text:
Posts Tagged 'Labor Day'
Unions work for building power—for all workers
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2019
There's a lot to talk about on Labor Day, but we should take at least a moment to really acknowledge the difference unions make in the lives of working people in this country. Even after decades under assault from the bosses and the Republicans, even representing too few workers, unions boost their members—and not only their members, but more about that in a minute—to a living wage or into the middle class, they get people health coverage, and they reduce racial and gender inequality. Let's take a look at some of the numbers, courtesy of the AFL-CIO:
People with a union have median weekly earnings of $1,051 as opposed to $860 for people without a union.
The median for black workers with a union vs. not is $826 vs. $673. For Latino workers, it's $912 vs. $657. For Asian American workers, it's $1,119 vs. $1,092.
Unions make a difference on benefits, too: 75% of people in a union have job-provided health insurance. For people not in a union, the rate is 49%.
In unions, 72% of people have guaranteed pensions, while just 14% of people not in unions have guaranteed pensions.
And 90% of people in a union have paid sick leave compared with 71% of people not in a union.
These days, unions represent less than 11% of workers—but that doesn't mean they're only making life better for 11% of workers. Take the strikes by teachers fighting not just for their own wages and benefits but for school funding and better staffing levels to give students what they need.Take the state and local minimum wage laws that unions have fought for across the country, which have boosted wages for millions of workers. Take the multiple studies that have found that unions reduce income inequality.
Workers shouldn't have to rely on having a nice boss. They shouldn't have to be grateful for a living wage. Worker power should be a real thing in this country, and unions are the best way we've found to get there. On Labor Day, let's remember that.
This blog was originally published at Daily Kos on September 2, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Laura Clawson is labor editor at Daily Kos.
Tags: expanding workers rights, Labor Day, unions
Posted in Labor Day | No Comments »
From Victories to Union Militancy, 5 Reasons for Workers to Celebrate This Labor Day
Labor Day often gets short shrift as a worker's holiday. Marked primarily by sales on patio furniture and mattresses, the day also has a more muddled history than May Day, which stands for internationalism and solidarity among the working class. Labor Day, by contrast, was declared a federal holiday in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland, fresh off his administration's violent suppression of the Pullman railroad strike.
But Labor Day was first celebrated twelve years earlier, when a coalition of socialists and labor activists organized a mass march in New York City calling for shorter hours, safer working conditions, increased pay and a labor holiday. On September 5, 1882, 10,000 people took to the streets of New York instead.
That history, plus the simple fact that workers deserve more than one holiday, makes Labor Day worth celebrating. And this year, there are more reasons than usual for working people to rejoice.
The teacher strike wave rolls on
The wave of teacher strikes that began in red states last year has continued apace in some of the biggest U.S. cities. Earlier this year, Los Angeles teachers wrung a hard-won deal from their school district through a week-long strike.
A first-ever charter strike in Chicago last year kicked off a domino effect—more than 700 Chicago charter teachers at 22 different campuses have walked off the job in the past year, and they're winning things previously unthinkable in the traditionally union-free charter industry.
An impending teacher strike in Las Vegas is drawing some creative solidarity from students, and the Chicago Teachers Union—whose 2012 walkout arguably laid the groundwork for renewed teacher militancy—could be on the verge of another massive strike.
Workers are winning strikes in the private sector, too
There's an important caveat to statistics showing that the number of striking workers is at a two-decade high: Most of this strike activity is still limited to the public sector.
In the private sector, there is not yet an equivalent strike wave. There are, however, some encouraging signs. A rare, coordinated strike by workers at nearly 30 hotels in Chicago ended largely in victory (workers at one hotel are still holding out). This spring, locomotive plant workers in Erie, Pennsylvania staged a nine-day strike against the company that purchased their facility and attempted to impose significantly lower wages for new hires. Negotiations continued into the summer, and the deal the union eventually accepted included some concessions. But the strike against a two-tier wage system—long-ago conceded by most manufacturing unions—was an important sign of life in the once-militant sector.
Labor support for Green New Deal is on the rise
To hear the mainstream media tell it, blue-collar workers are united in their opposition to climate action. In June, Politico published an article citing local labor leaders who leveled a dire warning at Democrats: the Green New Deal is pushing members into the Republican camp.
In fact, a survey released this year from the think tank Data for Progress found that 62 percent of current union members back the GND. That figure suggests that while climate activists certainly can't take labor's backing as a given, there's substantial support from workers—and the biggest factor in growing this support is organizing with labor to ensure that the Green New Deal benefits workers, and that they're at the core of the fight to pass it.
This year, the Green New Deal picked up major endorsements from the Service Employees International Union and the Association of Flight Attendants led by president Sara Nelson. In May, Nelson spoke to In These Times about how Green New Deal advocates can engage labor:
Make labor central to the discussion, including labor rights, labor protections and labor expertise. We must recognize that labor unions were among the first to fight for the environment because it was our workspaces that had pollutants, our communities that industry polluted. Let's not dismiss the labor movement. Let's recognize and engage the infrastructure and experience of the labor movement to make this work.
Rank-and-file reformers are gaining traction
Speaking of Sara Nelson, her star has been rising since she called for a general strike to end the government shutdown in January, and she could potentially end up succeeding Richard Trumka as the next president of the AFL-CIO.
While they're still few in number, it's a breath of fresh air to see national labor leaders who come out of the rank-and-file use their positions to encourage, rather than stifle, independent action by workers, happily break bread with socialists and readily draw connections between labor issues and those of climate change and immigration.
Labor could actually make gains through the 2020 elections
Let's be honest: Presidential elections have long been a dead-end for unions. Awarding early endorsements without member input and spending millions of dollars on behalf of candidates who won't even talk about workers' rights is not a winning strategy.
This year could be different.
With Democratic candidates scrambling to tack to the left, the primaries are also putting important labor policy ideas back on the table. As Jeremy Gantz reported in July, 2020 candidates are rushing to embrace worker-friendly policies in order to win labor's support.
Bernie Sanders' Workplace Democracy Plan, in particular, includes ideas that should get a full hearing—ending "at-will" employment, expanding workers' rights to strike and permitting collective bargaining at the sectoral level.
Sanders is also using his campaign infrastructure to turn supporters out for strikes and labor actions, another welcome development for labor when it comes to presidential campaign season.
The U.S. labor movement may still be under siege, thanks to powerful anti-union forces, including the Trump administration. But with approval of unions at a 15-year high, and a wave of labor militancy on the rise, working people have plenty to celebrate this Labor Day.
This article was originally published at In These Times on August 29, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Rebecca Burns is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work has appeared in The Baffler, the Chicago Reader, The Intercept and other outlets. She is a contributing editor at In These Times. Follow her on Twitter @rejburns.
