Bush Official Says Hunger Statistics Are A Fraud

As we reported in this space not long ago, fully one-third of American children live in poverty. The Center for American Progress reports on a USDA study:

HUNGER ON THE RISE: Available government data all suggest a worsening of hunger in America. In a study based on the most recent statistics, the USDA conceded “the economic recession that began in 2001 pushed the prevalence of food insecurity slightly upward.” The study showed “11.1 percent (12.1 million households) were food insecure [in 2002], up from 10.7 percent in 2001.” Other data point to a more than “slight” increase in hunger. USDA statistics show a 40 percent rise in food stamp participants since October 2000, up to nearly 24 million Americans. Such statistics back up a 2002 report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which found increased demand for “emergency food” in all 25 cities surveyed.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that Ohio has been hit pretty hard.

COLUMBUS — A struggling economy has created a new kind of poverty in Ohio in which the number of people seeking help at food pantries has increased each of the last three years, The Columbus Dispatch reported on Sunday.

The Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks, which serves much of Ohio through 3,000 agencies, reported a 44 percent increase in people seeking assistance during the first three months of this year compared with the last three months of 2003. At the same time, the food available at pantries rose just 4 percent.

George Zeller, senior researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Council for Economic Opportunities in Greater Cleveland, said as Ohio’s large manufacturing base has shrunk, it has become more difficult for people to work their way out of poverty.

Vince Chase of Catholic Social Services of Clark, Champaign and Logan Counties, calls Ohio’s economic climate Depression-like, the worst he’s experienced in 30 years of helping people in need.

“We’re seeing people who never thought they would be in this situation,” Chase told the newspaper for a week-long series on poverty that began on Sunday. “Half of them are working people who have 10 to 15 to 20 years of work experience but don’t have jobs.”

Nationwide, the number of people seeking emergency food from Catholic Charities USA and its partners has jumped about 20 percent annually in recent years. A U.S. Conference of Mayors survey of 25 cities found the demand at food pantries rose 17 percent in 2003 and 19 percent in 2002.

But USDA Undersecretary Eric Bost calls his own Dept’s study a fraud.

“There’s a bump, but how much of that is due to people taking the easy way out? I don’t know,” he said.

Food-stamp enrollment is up largely due to government outreach to eligible people, he said. Pantries typically don’t require documentation of income, so not everyone receiving provisions is truly in need, Bost said.

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Shown a study by his own agency demonstrating a rise in the hungry, he said the numbers were probably inflated, and indicated the questions were too vague: “If you ask any teenager if they’re happy about the food they have in their house, what will they say?” he asked.So Bost thinks the rich are hanging out at shelters claiming food meant for the poor? And that his Dept’s hunger studies are put together by people running around asking teenagers if they like the food their parents buy? I suppose that makes about as much sense as anything else this Administration believes.

The Bush Administration is riddled with deep thinkers like Bost, rabid followers of Ronald Reagan who attacked welfare by claiming off the top of his head that welfare recipients were using food stamps to buy vodka. Regan’s legacy was to show them the way to destroy social programs: deny the evidence and tell blatant lies based on imaginary anecdotes and wishful thinking.

Not much has changed in the last quarter-century.

(Thanks to Jamison of BiteSoundBite for the tip)

Homeless Representative Is…Homeless

Two years ago, the city of Los Angeles created an ‘advisory’ panel called the Downtown LA Neighborhood Council. The idea was to give actual residents a voice in city government. Then last year the DLANC voted to creat a ‘skid row’ seat, and this year several homeless candidates are running for it.

Organizers of the 2-year-old city-funded advisory panel created the unusual seat to give an official voice to the estimated 11,000 people living in and around skid row. But the number of homeless candidates running in the downtown council’s second election has taken even some of the participants by surprise.

“I actually didn’t think there would be much competition,” said Max Delsoin, who graduated from law school at Washington University in St. Louis but now lives in a hotel near skid row.

Interest in the council from a group often perceived as disengaged and disenfranchised is so high that two other candidates without permanent homes are seeking to represent the Fashion District and Central City East on the 27-member council. The downtown neighborhood council, like 80 others across the city, advises the mayor and City Council.

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As the graceful old buildings around skid row are transformed into luxury lofts and upscale stores and restaurants, candidates like Ali want to make sure their community isn’t forgotten.”Our voices need to be at the table … to help City Hall make decisions,” Ali said, explaining that he thinks the city’s leaders lack the “political and creative will” to address the homeless problem.

[Candidate] Delsoin, who wound up downtown a year ago, thinks homeless shelters are dehumanizing and ought to be reformed, with “food that’s not expired” and better education and job-training opportunities.

But some of the candidates, he figures, are also seeking “self-actualization because, in every aspect of their lives, they are demolished, humiliated and seen as non-persons.”

