Marketwatch, “Manufacturing strength is focus of investors“: “WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — If the smoldering U.S. economy is going to catch fire, the manufacturing sector is probably going to have to provide the spark….As a result, economists and investors will be paying even closer attention to the monthly report on durable-goods orders, whose latest figures for January will be issued Thursday. Durable goods are items that last at least three years.”

Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus-Leader, “Poll: Bring in more manufacturing jobs” “[Despite] credit cards’ rich imprint on Sioux Falls during almost three decades here, few residents want the city to encourage expansion of the industry, according to a new poll commissioned for the Argus Leader. Residents were asked to choose the industry the city should encourage the most to expand in Sioux Falls, and 41 percent said manufacturing. Almost a third said health care, and only 3 percent said the credit card industry.”
 

Mike Boyer, Cincinnati.com, “Manufacturing jobs on rise“: “Manufacturing jobs are making a comeback across Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky as the region produces everything from auto parts and micro-machinery to burial caskets and copper wire. After losing nearly 37,000 jobs over the past decade, manufacturing employment in the region increased 5 percent last year over 2009 – adding 4,800 jobs and encouraging the fragile economic recovery.”

Oregon Business Report, “Where jobs are growing, shrinking in Oregon“: “If you want to which jobs are hiring and which are firing in Oregon, take a look at the graph below by the Oregon Employment Department.   There appears to be lots of hiring in information jobs, mining and leisure/hospitality sections.   Those jobs that are not hiring but firing would be manufacturing and financial services.” The chart for November 2009 to November 2010 shows a 0.3 percent drop in manufacturing jobs, totalling 500, putting Oregon in 33rd place in the country.”\

Oregon Business Report, “Kitzhaber visits the shipyard to promote ideas for boosting jobs“: “Gov. John Kitzhaber picked gritty, growing Vigor Industrial on Wednesday as the place to talk about boosting the state’s manufacturing sector and creating high paying jobs. Supporting those aims, he discussed a new bill to preserve state industrial areas and a proposal to provide capital gains tax relief to those who invest in job-producing companies. The press portion of the event at Swan Island was canned, but the timing and setting were nonetheless salient symbols of progress for a sector that was troubled even before the recession — since 2004, Oregon has lost 13.4% of its manufacturing jobs.”

NPR, Morning Edition, “Jobs Office Retrains Itself To Focus On Hiring“: When Larry Benders started as head of Cleveland’s federally funded jobs office in mid-2008, helping people find work usually meant paying for job training….Last year, Benders decided his office was approaching the problem backward: Instead of focusing on the jobless, the agency needed to be zeroing in on the people doing the hiring. “So we said, ‘Wait a minute, let’s go and talk to the employers and say how many welders do you need? And what sort of welders do you need? And what does a successful welder in your organization look like?’ ” he says. “Then, take that information back and then try to do matches for welders in our system that fit the profile of the specific employer.”

Tennesssean.com, op-ed by state Rep. Jim Gotto (R-Nashville), “Plants like Nissan’s show UAW how it should work“: “All Tennesseans should be concerned by the recent news story regarding the United Auto Workers’ renewed campaign to recruit employees at various U.S. plants….[While] Detroit and its UAW members work on cobbling the American auto market back together, global auto manufacturers with operations in Tennessee have been quietly supplying vital manufacturing jobs for American workers and investing in our communities.”

In the yet another absurd and offensive plan to bully companies into unionizing, the United Autoworkers are preparing to claim that auto manufacturers that resist labor organizing campaigns are human rights violators.

In a Washington Times analysis, “UAW doesn’t care what you think, Ivan Osorio and F. Vincent Vernuccio of the Competitive Enterprise Institute describe the scheme led by UAW President Bob King:

The UAW has laid out a set of demands, known as its Principles for Fair Union Elections, which are intended to facilitate the union’s organizing efforts…

Essentially, the UAW principles boil down to a company’s managers not telling workers their side of the story regarding what would happen if a union organized their business. The principles call for employers not to talk to their employees unless they also invite the UAW to speak, never to say that unionization would lead to job losses (and to disavow any group that does) and always to leave open the option of card-check organizing.

If a company reject this demand for a so-called neutrality agreement, the UAW will mount a campaign in alliance with outside groups to damage the business’ reputation. Basically, it’s extortion by negative PR. That’s a familiar and ugly tactic known as a “corporate campaign,” but the UAW has even more odious plans in the works.

Mr. King recently announced that if companies resist his organizing efforts, the UAW “will launch a global campaign to brand that company a human rights violator.” What would such a campaign look like? The Obama administration’s report to the United Nations Human Rights Council – whose members include such human rights champions as China, Cuba, Libya and Saudi Arabia – provides a hint. (continue reading…)

From The Detroit News, “Gettelfinger: Organizing unions a basic right“:

United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger gave a preview Sunday of part of his Monday farewell speech at the union’s constitutional convention, telling reporters that he would vigorously defend the right of workers to organize.