Tags: Labor Day, unions, workers
A Worker's Place Is in the Museum
Not many museums have mounted a collection of photographs and ephemera that chronicle the history of worker organizing and the labor movement. That's not surprising. Museums and their special exhibits are underwritten by foundations, corporations and the very rich—funders that, by and large, are not known for their concern for those who toil for a living and seek to better their lives through union representation.
The annual Met Gala, the high-society benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, has revolved around couturiers like Coco Chanel and Alexander McQueen or sartorial themes from camp to Catholicism. Television viewers have yet, however, to see celebrities like Lady Gaga done up in a McDonald's uniform or other industrial-designed attire walk the red carpet across David H. Koch Plaza—the $65 million gift to the Met from David H. Koch.
All of which makes City of Workers, City of Struggle: How Labor Movements Changed New York a rare and radical gem of a show.
One enters this special exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York through a montage of photographs of demonstrators holding placards that read: "Abolish Slavery," "We Want Respect for Workers," "Put Black Men to Work or Stop Construction," "Mt. Sinai Workers Can't Live on $32 a Week—On Strike" and "Carwasheros al Poder" (Power to the Carwashers).
The exhibit begins with the enslaved people of New York (40% of New York households owned one or more workers in colonial days) and continues through today's movement of minimum-wage slaves and the Fight for $15.
If the overarching theme of City of Workersis collective action—how New Yorkers formed unions and gained better working conditions and better pay—the subtext is that cooperation among black, brown and white workers made those advances possible. In the age of Trump, that message bears repeating.
In the book that accompanies the exhibit, labor historian Joshua B. Freeman writes, "The city of New York would not exist in anything like its current form without the struggles of working people over the past three centuries." Similar stories could be told of any number of cities across the country—cities where labor history exhibits could be mounted, if not for want of museum space, cities where the struggle of workers continues to this day.
City of Workers, sponsored by the union-friendly Puffin Foundation of Teaneck, N.J., is on exhibit through Jan. 5, 2020, at the Museum of the City of New York, just one mile north of the Met and across from Central Park. While you are there, check out Activist New York, a permanent exhibit on the city's history of political agitation in the Puffin Foundation Gallery.
All images courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.
(A few of the New York shirtwaist workers, most of whom were Jewish women, went on strike in 1909 for better pay, working conditions and shorter hours. The strike, known as the Uprising of the 20,000, targeted more than 600 garment shops and factories.)
(Frank J. Ferrell, a black delegate of the New York City chapter of the Knights of Labor addresses the group at their 1886 convention in Richmond, Va. When Ferrell was denied a room at a local hotel where he and his New York colleagues had a reservation, they decamped en masse for less racist accommodations.)
(This poster advertises a 1912 Milwaukee talk by Rose Schneidermann, a socialist feminist who had worked in the garment industry. Rose is best known for her speechthat same year to middle-class suffragettes in Cleveland: "What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist … The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with.")
(In 1882, members of the Knights of Labor and the Central Labor Union gathered in New York's Union Square for the first-ever Labor Day parade.)
(In 1965, in front of Macy's, members of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union picket Judy Bond, a "runaway plant" that had moved to the South. The union's multi-year campaign included shopping bags that read, "Judy Bond Inc., On Strike, Don't Buy Judy Bond Blouses." According to the union, strikers handed out more than 3 million bags in 1963.)
("Filthy Tenement House Cigar Factories" postcard, circa 1885.)
Amalgamated Dwellings is the oldest limited-equity housing cooperative in the U.S. Founded in 1927 in the Bronx by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, the co-op was established to provide affordable housing for workers. Today, Amalgamated is home to more than 1,400 families.
(In 1936, in the Poconos, members of New York's Communist-led Dressmakers' Union (Local 22) relax at Unity House. Local 22 and Local 25 purchased the 750-acre retreat, which had formerly been a tony resort for German Jews, in 1919.)
This blog was originally published at In These Times on August 28, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Joel Bleifuss, a former director of the Peace Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is the editor & publisher of In These Times, where he has worked since October 1986.Bleifuss has worked at In These Times for 24 years, including as managing editor and senior editor. He tackles the state of national and international events with a blend of critical insight and humor, and over the years has developed a niche for investigative reporting.
His reporting on environmental health issues, national security scandals and the Iran Contra affair has landed in newspapers and magazines around the country, including the New York Times, the Utne Reader, the Capital Eye and many others.
He is the co-author of the book "Was The 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?," with Steven F. Freeman.
Before joining In These Times, Bleifuss was director of the Peace Studies Program for the University of Missouri, a features writer for the Fulton Sun in Fulton, Missouri, and a freelance journalist in Spain.
Bleifuss currently serves on the advisory board of The Public Square, a program of the Illinois Humanities Council.
Tags: Labor Day, unions, worker's rights
Posted in worker's rights | No Comments »
Trump administration set for a Labor Day overtime fake-out, this week in the war on workers
The Trump administration is about to pretend it's doing something great for workers, but surprise—it's not so great. Heidi Shierholz explains the truth behind reports that the administration will roll out its new overtime eligibility rule in time for Labor Day, looking for positive headlines about all the workers who'll suddenly be eligible for time-and-a-half if they work more than 40 hours a week.
The Obama administration tried to raise the threshold to which salaried workers are eligible for overtime from the current level of $23,660 up to $47,476, meaning that a lot of workers would suddenly get either more time or more pay. That got blocked by a conservative judge, and now the Trump administration plans to propose an increase to $35,308—which sounds good, if you don't realize that $47,476 had been on the table, so everyone earning between those two numbers will now be left out. It's an advance over the status quo, sure, but a big step back from what the status quo would have been if right-wing groups hadn't sued to block the Obama policy and a right-wing judge hadn't taken their side.
"The Trump administration's weaker rule will leave behind an estimated 8.2 million workers who would have gotten new or strengthened overtime protections under the 2016 rule," Shierholz writes. "This includes 4.2 million women, 3.0 million people of color, 4.7 million workers without a college degree, and 2.7 million parents of children under the age of 18." Overall, $1.2 billion a year less will go to workers under the expected Trump rule than under the thwarted Obama rule.
This blog was originally published at Daily Kos on August 24, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
Tags: labor, Labor Day
When the Parades Are Over, Who Stands With Unions?
The Labor Day parades are over. The bands have packed up. The muscular speeches celebrating workers are finished. The trash is getting collected from parks across the country. And now conservative politicians from Trump on down will revive their systematic efforts to weaken unions and undermine workers.
Trump – despite all the populist bunting that decorates his speeches – sustains the deeply entrenched Republican antipathy to organized workers. Their attack is relentless.
Trump's budget calls for deep cuts in the Labor Department, eviscerating job training programs and cutting – by 40 percent – the agency that does research on workplace safety. It would eliminate the program that funds education of workers on how to avoid workplace hazards. It even savages money for mine safety enforcement for the miners Trump claims to love.
