the story of what happened and how the incident impacted the miners, their families and communities. . A great deal has been written on this event and some may tell a slightly different story, but the movie depicts the site as a worn…


Worker Notes: The VW Emissions Scandal Is A Powerful Lesson For Management & Labor Reps

  By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (6/19/17) Further information on the unique design of the German labor movement is provided in the investigative work “Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal” by Jack Ewing. The irony that a management scandal occurred under the highly regarded German combined labor/management system will be discussed at the end of this piece, but the precedent for labor taking more than an adversarial role is worth investigating more deeply. Ewing writes: “When the British gave up administrative control of Volkswagen in 1949, they passed ownership to the German Federal government, which delegated control to the…


Worker Notes: The Benefits Of European Unions Have A Seat In Corporate Board Rooms Are Many

  A different type of union. A different kind of life. By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (6/12/17) Many of the chronic problems we now see with the American union movement can be tracked back to the history of European craft guilds and the relationships of masters to apprentices. The constricting effect of one–to–one instruction, portioned out slowly over time to fit market demand and prevent competition between master and apprentice was one cause for the fractured condition of Labor today. The transition to modern American trade unions followed the idea of organizing around skills instead of by entire industries,…


Worker Notes: It’s Not Just About Wages & Benefits – Working Conditions Are A Matter Of Life Or Death

By Tom Crofton The Commoner Call (6/8/17) While wages are clearly a top reason to organize a union, and benefits are life-changing, struggles over working conditions may be the most important fights working people can take on and often are the catalyst for union organizing. From grape pickers and tomato harvesters, to nurses and corrections officers, the hours and conditions of work are often the last breaking straw that leads to organizing for change. While technology has changed dramatically, the drive to save money, and to use human capital to save on investing monetary capital, is as old as the…