Today, a planned action against Wells Fargo involving thousands of people will take place in San Francisco. Wells Fargo holds its annual shareholder meeting there; these protesters plan to march from Justin Herman Plaza to the site of the shareholder meeting, where they will, in their own words, attempt “to shut down the meeting and disrupt the proceedings in order to demand Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf and other executives address the concerns of the 99%.”
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About 175 South Florida bridge tenders — many of them senior citizens — appear to be taking a leading role in the resurgence of unions in Florida.
Employees of a private contractor operating in Broward and Palm Beach counties have voted to join an international union, raising the hopes of labor leaders that a long period of decline is at an end.
“It’s always been rough going down here,” said Scott Singer, president of the International Union of Operating Engineers, Local 487. “But this shows the mindset is finally starting to change. Workers see that they need to fight for themselves a little bit.”
The employees’ decision represents the largest single organizing victory in Local 487′s 100-year history and will be used as a model for efforts to unionize other bridge tenders around the state, officials said. Local 487 covers Broward, Palm Beach and 11 other Florida counties.
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SOUTHFIELD, Mich. — When the 2012 version of “Occupy Wall Street” emerges from hibernation, it will be after having been to school.
A coalition of liberal, union, and progressive organizations hoping to capitalize on the success of last year’s Occupy movement held a series of “99% Spring Action Training” sessions in the Detroit and Ann Arbor areas Saturday.
A “training” held in a meeting room at a Communications Workers of America hall on Southfield Road near 10 Mile Road, attracted 27 people interested in participating in “nonviolent direct action” to transform the Occupy movement’s ambiguous goals into something concrete.
Mother-and-daughter team Anne and Jessie Mannisto, from the Detroit suburb of Northville, attended together after Jessie, 29, was invited in an email from MoveOn.org, the main sponsoring organization.
Anne Mannisto, 63, an assistant library director, said she sees the goal of 99% Spring as promoting equality and contrasted the movement with the Tea Party, which she criticized as focused on the national debt and “totally misinformed.”
“I want to see the tax code reformed, the wealthy to pay their fair share. But I want to see a bigger mind-set change,” Ms. Mannisto said. “Deficit reduction is not the biggest problem facing this country. Inequality is the bigger problem.”
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KPFA workers and their supporters will take to the streets Wednesday to protest Pacific Radio Network’s hiring of a law firm the AFL-CIO has dubbed “the devil incarnate” and the “the number one union-buster in America.”
Pacifica Foundation hired Jackson Lewis in 2010, but that is the only point of agreement between the five-station, listener-supported broadcasting network and its KPFA workers group.
Pacifica’s executive director argues that the organization simply plucked the law firm from a list of firms approved by its insurance carrier to handle litigation.
“We deplore ‘union busting’ wherever it occurs—and it will not occur at Pacifica on my watch,” writes Arlene Engelhardt in a March 30 guest commentary that appeared on RadioSurvivor.com. “Jackson Lewis was first hired in 2010 to handle only litigation and is not involved in union relations at Pacifica at all.”
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Syracuse, NY – It’s income tax deadline day, and two groups have scheduled events to remind Syracuse-area taxpayers about who is paying taxes, who isn’t and what the money is going toward.
SEIU Local 200 United is protesting corporate taxes with a “Tax Dodger Dodgeball” game at 11 a.m. today at Clinton Square in downtown Syracuse.
The game is intended to raise awareness that some corporations pay little or no federal taxes, the union said..
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Business groups and unions are bracing for congressional action on the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) union election rule.
Those in business and labor are expecting a vote in the Senate, perhaps as early as next week, on a joint resolution for congressional disapproval that would block the regulation. A Senate Republican leadership aide told The Hill that a vote on the measure was expected sometime over the next two weeks.
That will likely step up lobbying on the proposal. On Thursday, the AFL-CIO sent a letter to senators urging them to vote against the joint resolution.
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A federal judge in South Carolina ruled on Friday that the National Labor Relations Board did not have the authority to order most private employers to post notices telling workers about their right to unionize under federal law.
The judge, David C. Norton of United States District Court in Charleston, rejected the labor board’s argument that its order to post such notices was necessary for the board to carry out its mission. He also rejected the board’s contention that Congress had delegated authority to the board to order the posting of such notices, which would explain the right to bargain collectively, to distribute union literature and to work together to improve wages and conditions.
Judge Norton’s decision clashes with one that a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C., issued last month, concluding that the labor board did have the authority to issue its order on posting notices.
Officials with the labor board and the United States Chamber of Commerce, the main plaintiff in the South Carolina case, said their lawyers were looking into whether Friday’s ruling would or should cause the suspension of the board’s order just in South Carolina or nationwide.
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The hole in the pension plans of U.S. labor unions now stands at $369 billion, Credit Suisse has calculated with the aid of new reporting standards. This raises the prospect of higher pension contributions for employers and deteriorating industrial relations.
Multi-employer pension schemes, managed by trade unions on behalf of members working for many different employers, are now just 52 percent funded, the bank calculates with most of the burden to close this gap likely to fall on small and midsize companies.
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IS any C.E.O. worth $1 million a day?
That’s roughly $42,000 an hour. Or $700 a minute. Or $12 a second.
Think of it this way: In the time it took to read those words, you could’ve pocketed $100. Finish this article and — well, you do the math.
At Apple, the answer to that question is an emphatic yes, and then some. Not since Steve Jobs has a chief executive at Apple, or any other public American corporation, for that matter, been as richly rewarded in stock as Timothy D. Cook, who succeeded Mr. Jobs as chief executive last August, a few months before Mr. Jobs died.
Mr. Cook was paid a cash salary of roughly $900,000 in 2011. On its own, that would have been a ho-hum paycheck for a top American C.E.O. in recent years.
But then came a wild extra, a one-time award, in the form of Apple stock. It was initially worth a staggering $376.2 million. As of the end of last week, it was valued at roughly $634 million, reflecting Apple’s soaring share price.
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The National Labor Relations Board’s (“NLRB”) aggressive campaign to educate non-union employees about their rights under the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”) is in full swing.
In addition to the mandatory notice posting requirement that will go into effect for all employers on April 30, the NLRB recently announced its plan to launch a new website designed to educate both union and non-union employees about their rights under the NLRA. These rights include the rights to discuss working conditions and to present grievances to their employers. Under the NLRA, employees have a right to engage in such “protected concerted activity,” even when they are not union employees or involved in union organizing efforts.
The new website will be rolled out in mid-April, just before employers are required to post the Notice of Employee Rights. The NLRB also plans to distribute pamphlets, published in both English and Spanish, addressing workers’ rights and to publicly discuss this information across various media outlets.
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