Trump is systematically reversing any Obama rule that aided workers. He signed legislation scrapping the rule that required federal contractors to disclose violations of workplace safety and employment and anti-discrimination laws. His Labor Secretary has announced his intention to strip millions of workers of the overtime pay they would have received under Obama DOL regulations.
Trump is creating a pro-business majority at the National Labor Relations Board, which will roll back Obama's efforts to make it easier for workers to organize, and make it possible to hold home companies responsible for the employment practices of their franchisees.
The GOP's Anti-Union Strategy
This is simply standard operating procedure for today's Republican party. Long ago, Republicans realized that organized labor was a central "pillar," as Grover Norquist described it, of Democratic Party strength. Now Republican office holders at every level – from county officials to statehouses to judges – know that their job is to weaken labor unions. From right to work laws to administrative regulations to court challenges, Republicans sustain an unrelenting attack.
And aided by our perverse globalization strategies, they've been remarkably successful. Unions are down to about 7 percent of the private workforce. Public employee unions, a relative stronghold, are facing court challenges – essentially allowing workers to enjoy the benefits of union negotiations without paying dues — that will decimate their membership.
True conservatives would embrace unions. They are a classic "mediating institution," a voluntary civic organization between government and the individual. Unions increase the voice and power of workers in the workplace, helping to keep executive accountable, and to protect workers from abuse. They also educate their members, teach democracy, and are central to community volunteer and service efforts. They teach and practice democratic citizenship.
The modern Republican Party, of course, is the party of big business and big money. It isn't conservative; it is partisan. And weakening unions is a constant target.
While Republicans understand how important unions are to Democrats and to workers, Democrats don't seem to get it. Sure, they line up to get union donations; most will vote to defend unions and worker programs. But as the money in politics has gotten bigger and the unions have gotten weaker, the Wall Street wing of the Democratic Party has become more powerful.
The result is clear. When Republicans get control, they attack unions relentlessly. When Democrats gain control, as they did in 2012 with the election of Barack Obama and Democratic majorities in both houses, labor law reform, empowering workers to organize is not a priority. Obama essentially told unions that if they could get the votes, he'd sign the law, but he wasn't leading the charge. And so as under Carter and Clinton, changing the law to make it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively didn't happen.
Unions Under Siege
Now unions are under siege. Yet it is hard to imagine how a small "d" democracy can be robust, or a large D Democratic Party can regain its mojo without a revived movement of workers. It's time for Democrats at every level to realize: strengthening workers and their unions isn't an elective; it's a requirement and a first priority.
The loop works like this: Unions are in decline. As a result, unions lose influence inside the Democratic Party. The Democrats then feel no pressure to stem unions' decline, and the economically disadvantaged lose what was once their most powerful advocate. Then the cycle continues. We cannot revive unions, and we have no template for egalitarian politics without them.
Unions aren't simply economic actors. They're political actors. Labor still needs the Democrats. The Democrats, more than they realize, still need labor. But most of all, all those who want to build a fairer society need their partnership.
Republican elites understand the doom loop. Big business, small business, and Tea Party alike have pushed hard against unions. As the parties have polarized, Republicans have taken the gloves off, risking the votes of the 40 percent of union members who back Republicans in order to crush a pillar of the Democratic coalition. Even President Bernie Sanders would have real trouble rebuilding unions in the face of a Republican Congress and a federal judiciary eager to swat down pro-labor executive action.
Even without Republican politicians digging their graves, labor unions face deep challenges. In the private sector, unions must sign contracts workplace by workplace. Gawker writers here and home-care workers there will continue to organize their workplaces, but the barriers remain dauntingly high. In the public sector, unions have stood steady. But cops and teachers alike face blowback for putting their own prerogatives above the public interest. And if the Supreme Court bans the collection of agency fees in the public sector (thus imposing "right to work"), public-sector union membership could halve in a decade.
This blog was originally published at OurFuture.org on September 5, 2017. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Robert Borosage is the founder and president of the Institute for America's Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America's Future. The organizations were launched by 100 prominent Americans to develop the policies, message and issue campaigns to help forge an enduring majority for progressive change in America. Mr. Borosage writes widely on political, economic and national security issues. He is a Contributing Editor at The Nation magazine, and a regular blogger at The Huffington Post. His articles have appeared in The American Prospect, The Washington Post,Tthe New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He edits the Campaign's Making Sense issues guides, and is co-editor of Taking Back America (with Katrina Vanden Heuvel) and The Next Agenda (with Roger Hickey).
Tags: Labor Day, Labor Department, NLRB, Obama, private sector, Public-sector, Robert Borosage, Trump, workplace safety
Posted in unions | No Comments »
Labor unions are trying to take back politics in the Midwest
On Labor Day — designated a federal holiday in 1894 to honor America's labor movement — at least eight Democratic candidates will hold rallies in five Midwest cities to tell workers just how far the country has veered from its pro-labor roots.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker (R) has helped turn the state red by decimating public-sector unions. In Iowa, Republicans rolled back an increase in the minimum wage in March. Just last week, Illinois' Republican governor vetoed a billthat would have raised the minimum wage. And Republican governors in Michigan and Ohio have also pushed for regulations that would cripple workers.
In 2018, each will face challenges from unconventional, labor-aligned candidates inspired to run by President Trump's election and the decline of pro-worker lawmakers, which has resulted in a political system in the Rust Belt that favors the wealthy over the working class. Each candidate will center their campaigns on their support for a $15 minimum wage, progressive health care, and pro-union policies.
Cathy Glasson, a registered nurse and union leader in Iowa who will officially announce after Labor Day her campaign for governor in 2018, said that before this year, she had never considered running for elected office.
"This wasn't in my plan, but as a union leader, you take action when you see the problems ahead and you don't sit back and wait for things to change," she told ThinkProgress. "That's why I decided when I saw what happened with the legislature and the rollback of the minimum wage. We had raised the minimum wage in five counties in Iowa and this administration literally took money out of the pockets of Iowans — 85,000 Iowans were affected by the rollback here."
Like other first-time politicians throwing themselves into 2018, Glasson has been a union member for decades and will prioritize the need for more American workers to join unions and employee associations.
"The number one job of any elected official, particularly the governor, should be to raise wages and improve the standard living for all Iowans," she said. "The union movement and the Fight for $15 and its allies realize that low pay is not okay."
Glasson's campaign will have the backing of her union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). One of the country's largest labor unions, SEIU and its Fight for $15 arm — a national campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 — will announce Monday a push to elect labor-friendly candidates in 2018 in the Midwest states where unions once held tremendous power. The union will budget roughly $100 million for the 2018 midterm elections — around $30 million more than it spent in 2016 — to flip the once-Democratic states back to blue.