Having an elected seat reserved for a homeless person may be unique to Los Angeles, according to Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C.

Uh, yeah, I bet it is. Too much of reporter Jessica Garrison’s article seems to find the whole thing amusing, what with one candidate pushing a shopping cart while he campaigns and another a self-described ‘monarchist’. But to give her credit, she does find time to note how serious the issues–and some of the candidates–are.

But Ali, though engaging and nicely dressed, is missing a lot of front teeth and did not look the part of the hip, downtown loft dweller. Neither the handyman nor the security guard offered to help him get to the apartments upstairs.

So down the street he went, past the discount clothing storefronts and men sipping from paper bags, and into the lobby of that other type of downtown residence, the kind of place with a locked metal door where tenants rent rooms by the week.

“Hi, I’m Bilal Ali,” he told a young woman in the dingy lobby of a hotel on Los Angeles Street. “A vote for me is a vote for you. This is for the neighborhood council. This is folks like me and you, getting our voices heard.”

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Skid row is loud, colorful, pungent — an explosion of humanity. Tents, cardboard boxes, makeshift beds and sprawled bodies crowd the sidewalks. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and drug dealers share space with preachers and pickpockets. Free meals abound, but dignity and a private place to go to the bathroom are hard to find.It is a world few understand if they have not lived there, many homeless people say.

“I consider this my home,” said Garcia, who said he has lived on and off skid row since losing his job in 1991. “I’ve met a lot of really good people down here.”

If elected, he said, he would press the police to stop rousting sleeping people from the sidewalks at dawn.

“It’s making people’s lives more difficult — people who already have a lot of difficulties. They are dealing with drug addiction and poverty and looking for jobs and, on top of all this, they have the police.”

Isn’t this what democracy is about? Giving a voice to the voiceless? And they didn’t think anybody would care.

Labor Law in Reality: A Personal Experience

Shortly after I graduated high school (and had gotten thrown out of my first college–UNH–after the first semester), I got married. Naturally, I needed a job. I found one in the warehouse at a company called Booth Fisheries that had just opened a plant in Portsmouth. The Home Office was in Brownsville, Texas, and they brought their Texas management style with them.

# The minimum number of breaks the law required were given and for the minimum amount of time–10 mins–even though most NE companies had moved to 15 or even 20 by then. These breaks were rigidly enforced, to the point where women who had to pee outside break-time weren’t allowed to leave the line long enough to go to the bathroom. This created health problems for a number of them.

# Workers were regularly stopped on their way out the door to go home and accused of stealing stock or equipment, not only without any proof that they had done it but without any proof that anything had been stolen. Some had to submit to personal searches of themselves and their clothes. No one was ever found to have stolen anything; the company considered that proof that the searches had stopped employee thieving even though nothing had been stolen to begin with, so they kept doing it despite employee protests.

# Managers had been told to yell at people without reason on the theory that intimidation would keep employees ‘on their toes’, and did so most of the day. The smallest infraction or mistake was enough to get you hauled ino the line manager’s office and yelled at so loud we could hear it over the machines. Two mistakes and they would cut your pay rate; three and you could be fired. Some were.

# ‘Orientation’ for new employees consisted largely of a video of lies about unions stealing from their members and a lecture on the general evils of unions.

# When the company was negotiating for the contract to provide McDonald’s with the patties for its fish sandwiches (a contract worth $$millions$$ to Booth), in order to prove that they could handle the size of the order they sped the line up so fast that none of the workers could keep up with it and the machines kept breaking down. Supervisors roamed the lines verbally abusing anyone who had trouble keeping up. One woman whose machine kept breaking down was accused of deliberately sabotaging it and slapped across the face by a manager. Another was fired because she dropped a box of fish sticks.

# Workers were often berated, sent home early without warning or kept late without choice as punishment for a mistake or talking back to a supervisor. If they balked, they were disciplined or even fired. One woman who was ordered to stay 3 hrs after her usual quitting time was fired when she insisted on leaving the line to call her husband to tell him–he was driving ten miles to pick her up.

As things went from bad to worse, anger began to build up. A couple of us began to say we needed the protection of a union, and when enough people agreed we called a representative of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. We had several meetings at various employees’ homes, circulated a petition in secret, and when there were enough signatures, the AMC rep presented the petition to management and demanded a vote.

From that point on, things got nasty. The company found various pretexts to prevent union reps from talkimg to us on-site before the vote, sometimes by force. They identified the people they thought were behind getting the union and harrassed them–threatening phone calls in the middle of the night, black cars with burly men in them following us wherever we went, anonymous death threats by mail and hand-delivered. Some of us who were careless were even beaten when they could catch us alone. One guy suffered a broken arm and cracked ribs, and quit both the union effort and the company. Companies where spouses worked were called by Booth reps and told to stop their wives from working for the union or Booth would get them fired.