Gettelfinger questioned why it is all right for groups like the National Association of Manufacturers to have members, but businesses try to trample the rights of individual employees to form unions and collectively bargain for wages, benefits and working conditions. He made the remarks in response to questions by reporters at a UAW press reception.

Trample the rights of individual employees? Oh, brother. If you want to talk about trampling employee rights, it’s the UAW, not the National Association of Manufacturers, that wants to use card check to deprive employee of secret ballots in union representation elections.

There are plenty of other obvious differences between business associations like the NAM and labor unions. The LaborUnionReport lists prominent ones:

• Businesses can quit their associations whenever they want, union workers cannot. In fact, trying to get a union out of the workplace is extremely difficult for workers.
• Businesses can stop paying money to their associations any time they like and the worst that would happen to them is they get kicked out. If a unionized worker quits paying a union, in 28 states, the union can have him fired.
• Businesses who break an association’s rules can get kicked out, but a union worker who breaks a union’s rules can be placed on trial by the union and fined money.
• Business associations cannot cause their members to go out on strike, unions can.

Etc.

The UAW marks 75 years of solidarity at its convention starting today in Detroit, but it sounds like Gettelfinger is choosing to rage instead of celebrate. A sad tone on which to end a career…

The White House, the Democratic congressional leaders, and representatives of Big Labor have reached an agreement to give the unions broad exemptions from the excise tax on health care plans.

Wall Street Journal’s account cuts right to the chase. From “Unions Cut Special Deal on Health Taxes“:

Democratic negotiators acceded to union demands for a scaled-back tax on high-end health-insurance plans, exempting union contracts from the tax until 2018, five years beyond the start date for other workers.

The deal helped Democrats clear a key hurdle, but the break for organized labor added to the pressure to find new revenue to pay for their health bill, which is designed to give coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Negotiators were considering increasing the financial hit on drug makers, nursing homes and medical-device makers, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Apparently union backing is seen as so critical to passage that everyone else is supposed to carry their weight. But we’d count “drug makers,  nursing homes and medical-device makers” as more important to the quality of the U.S. health care system than political clout of the SEIU, UAW or AFL-CIO.

• New York Daily News, “White House entices Big Labor to back struggling health care reform legislation“
• Seattle Times, “Obama, unions agree to modify high-cost health-benefit tax“
• New York Times, “Accord Reached on Insurance Tax for Costly Plans“
• Fox News (blog), “Labor Effusive With Praise for Excise Tax Deal“
• The Hill, “White House, Dem leaders give concessions to win labor’s support“

Should have seen it coming.

From National Journal, Congress Daily (subscription), “Unions Tentatively Strike A Deal Regarding Excise Tax.”

Unions tentatively struck a deal Tuesday to exempt collectively bargained healthcare plans from a tax on high-cost plans expected to be used to help raise revenue for the healthcare overhaul.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern and United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger met with House Speaker Pelosi Tuesday, a day after labor leaders met at the White House to express their opposition to the excise tax.

So that’s why Andy Stern has gone to the White House so often. He keeps getting rewarded for the visits.

Supporters of the government health-care bills will sell union acquiescence to a modified excise tax as a political victory, moving the legislation closer to passage. But it could very well do the opposite. A union carve-out will reinforce the public’s perception that the health care bill isn’t about improving individual coverage, but is rather is a cynical effort expand government control of care at any cost. If supporters have to gut one provision at the demands of a special interest, this time labor, then gut away! As long as it passes.

For a roundup of this news and other developments, see Kaiser Health News, “‘Cadillac’ Tax Deal In The Work.”

From Gallup.com, “Labor Unions See Sharp Slide in U.S. Public Support“:

Princeton, NJ — Gallup finds organized labor taking a significant image hit in the past year. While 66% of Americans continue to believe unions are beneficial to their own members, a slight majority now say unions hurt the nation’s economy. More broadly, fewer than half of Americans — 48%, an all-time low — approve of labor unions, down from 59% a year ago.

We’d say most of the slide comes from labor’s relentless bullying to pass the anti-democratic Employee Free Choice Act. The public objects to anybody trying to eliminate secret ballots.

But we suspect it’s the role of organized labor in driving two major domestic automakers into bankruptcy that most caused the unions to lose popularity. The federal aid to save the companies demonstrated that the union contracts were unsustainable, self-serving and destructive to the general economy. After all, before this year how many people knew about UAW job banks that paid people for not working?

UPDATE (11:30 a.m.): In a post, “Labor Day Shock Poll!” Mickey Kaus judges the factors about the same as we do, save he adds the public teachers unions as another cause for slipping popularity. And he postulates: “Polls like this aren’t going to make it easy for the Senate to pass even a watered-down labor law “reform.” Did the UAW kill ‘card check’?”

From Bloomberg, “Autoworkers See Help From $10 Billion Fund in U.S. Health Plan“:

Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) — Legislation overhauling U.S. health care includes $10 billion to pay some of the most expensive medical costs for millions of autoworkers, steelworkers, schoolteachers and other early retirees with coverage.