In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mahlon Mitchell, the president of the Professional Fire Fighters Association of Wisconsin who announced he's considering a run for governor in July, will rally with workers at a hospital. In Cleveland, Ohio, talk show host and former Cincinnati Mayor Jerry Springer, who is considering a run for governor next year, will join workers at a march. In Des Moines, Iowa, Glasson will also rally at a medical center. In Chicago, Daniel Biss, Chris Kennedy and J.B. Pritzker, three leading 2018 Democratic gubernatorial candidates, will rally with SEIU's president. And in Detroit, Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, another gubernatorial candidate, will also rally at a hospital.
"With the election of Donald Trump, we're seeing a wave of first-time candidates excited about creating change in each of our states," Glasson said. "We need to give people something to go to the polls and stand in line and vote for."
Randy Bryce, a Wisconsin ironworker known as "Iron Stache" who launched a challenge to House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) in June and saw his campaign video go viral, will also be participating in Labor Day events across Wisconsin. He told ThinkProgress that, other than his son's birthday, Labor Day is his favorite holiday.
"Especially in Wisconsin, with all the blatant political attacks, it's great to see people still getting together and the numbers seem to increase every year, instead of what they're trying to do, which is decrease our membership," he said. "It's great seeing more people get angry, frustrated, and want to fight back at the attacks because the government isn't doing anything to stand up for workers' rights."
In Wisconsin in particular, the labor movement has struggled to fight back against the "banana republicans" in office, as Bryce calls them. "The labor movement took everything that we had for granted up until Scott Walker got elected," he said.
Republicans in Wisconsin have gerrymandered the state so they do not fear losing their seats, Bryce noted, but the union movement is going to latch onto policies that he believes will resonate with voters across party lines, like wages and health care.
"Iowans and Americans in general are just tired of not fixing the problem, and states like Iowa should lead on this," she said. "We can do that because it's a reasonable size states, we can figure out how to pay for it, we can put policies in place that can move that agenda."
Bryce agreed. "It's the right thing to do but it's also going to help create jobs," he said.
SEUI's campaign will include a voter engagement drive aimed at expanding the turnout on Election Day in 2018. According to the New York Times, the union conducted a pilot project during the 2016 campaign in which it canvassed voters in two largely African-American neighborhoods of Detroit to spread information about which candidates support workers and higher wages.
"Over all, about 62 percent of voters the union talked to during the pilot project cast ballots in the presidential election, versus turnout of about 38 percent of voters who it did not talk to, according to data provided by the union," the report noted. "Applying the same percentage to all of Detroit's voters would have produced about 40,000 more total votes in 2016, an amount that would have almost certainly secured the state for [Hillary] Clinton."
While the need to push out anti-worker Republicans in the Midwest is paramount, many of the labor-aligned Democrats are also running to provide a counter to the Trump administration. As Glasson noted, the administration has been a disaster for working families and has alienated labor more and more as the year progresses. In August, in the wake of the president's comments about Charlottesville, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka left the president's manufacturing council, saying that some White House aides "turned out to be racist."
Glasson said that because of the administration's hostility toward labor, its critical to have pro-union individuals get involved in politics.
"Unions have been the only way that workers who drive our economy have a voice in politics," Glasson said. "By collecting and pooling union members' money, we are a force to be reckoned with in politics, and so the intentional attack on unions in the state of Iowa and the Midwest and beyond is intentional to silent the voice of everyday workers that need to have a voice in politics."
Bryce agreed that if unions do not get involved now, the Trump administration could decimate the labor movement to a point of no return.
"You're seeing a lot of people step up since this past election and see that if we don't get our stuff together, what little we have left, it's going to be totally gone."
This article was originally published at ThinkProgress on September 3, 2017. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Kira Lerner is a political reporter at ThinkProgress, where she covers a wide range of policy issues with a focus on voting rights and criminal justice reform. Her reporting on campaigns, elections, town halls, and the resistance movement has taken her to a long list of states across the country (but she's still working on hitting 50). A native of the Washington, D.C. area, she holds a degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.
Tags: fight for 15, Labor Day, Minimum Wage, pro-labor, public sector unions, Randy Bryce, rust belt, Scott Walker, SEIU, wages
Raising America This Labor Day
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014
The weekend and Labor Day are important times to reflect on and honor the courage of generations of working men and women–the people who brought us Labor Day and countless other benefits won by the labor movement, from better wages to improved working conditions.
SEIU International President Mary Kay Henry adds that it is also a "pivotal time to take stock of where our families, our economy and our democracy are heading."
In an op-ed for The Nation, Henry writes that we face an "incredible challenge":
Half of all Americans now make less than $15 an hour. Of the 10 fastest-growing jobs in America, eight are service sector jobs. Service sector jobs are the heartbeat of our economy and our communities, from the folks who care for the elderly and our children, to those who cook and serve our food to those who clean and secure our offices. Moving our economy forward must include making service jobs into good jobs with wages that you can raise a family on.
From home care workers to adjunct professors and security officers to fast food workers, people are uniting in the largest, most determined movement for working families that modern America has ever seen. And we're winning:
All told, 6.7 million workers have achieved better pay since fast food workers began striking less than two years ago, either through states or cities moving to raise minimum wages or through collective bargaining. These brave workers are building the momentum to raise wages and get our economy roaring again.
Yet, Henry notes, our prosperity depends not just on economic justice, but the fundamental American principles of liberty and justice for all.
The taking of Mike Brown's life in Ferguson, Missouri only weeks ago reminds us that social and economic justice must go hand in hand for America to thrive. To solve these issues, we need opportunities for all Americans to fully participate in our economy and improve the quality of life for their families. That's why we must also fix our broken immigration system and uphold and protect civil rights and democratic participation for all Americans, not just the wealthy few.
Enjoy a happy and safe Labor Day. For those who have the day off, best wishes for enjoyable celebrations with families and friends–and for those who are on the clock, thank you for the hard work that keeps America moving.
Originally appeared in SEIU Blog on August 31, 2014. Reprinted with Permission. http://www.seiu.org/blog/
Tags: justice, Labor Day, pay rate, SEIU
Labor Day 2013: Things Have Never Looked Worse for Workers—Or Brighter
Four young men breakdancing on the Federal Plaza last week in downtown Chicago say a lot about why this Labor Day provides occasion for both celebration and protest.
The dancers—black, white, Latino, all of them putting on a spectacular show—were fast food and retail workers on strike for the day for $15 an hour pay and the right to form a union without retaliation. They were among about 400 low-wage workers from more than 60 stores convening for a celebration after a day of delivering their key demands—with specific additional grievances tailored to each workplace—to their employers, who, from McDonald's to Sears, make up a Who's Who of brand-name fast-food and retail companies.
It was the third strike for many of the workers. The strike wave began last November in in New York, with Chicago holding protest marches late last year as well, and it spread in July to five other traditional union strongholds. On Thursday—just after the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—thousands of workers from a total of approximately 60 cities joined a national day of action, the largest yet. Strikes cropped up in the South, in cities such as Raleigh, N.C. and Memphis, Tenn., and in smaller Northern cities, such as Bloomington and Peoria, Ill. In tiny Ellsworth, Maine, a community-labor group demonstrated support for higher pay fast food workers even though none went on strike. In some cases, workers appear to have organized themselves after hearing about the earlier actions, calling whomever they could contact and asking how they could take part in the next strike.