The union protested these actions to the State Labor Board, but the NHLB was composed of businessmen who hated unions and they did nothing. The threats and beatings were reported to the police, but they said that unless we–we–could prove that Booth was behind them, they couldn’t do anything. I said to one of them ‘Isn’t that your job?’ and he ordered me out of the station under threat of arrest for ‘disturbing the peace’.

The union reps did what they could to keep us calm but as the vote approached, the company switched tactics. The brass from Brownsville–the President, a few VP’s, a couple of corporate lawyers–arrived and took over. One-by-one we were each taken into the cafeteria and made to sit before a table full of glowering suits who demanded to know how we were going to vote. They said they had a right to do this. They didn’t. It’s illegal. But the low-income folks they’d concentrated on hiring didn’t know that.

We were asked what our complaints were and they were dutifully written down. They told us in detail the changes they planned to make to address those complaints; those promises were NOT written down and from what people said when they came out of the cafeteria, it seemed they had promised a lot of people a lot of different things. After the promises of improvements, the suits turned to threats. Run down the list in the previous post–they did or promised to do all of them, one after the other. Plus one that isn’t there: we had a lot of women working in that plant, so the suits told the married workers that if they voted for the union they’d see to it their husbands lost their jobs.

When I went in, they told me right off the bat that they had me tabbed as a ‘troublemaker’ and that whether the union won or lost, I was going to be fired as soon as the vote was over. Then they dismissed me. They didn’t ask me how I was going to vote. They didn’t care.

The threats and promises worked. The union was voted down, though not by much despite all the heavy-handed tactics; that meant that the union threat was still in the air. Within a month, all the ‘troublemakers’ were gone. They got rid of me by having a young supervisor hide behind a crate in the warehouse. When I passed by on my forklift, he jumped out from behind the crate and threw himself against the side of the fork lift claiming I had ‘run him down.’ He then fired me for ‘recklessness’.

I protested first to an unemployment inspector and then to the Labor Board. The inspector let me and my witnesses speak our piece, then found for the compoany without their having to say a word in their own defense. The NHLB was exactly the opposite: they listened to the company and upheld their action without letting either me or my witnesses say a word in defense.

The company, needless to say, kept none of its promises to improve conditions and they continued to deteriorate. Employment at the plant was like a revolving door–as one was going in, two were coming out. The company complained that it was constantly understaffed and couldn’t keep workers. A year or so later, they closed the plant because, as an executive explained to the local paper, ‘People in New Hampshire don’t want to work.’

I know the law gives us rights on paper, but where’s the reality?

It’s a good question. Paper law may favor the worker but practical law sides with the owners. When it comes to labor law–

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.–Lenny Bruce

Labor Law

by Phaedrus

No Labor Rights, No Freedom, No Democracy

They go hand in hand. A liberal writing at The American Street criticized unions as elitist organizations that had failed in their duty to organize low-wage and, in particular, agricultural workers. Agricultural workers have no protection under US labor law. They are excluded from the Wagner Act. Liberals and everyone else better understand that the fault does not lie in unions, it lies in US labor law which fails to protect a basic human right, the right of free association of workers. Said right is considered, internationally, a major bulwark of freedom and democracy. Welcome to America, land of the sort of free, home of the getting poorer but still brave.

All of the excerpts below come from the Human Rights Watch 2000 report on human rights violations in the US involving labor and the right to organize. The excerpts are lengthy, but if you haven’t had personal experience with this stuff you really need to read the whole report. None of this is news to me, and I know HRW ain’t makin’ it up. I’ve served on a union bargaining committee, I’ve been a shop steward, I’ve taken part in an organizing campaign. I’ve see this bullshit up close.

UNFAIR ADVANTAGE
Workers’ Freedom of Association in the United States
under International Human Rights Standards

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of association with others, including the right to form and join trade unions.
-International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified by the United States in 1992)

Employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other mutual aid or protection.
-National Labor Relations Act (passed by Congress in 1935)

I know the law gives us rights on paper, but where’s the reality?
-Ernest Duval, a worker fired in 1994 for forming and joining a union (speaking in 1999)

According to Prof. Theodore St. Antoine, former dean of the University of Michigan School of Law and president of the National Academy of Arbitrators, the nation’s leading organization of labor-management neutrals, “[t]he intensity of opposition to unionization which is exhibited by American employers has no parallel in the western industrial world.”

[snip]

Reviewing NLRB records, Prof. Paul Weiler at Harvard Law School found that unfair labor practice charges against employers increased by 750 percent between 1957 and 1980, while the number of NLRB elections (a measure of workers’ organizing activity) increased by less than 50 percent.