The dark side of this jubilant surge of activity is the many reasons why it is needed—weak job growth, underemployment, flat or declining wages, feeble labor standards, a stalled union movement, an occupational structure shifting toward more low-wage service jobs, growing inequality, and widespread abuse of power by the very rich.
The decline in the official unemployment rate masks the degree to which American workers face a very grim world of work. Much of the improvement in the unemployment rate simply reflects a growth in the number of discouraged or "marginally attached" workers (people who want a job but have given up looking). The share of the workforce working part-time involuntarily has risen as well.
Such slack in the demand for labor, along with the declining power of unions and the cuts in pay demanded by both private and public employers (often accompanied by outsourcing or, at public employers, privatizing), holds down—or pushes further down—wages that had improved little even from 2000 to 2007, when the recession began. Between 2007 and 2012, even as productivity grew by 7.7 percent, wages declined for the bottom 70 percent of the workforce, according to a recent Economic Policy Institute report by Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz.
The weakness of the labor movement, especially in growing, low-wage sectors like retail and fast food, accounts for much of the decline, but the diminishing value of the minimum wage plays a big role. According to another recent EPI study, by Sylvia Allegretto and Steven C. Pitts, if the federal government restored the minimum to its peak value in 1968, the minimum wage would be $9.44 today in inflation-adjusted dollars, not $7.25. And if it matched in real terms the $2.00 minimum wage demanded 50 years ago by the March on Washington, the minimum wage would be $13.39—not far from the striking fast food workers' demand and not far from the minimum in many advanced countries (approximately $12 an hour in France and $15 an hour in Australia, for example). If the minimum wage had risen as much as worker productivity since 1968, it would be $22 an hour.
Any rise in the federal minimum would especially help people of color and women, Allegretto and Pitts report. Contrary to stereotypes of low-wage workers as teenages, a raise would help many adult, family-supporting workers. In a report for EPI published in March, David Cooper and Dan Essrow calculated that with even the modest $10.10 minimum proposed by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the average age of low-wage workers whose pay would likely increase is 35. Eighty-eight percent are over 20 years old, and 35.5 percent are 40 or older. In addition, 44 percent of the beneficiaries would be workers with some college education, and 28 percent with children.
The plight of low-wage workers is becoming a much more acute problem as the nation's occupational structure, that is, the kinds of jobs being created or retained, has changed. According to Daniel Alpert of the Century Foundation, 70 percent of the jobs created in the second quarter of this year were low-wage, like retail and hospitality work, about twice the percentage of such jobs in the overall workforce. And about 50 percent of all new jobs in the first half of 2013 were part-time.
Wages have risen for the top 5 percent, however, especially for the very richest. The top 1 percent—mainly executives and financial managers—captured 121 percent of the nation's new income during the first two years of the recovery, according to University of California, Berkeley economist Emanuel Saez. How do they do that? Essentially, they direct all national income gains to themselves while simultaneously taking more away from the 99 percent.
Looking more closely makes the picture even uglier. The success of the very rich often involves large elements of chicanery, fraud and exploitation of public resources, according to a new study, "Bailed Out, Booted, Busted," the 20th annual Labor Day edition of the Executive Excess reports from the Institute for Policy Studies. The researchers compiled data from 20 years of their studies, which relied on annual Wall Street Journal surveys of CEO pay.
Their final survey covered 500 CEOS—the 25 highest-paid CEOs each year for the two decades. IPS reports that 38 percent of these CEOs had performed extremely poorly as executives of their firms. Of those poor performers, 22 percent of the top pay winners led their firms into bankruptcy or bailout; 8 percent were fired (but got golden parachutes worth $38 million on average); and 8 percent were found guilty of fraud.
Then there are simply the super-excessively paid, making over $1 billion during their tenure, and other executives who fed at the "taxpayer trough," collecting top pay while their companies profited as major government contractors.
Any move towards equality will have to hold down the excess at the top as well as raise the bottom. But beyond basic fairness, society would reap additional benefits—faster and more stable growth (and therefore a speedier, more robust recovery); less crime and social tension; a stronger democracy; and better health, longer life and lower medical expenses, to mention a just few. (See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level.)
U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was not speaking rhetorically, but quite practically, when she told strikers in Chicago, "These workers are among thousands and thousands of low-wage workers around the country, who have a really reasonable and simple request, and that is that they be paid a living wage. …These are the makers; they are the takers. I want to thank these brave workers who walked out. They are doing it for themselves and they are doing it for America."
And it seems the strikers are doing it their way, with people volunteering and reaching out to other workers to spread the word. Most events include raps composed by strikers about their work, and protest strategies reflect their decisions. For example, in Chicago, the strikers this time wanted actions at every store where someone walked out, not just a couple of highlighted targets, as in the July strike. And they wanted a celebration at the end. If the fast food fight succeeds, it will be a result of that insurgent sentiment.
The spirit was there in the breakdance—introduced in Spanish and English, as all the program was before the crowd of comfortably mixed ethnicities, performed under a banner reading, "Fight for 15, Valemos Mas." Dancing to Michael Jackson's "Beat It," two stands-in for CEOs in mock-suits faced off against two workers from Potbelly's.
The workers won. It wasn't Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers singing "Roll the Union On." But I'm sure Pete would have approved
This article was originally published on Working In These Times on September 2, 2013. Republished with permission.
About the Author: David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy. .
Tags: chicago, labor, Labor Day, strikes, unions, workers
On Labor Day, Work to Save the Middle Class
This Labor Day feels gloomy. It's a celebration of work when there is not enough of it, a day off when too many desperately seek a day on.
America has commemorated two Labor Days since this brutal recession began near the end of George Bush's presidency in December of 2007. Now the relentless high unemployment, the ever-rising foreclosures, the unremitting wage and benefit take-backs have replaced American optimism and enthusiasm with fear and anger.
Happy Labor Day.
On this holiday, we can rant with Glenn Beck, kick the dog and hate the neighbor lucky enough to retain his job. Or we can do something different. We can join with our neighbors, employed and unemployed, our foreclosed-on children, our elderly parents fearing cuts in their Social Security lifeline and our fellow workers worrying that the furlough ax will strike them next. Together we can organize and mobilize and create a grassroots groundswell that gives government no choice but to respond to our needs, the needs of working people.
We can do what workers did during the Great Depression to provoke change, to create programs like Social Security and achieve recognition of rights like collective bargaining. These changes were sought by groups to benefit groups. In a civil society, people care for one another. And America is such a society – one where people routinely donate blood to aid anonymous strangers, children set up lemonade stands to contribute to Katrina victims and working families find a few bucks for United Way.
The self-righteous Right is all about individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. That proposition – the do-it-all- by-yourself-winner-takes-all philosophy – clearly failed because so many Americans are jobless, homeless and too penniless to afford boots.
Over the past decade, the winner who took all was Wall Street. The banksters gambled on derivatives and other risky financial tomfoolery and won big time. Until they lost. And crashed the economy. After the American taxpayer bailed them out, those wealthy traders returned to making huge profits and bonuses based on perilous schemes.
Still, they believe they haven't taken enough from working Americans. They're lobbying to end aid for those who remain unemployed in a recession caused by Wall Street recklessness. And they're demanding extension of their Bush-given tax breaks. This is the nation's upper 1 percent, people who earn a million or more each year, the 1 percent that took home 56 percent of all income growth between 1989 and 2007, the year the recession began.
Since 2007, 8.2 million workers have lost jobs. Millions more are underemployed, laboring part-time when they need full-time jobs, or barely squeaking by on slashed wages and benefits. Since the recession began, the unemployment rate nearly doubled, from 5 percent to 9.6 percent, and that does not include those so discouraged that they've given up the search for jobs, a decision that is, frankly, understandable when there are only enough openings to re-employ 20 percent of the jobless. Five unemployed workers compete for each job created in this sluggish economy.
And American workers weren't prepared for this downturn, having already suffered losses in the years before it began. The median income, adjusted for inflation, of working-age households declined by more than $2,000 in the seven years before the recession started.
At the same time, practices like off-shoring jobs and signing regressive international trade deals contributed to the loss of middle class, blue collar jobs. A new report, "The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market," by the Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project, says:
"The decline in middle-skill jobs has been detrimental to the earnings and labor force participation rates of workers without a four-year college education, and differentially so for males, who are increasingly concentrated in low-paying service occupations."
The recession compounded that, the report says:
"Employment losses during the recession have been far more severe in middle-skilled white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill, white-collar jobs or low-skill service occupations."
What that means is high roller banksters are living large; lawn care workers and waitresses subsist on minimum wage, and working class machinists and steelworkers are disappearing altogether.
The researchers found the U.S. economy is increasingly polarized into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low wage jobs. America is losing the middle jobs and with them its great middle class.
No wonder the rising anger in middle America.
But fury doesn't solve the problem. This Labor Day, we must organize to save ourselves and our neighbors. We must stop America from descending into plutocracy. We must demand support for American manufacturing and middle class jobs. That means terminating tax breaks for corporate outsourcers, ending trade practices that violate agreements and international law and punishing predator countries for currency manipulation that subverts fair trade by artificially lowering the price of products shipped into the U.S. while artificially raising the price of American exports.
We must demand support for American industry, particularly manufacturers of renewable energy sources like solar cells and wind turbines that create good working class jobs, increase America's energy independence and reduce climate change.
We must insist on policies that support the middle class, including preserving Social Security and Medicare, extending unemployment insurance while joblessness remains high, and enforcing the health care reform law so that every American worker and family can afford and is covered by insurance.
On this Labor Day, we should all have a picnic, invite neighbors, friends and family, and over hot dogs and potato salad, organize to save the American middle class.
Mobilize to end the gloom and restore American optimism.
For help: the Union of the Unemployed, the AFL-CIO, USW, Working America. Join the One Nation March for jobs Oct. 2 in Washington, D.C.
About The Author: Leo Gerard is the United Steelworkers International President. Under his leadership, the USW joined with Unite -the biggest union in the UK and Republic of Ireland – to create Workers Uniting, the first global union. He has also helped pass legislation, including the landmark Canadian Westray Bill, making corporations criminally liable when they kill or seriously injure their employees or members of the public.
Tags: banksters, Center for American Progress, Glenn Beck, Great Depression, jobless, Labor Day, manufacturing, Medicare, Recession, renewable energy, Social Security, solar cells, The Hamilton Project, unemployment, Wall Street, wind turbines
Posted in economy, Labor Day | No Comments »
Labor Day's Legacy: A More Inclusive America
At some point in their lives, almost all parents think about making a will to ensure that their assets are passed on to the next generation. But material gains, of course, are the least of what we give our children. Far more important are the values we teach them.
This Labor Day, I propose we think less about the material gains that working Americans have secured for their families over the past century. Instead, we should consider the values that organized labor embodies that we might hope to pass along to our children.
What I inherited from my grandparents — and what I want to see the labor movement impart to the next generation — is a legacy of inclusion.
In the early 1900s, my grandparents came to this country as Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms and oppression in Eastern Europe. Although they worked low-paying jobs in the textile and apparel sectors, they were deeply motivated by a vision of building a better society.
Part of their motivation was secular, and part came out of their faith. Their vision of creating a better America involved a politics of mutual aid and mutual support. Working with this in mind, they helped to establish some of the foundational institutions of our democracy. Their generation built hospitals and synagogues. They built public schools. And they built trade unions.
When I was a child, my grandfather brought me from meeting to meeting, where we would hear people talk and argue. They would discuss pooling their resources to take care of someone who was sick, or to bury the dead, or to help a family whose breadwinner had been suddenly thrown out of work. Those informal networks of support, which existed for generations, were the precursors to modern trade unions. In more recent decades, unions have been the means for employees to come together, work in their collective interest, and help provide one another with a measure of economic security.
The result has been profound. Because my grandparents' generation built unions of textile and apparel workers — as well as unions in other industrial sectors of the economy — their children were able to go to college. Many in the next generation became educators and public servants, and they built organizations of their own. Today's teachers unions and public sector unions stand in this same tradition of being a bulwark of middle class life in America.
On this Labor Day, we can witness a new wave of immigrants coming to this country with a vision of building a better life. They may come from different countries, their complexions may be different, and they may be more likely to work as janitors or housekeepers than as factory workers. But their hopes and aspirations are the same.
The question for us as a society is: Will we leave a legacy behind of inclusion and preserve our country as the place that the world looks to as a haven of opportunity? Or will we take America down a very alien path, close our doors, and become a nation laden with fear-mongering, scapegoating, and exclusion?
This is an especially important question for Labor Day, because organized labor has been the central institution in our country that has allowed previous generations of immigrants — people like my grandparents — to enter into the economic mainstream of their communities. Today, as we work to create pathways that will allow newly arrived immigrants to weave themselves into the civic fabric of American society, a large part of our efforts must be to create a revitalized labor movement, one eager to welcome them into its ranks.
We need look no further than labor's past to give us direction toward a more inclusive future.
About This Author: Amy B. Dean served as President of the South Bay AFL-CIO in Silicon Valley from 1992-2003 and chaired AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's committee on the future direction of labor strategy at the regional level. She is co-author, with David B. Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement.
Tags: Amy Dean, Immigrants, Labor Day, public sector unions, teachers unions, textile workers


Sometimes finances can become so much of a burden that it is impossible to make it to payday. When this happens, payday loans might be the only option that you have to make the payment of bills on time. Payday loans, however, are a very risky practice. They are risky for a multitude of reasons, mostly because of what is expected when paying them back.