Research in the 1990s continued examining workers’ right violations in light of domestic legal principles and the original intent of the NLRA. In 1994 a report by Prof. Richard Hurd of Cornell University documented one hundred recent cases of flagrant workers’ rights violations by employers and the failure of U.S. labor law enforcement authorities to remedy the violations. Hurd concluded that “the right to an independent voice for workers has become a mirage.”

The following case is pretty typical. HRW has many other examples.

V. CASE STUDIES OF VIOLATIONS OF WORKERS’ FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATIONAbuses by Management

A complaint issued by the NLRB finding merit in unfair labor practice charges filed by the union tells what happened next. PTP management fired Gilbert Gardner and eight other workers active in the union organizing effort. In addition to the firings, PTP managers and supervisors:

– threatened to close the plant if a majority of workers voted in favor of union representation;

– threatened to move work to Mexico;

– threatened to move the AOL production line to another country;

– threatened that Eveready Battery would pull its business from PTP;

– threatened to fire workers who attended union meetings;

– threatened to fire anyone who joined the union;

– threatened to replace American workers with foreigners if the union came in;

– threatened to transfer workers to dirtier, lower-paying jobs if they supported the union;

– told workers not to take union flyers from union organizers;

– told workers upper management was going to “get them” for supporting the union;

– asked employees to report to management on the activities of union supporters;

– stationed managers and security guards with walkie-talkies to spy on union handbilling and report on workers who accepted flyers;

– interrogated workers about their union sympathies and activities;

– denied wage increases and promotions to workers who supported the union.

Those are all illegal acts by the company, but obtaining judgments from the NLRB and the courts takes years, and then the penalties are puny, a miniscule cost of doing business for the company, far cheaper than allowing a union.

In a national poll, 59 percent of workers said it was likely they would lose favor with their employer if they supported an organizing drive. And 79 percent agreed that it was “very” or “somewhat” likely that “nonunion workers will get fired if they try to organize a union.” Among employed nonunion respondents, 41 percent believed that “it is likely that I will lose my job if I tried to form a union.”

How easy is it to intimidate workers who already believe such stuff? One firing should be plenty, but they usually fire more than that.

A 1997 study by the Secretariat of the North American Commission for Labor Cooperation under NAFTA’s labor side accord reported that employers threaten to close the workplace in half of the organizing campaigns undertaken by workers in the United States, but rarely in Canada or Mexico. Such threats are used even more intensively in U.S. industries where workers feel most vulnerable to shutdowns and relocations. Employers threatened closings in nearly two-thirds of organizing efforts in manufacturing facilities and warehouses.[snip]

Researching workers’ exercise of these rights in different industries, occupations, and regions of the United States to prepare this report, Human Rights Watch found that freedom of association is a right under severe, often buckling pressure when workers in the United States try to exercise it.

Yep, we sure got a right to organize — on paper. And that’s all.

International human rights law prohibits the use of state power to repress workers’ exercise of their right to freedom of association. Forming and joining unions, bargaining collectively, or exercising the right to strike may not be banned or rendered impotent by force of law. Officially or unofficially, authorities may not harass workers, arrest them, imprison them, or physically abuse or kill them for such activities.Moreover, governments must take affirmative measures to protect workers’ freedom of association. Governments have a responsibility under international law to provide effective recourse and remedies for workers whose rights have been violated by employers. Strong enforcement is required to deter employers from violating workers’ rights.

The failure to affirmatively protect the right to organize is a failure to protect a basic human right under international law.

In the United States, millions of workers are excluded from coverage by laws to protect rights of organizing, bargaining, and striking. For workers who are covered by such laws, recourse for labor rights violations is often delayed to a point where it ceases to provide redress. When they are applied, remedies are weak and often ineffective. In a system replete with all the appearance of legality and due process, workers’ exercise of rights to organize, to bargain, and to strike in the United States has been frustrated by many employers who realize they have little to fear from labor law enforcement through a ponderous, delay-ridden legal system with meager remedial powers.[snip]

In the 1950s such union “density” reached more than 30 percent of the total workforce and nearly 40 percent in the private sector.

Those figures have fallen to around 13% total and less than 9% in the private sector, and not because unions are outdated. Other democracies have not had similar declines. The US drop in union density began with the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 over the veto of Harry Truman, who denounced it as a “slave-labor bill”. The effects didn’t show up for some years and were accelerated by the passage of the Landrum-Griffith Act in 1959. The orginal Wagner Act, creating the NLRB, by-de-by, is named for a Republican Senator. Try to imagine a Republican voting for it today.

This is supposed to be government of, by, and for the people. What are the majority of Americans? They’re workers. So how come workers have no real rights in this great “democracy?” What do you call a country that ignores a basic human right? Certainly, authoritarian comes to mind. As does evil/savage/facist/fuck-the-worker land.

(reposted from No Fear of Freedom)