First of all, payday loans are usually issued at an extremely high interest rate. While you may be getting 100% of your paycheck, you may be expected to pay back as much as 20% interest to the company. In another instance, they may only give you 80% of your paycheck with the payday loans. You will be expected to give them the full 100% as soon as it reaches payday for you. Payday loans should only be used in dire situations when money is extremely needed.
Your first line should be directly to friends or family members that will loan you the money at little or no interest. Because you will be required to pay back so much money with the payday loans, resorting to them would be in your best interest. Payday loans will also create a rippling effect in your personal finances if you are not careful. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, a payday loan could set you back a couple of weeks. Because of the large expense in getting a payday loan, it is likely to happen again during one of the weeks to come. Once you become reliant upon the payday loans, it will take a large reassessment of your personal finances to get everything straightened out.


Following reports that smuggled lemons and sour cherries are being sold in the domestic fruit markets, Agriculture Minister Mahmoud Hojjati has called for the formation of a taskforce led by his deputy for commercial affairs, Mojtaba Khosrotaj to tackle the issue.
As decreed by the ministry about four years ago, the import of all types of fruits other than bananas, pineapples, coconuts and mangoes is officially banned in support of local producers, as domestic production is sufficient to meet demand at home, ISNA reported.
According to Iran's Plant Protection Organization (PPO), not only does fruit smuggling inflict financial losses on domestic producers, but it also risks spreading pests and diseases inside the country.
"At present, there are more than 600 kinds of pests in Iran, most of which, including the olive fruit fly and sunn pest (which affects wheat) as well as the witches' broom disease have entered the country via smuggled fruit," says the PPO head, Ali Baghestani.


Because his high school is only about 40 minutes away via the 101 Loop in Arizona, I am going to see an awful lot of LHP Matthew Liberatore this spring. At the second of two fairly disparate starts from the senior, several teams picking in the top ten had a little extra heat in attendance to observe him. Indeed, after Liberatore sat 93-97 in his first start, there's been some admittedly premature discussion about how high he might go in the draft. But now that we have a few appearances worth of information this spring, it's reasonable to begin considering where he might go in June. We can do that by ignoring the other prospects in this year's draft class and instead comparing Libby to other recent prep lefties.
This style of temperature check is useful for a few reasons. At some point, we have to line up every prospect in this year's draft class, but it's hard to do that with precision right now because evaluations are constantly shifting and we don't know everything about things like signability or injuries. By comparing a current prospect — in this case, Liberatore — to his peers in previous draft classes, we're now only dealing with one moving target and can more easily get an idea of where he's likely to be selected.
There are several factors besides mere talent that influence where a player is selected in the draft — especially early in a draft — and, of course, the quality of talent in a given class is also relevant. We can't control for that stuff and probably don't need to because, again, we're just trying to get a feel for a realistic range of potential outcomes.
With that in mind, here are the draft-day evaluations of the high-school lefties who have been taken in the first round since 2014. I have them listed in order of preference based on talent at the time they were drafted, with other factors (size, makeup, delivery) noted. The "x" indicates that attribute was essentially value neutral, or at least not so impactful that it affected the player's stock. These were all future, not current, pitch projections, and if a kid had two breaking balls I just picked the better of the two.
So where does Matthew Liberatore stack among this group? Last week, he was up to 94, sitting mostly 91-92 for most of his start, with a fairly upright delivery that I think negatively impacts extension. His slowest fastball was at 88; it came from the stretch late in his start. Liberatore's curveball flashed plus several times. It's fair to question if a 70-72 mph curveball will be effective in the big leagues, but there's remarkable feel for spin here and it's likely Liberatore's breaking ball will have more power to it at maturity. He flashed an above-average changeup, which projects to plus at peak as he utilizes it more in pro ball.
From a strike-throwing and consistency perspective, Liberatore was disappointing. He failed to get on top of many fastballs and breaking balls, forcing a number of pitches to sail up and to his arm side. The quality of his stuff was also inconsistent throughout much of his outing. He's a good athlete for his size and has some room on his frame for more mass, so it's possible more velocity is coming. As the spring rolls on, this evaluation is likely to change a little but, but right now here's where we think Liberatore is at.
Matt Liberatore 55 60 60 50 + x x ? ?
*Reported agreed upon bonus with Houston before UCL issue was discovered during physical.
Groome and Allard probably go higher in their respective drafts if not for off-field and injury issues, respectively. I think it's fair to place Liberatore in the picks No. 3 to 7 range right now, just based on how his talent stacks up with recent precedent. A lot can still happen between now and the draft to change this. If his velocity ticks comfortably into the mid-90s as the draft approaches, we're talking about something closer to Gore than to Garrett. We can use similar methodology (especially during the summer prior to a draft) across a draft class to loosely tier players, while being mindful of changing industry norms. As the draft approaches, though, it's necessary to polish up the order within a given tier or move players around because of makeup, medicals, and other considerations.
We hoped you liked reading A Glance at Matthew Liberatore's Draft Stock by Eric Longenhagen!
How does this have no comments? I'm leaving one for that reason, and that reason alone.
…and I might secretly think there is a chance Liberatore (can we start calling him "Libby") goes 1.1.
Enjoy the peace and quiet before the boras conspiracy drones get here…. Nice piece eric and look forward to hearing more about the upcoming draft class!


text:
The Century Experiment
We are exploring the effects of agricultural management on resource use, economics, and the environment over the course of 100 years
Changes in the soil and agroecosystems often happen gradually, so we started our flagship 100-year experiment—the Century Experiment—in 1993 to understand the real impacts of agricultural management on resource use, economics, and the environment in the long term.
"The study of [soil is] really a study of biotic memories, of how living things, whether bacteria or people, reshape and are themselves reshaped by their habitat, through many generations….
One way of fostering this long view is through "listening places"—places set aside for patient and oft-repeated measurements, where our observations are melded into those of our predecessors, then handed off as heirlooms to those who follow us. In that way, we bequeath a lengthening legacy—a library expanding with time—from which to read the soil's memory and elicit portents of what is yet to be." —H. Henry Janzen
The philosophy of the Century Experiment is a simple one: studying how farm management practices impact the ecology of the farm over the seasons, years, and decades will help us figure out how to make agriculture and food production more sustainable.
On the 72 one-acre plots of the Century Experiment, we measure these trends by regularly observing:
crop yield
soil quality and biodiversity
water and energy use
other environmental impacts
Russell Ranch conducts extensive soil sampling and testing as part of the Century Experiment
Long-term Experiment in a Mediterranean Climate
Regions characterized by a hot-summer Mediterranean climate are in blue, and by a warm- or cool-summer Mediterranean climate in orange. Map adapted from a figure by Adam Peterson, from data provided by PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University (source: https://goo.gl/Kq6Fy6; CC 4.0 license).
Unlike most other long-term agricultural cropping systems studies, Russell Ranch is located in a region with a Mediterranean climate, meaning that most of the rain falls between November and April and little rain is received during the summer, a drought period accompanied by high temperatures. The Mediterranean climate type stretches across the western U.S., all the way north through central Washington State and Montana, south to southern CA and New Mexico.
The Mediterranean climate provides prime conditions for production of many crops, as the dry period limits disease and pest damage, but also stresses crop plants during the summer and necessitates irrigation to grow healthy crops. We use irrigation systems at a large scale similar to those used by field crop growers in California, so that our findings scale up and are applicable to large farms throughout the state of California and the western United States.
Cropping Systems of the Century System
The cropping systems in the long-term experiment include rainfed and irrigated systems, organic and conventional systems, and different forms and quantity of nitrogen inputs. The study began in 1993 with a uniform sudangrass crop to evaluate inherent soil differences and the original cropping systems were first planted in 1994.
The cropping systems at the Century Experiment are designed to fall along a gradient of increasing irrigation and fertilization intensity, and a gradient of crop management philosophies (i.e., conventional to organic to a hybrid system) mirroring typical crop rotations common to the Sacramento valley. Currently, the Century Experiment contains ten systems that are:
two-year corn/tomato rotations (started in 1994)
two-year wheat/tomato rotation (started in 1994)
two-year wheat/fallow rotations (started in 1994)
two-year wheat/legume rotation (started in 1994)
six-year alfalfa-tomato-corn rotation (started in 2012)
a perennial native grass system
Current Design of the Century Experiment
Changes in the Century Experiment since 1993
In 1999, a new transitional system was added to the Century experiment, which converted conventional plots to an organic corn/tomato rotation
In 2003, the "Legume" Corn–Tomato system was altered to receive cover crop each winter (instead of every other winter)
From 2003–2007, all one-acre plots of the Corn–Tomato systems were split in half and reduced tillage treatments were compared to standard tillage treatments
In 2007, the Irrigated Wheat–Legume system was discontinued
Wheat replaced corn from 2010-2012
In 2012, two systems, a six-year rotation (alfalfa–alfalfa–alfalfa–tomato–corn–tomato) and perennial native grass mix including nodding needlegrass (Nassella cernua), pine bluegrass (Poa secunda), three week fescue (Vulpia microstachys), squirreltail (Elymus multisetus), California oniongrass (Melica californias), and purple needlegrass (Nassella pulchra), were added to the Century Experiment
The Future of the Century Experiment
Long-term experiments are dynamic and need to respond to changing farming practices, as well as address evolving scientific priorities. For example, as subsurface drip tape became available to reduce water use in agroecosystems, we invested in conversion from flood irrigation to subsurface drip in most of our corn-tomato systems. Following this change, UC Davis scientists are leading research into optimizing irrigation efficiency with subsurface drip, while also working to understand the effects of this large-scale irrigation change on soil health. New innovations are always being explored to keep the Century Experiment on the cutting edge of crop management methodologies and technologies.
The cropping systems of the long-term project are being evaluated to be more flexible and responsive to current trends, while maintaining the integrity of the long-term experiment.
Additional new projects being discussed include:
integrated nutrient management systems
animal forage systems
rotations with pulse crops (grain legumes, e.g., garbanzo beans)
woody perennials (orchards and vineyards)
reduced tillage rotations
History of the Century Experiment

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Memory Wallpaper was created by Canadian designer Cynthia Hathaway. Hathaway was born and raised in Ontario and was an artistic director at the Design Academy in Eindhoven before starting her own firm in Amsterdam. This design is die-cut on a walnut grain adhesive vinyl. To give you some background on this material, Vinyl wallcoverings were introduced in 1947; self-adhesive vinyl was first patented under the brand name of Con-Tact in 1954. Con-Tact was 100% plastic with a pressure-sensitive back that stuck on contact to almost any surface. It was meant to revolutionize the wallpaper industry. Designed for the do-it-yourself market it was inexpensive, nearly indestructible, and all you needed to hang it was a pair of scissors. This piece was designed for a Canadian collective called Mother, with the project being to explore the best of the cabin experience. Hathaway chose self-adhesive vinyl because it is so ubiquitous, and the woodgrain pattern reminded her of log cabins. You're seeing one of five different cut-outs that are located at various points along the roll: the others being a rack of souvenir spoons, a lantern, canoe paddles, and a Canadian Mountie. Hathaway has a strong interest in the recyclability of things and ideas and doesn't think the past should be obscured by the present. When this wallcovering is applied over an existing wallpaper, the cut-outs give the old surface an automatic link to the present and allow it to become an integral part of the design. In this image the vinyl is laid over a 1960s wallpaper.
Sidewall: Memory. Designed by Cynthia Hathaway. Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2003. Gift of Cynthia Hathaway.


The website moves on to the next section, Sanskaras, or important milestones of life. Our ancestors designed ingenious landmarks involving ceremonies and prayers to mark transitional stages in life. These have evolved as ceremonies to be observed even in current society. For instance, there is the ceremony of namakarana, giving a suitable name to the newborn (within ten days of birth). Several life events follow the first ceremony: jatakarma–annaprashana, the child's taking of its first solid food (third month); karna-vedha, ear piercing (sixth month); choodakarma, the first haircut (one year); Upanayana, the wearing the of the holy thread and initiation into Vedic prayers (eighth year); Vag nischaya, the engagement ceremony; and Vivaha, the wedding ceremony. There are also ceremonies associated with events after death, cremation, and periodical observances of anniversaries of the departed.
While the Sanskaras are conceived of as landmark events creating a climate for enabling and empowering a person for his or her optimal growth and development, there are also colorful festivities associated with certain holy days, such as the birthday of Sri Rama, Sri Krishna, Dasara/Navaratri, Deepvali, the festival of lights, and Holi, the event of colors. These are presented in our special infomercials, interspersed with videos.


Pushbar length: 36" Standard width bars can be field cut to the next smallest opening width.
Projection: 2-5/8" when fully projected. 1-5/8" when dogged.
Door thickness: 1-3/4" standard up to 2-1/4". Device requires modification when used with cylinder in doors over 1-3/4".
Stile Wall: Doors with stile walls other than 1/8" require modification.
Stile Width: Minimum 2" stile. Fits narrow, medium and wide stile aluminum doors.
Bar Height: Adjustable from 30" to 44"
Door Height: Standard unit adjustable for doors up to 66" above the selected bar height.
Strike: Made of hardened steel. Supplied.
Bolt & Strikes: The patented top latching mechanism utilizes a rotating top bolt which dead latches around the header strike, interlocking the door to the frame.
Supplied with standard header strike.
The hexagonal, hardened steel bottom bolt works in harmony with the top bolt.