The provision, embedded in legislation passed in July by House and Senate committees, may help offset health-care concessions made earlier this year by the United Auto Workers as part of a government rescue of General Motors Co. and Chrysler Group LLC and related cost-cutting at Ford Motor Co.

The UAW cited the provision in an e-mail this week urging its members to support a health-care overhaul, President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

Here’s the UAW’s communication to its members. By the way, if you disagree with the UAW on health care, you are scum: “Not surprisingly, insurance companies and various right-wing groups are mounting a campaign to block health care reform. To counter their dishonest, disruptive scare tactics, UAW activists need to join with our progressive allies in sending a strong message to members of Congress that NOW is the time to pass genuine health care reform.”

(Hat tip: Peter List.)

Yesterday’s forum at The New America Foundation, “Manufacturing a Better Future for America,” featured a discussion of federal support — the term “bailout” was used — for GM and Chrysler.

The context: Speakers advocated a national industrial policy and more restrictive trade policies to invigorate the U.S. manufacturing sector. We think of the panel as representing the organized labor wing of the Democratic Party.

Asking a question, Bill Frymoyer, director of government relations at the Stewart and Stewart and a former Gephardt aide, hailed what he described as the apparently successful rescue of the domestic auto industry. He elicited this response from Leo Hindery, Managing Partner of Intermedia Partners, chairman of the foundation’s Smart Globalization Initiative, and an influential Democratic activist. Hindery:

The reason the auto recovery worked so well is Ron Bloom largely steered it. And Ron Bloom, for those of you who don’t know, came out of the Steelworkers. He spoke more cogently and capably about the need for a manufacturing policy before a lot of us…and I think he brought a sense of manufacturing policy to that initiative, not strategy but policy.

And this is an issue that Scott [Paul] and I have gone back and forth on: Are what we talking about here, is it a strategy or is it a policy? And we think, Scott and I and Ron, I think, would say, it’s a policy. And when you have a policy, then you save CIT if it needs saving, because it does certain things, you approach GM and Chrysler as he tried to drive the administration, because it would fit under his sense of policy. Strategy is transient. Policy’s the same.

Also commenting was Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing: (continue reading…)

Brian Worth, chairman of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (the NAM is a member), responds to the op-ed by UAW’s Ron Gettelfinger we wrote about below.

From today’s Detroit News, “Publicizing labor votes violates workers’ privacy”

UAW President Ron Gettelfinger crossed the line when he injected race into the debate over whether American workers should have the right to vote in private during union organizing elections (“Worker rights bill deserves debate, vote,” Feb. 6). By comparing opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act to the Southern senators who blocked civil rights legislation in the 1960s, Gettelfinger undermines his own credibility and does a disservice to the labor movement.

Let’s be clear about what the Employee Free Choice Act does. The bill would replace secret ballot elections with a card check scheme where the votes of workers would be made public to their employers, co-workers and union organizers.

Without the protection of the secret ballot, there would be no guarantee that workers could express their true wishes on the personal decision of whether to have a union in their workplace. Labor leaders want Congress to pass card check because the bill will make it easier for labor organizers to recruit workers into joining unions.

But the American people, including rank-and-file union members, understand the importance of the secret ballot and are opposed to the Employee Free Choice Act by overwhelming margins.

In a recent poll conducted for the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, 73 percent of union workers opposed the proposal. This helps explain why President Barack Obama has backed away from card check in recent weeks and why Gettelfinger is desperately playing the race card to defend it.

That’s right. The political support for the Employee Free Choice Act is weaker than advocates hoped for. (See this Hill article, “Contentious labor bill struggles behind the scenes“)

Besides being an odious line of argument, Gettelfinger’s rhetoric is also foolish in the big political picture. The UAW is a supplicant right now, asking members of Congress for help in supporting the domestic auto manufacturers. It’s not smart politics to be arguing, “Hey, you Senators! You unreconstructed Dixiecrat racists — Give us money!”

In the public debate over the Employee Free Choice Act, union leaders have recently favored this line of argument: “Opponents are LYING. They’re LYING. Liars!”

Now, Ron Gettelfinger of the United Auto Workers has added a different argument: “And they’re racists too!”

That’s the inescapable message from Gettelfinger’s Feb. 6 op-ed in the Detroit News, “Worker rights bill deserves debate, vote.”

The effort to stop social progress was led by Dixiecrats — Southern Democrats who stood for the privileged elite against the will of a majority of the American people. Today, their spiritual heirs have changed political parties, but they still reward the fortunate few who hold wealth and power and trample the needs of everyone else.

In December, a group of Republican senators used a filibuster to block legislation authorizing bridge loans for the U.S. auto industry, despite majority support from both houses of Congress. They were unwilling to give a penny to American companies and workers without imposing conditions that would effectively legislate our union out of existence.

A minority made up of many of the same senators is now threatening another filibuster — this time against an effort to expand workplace rights. They have signaled they will attempt to block the Employee Free Choice Act, which is supported by President Barack Obama and majorities in the House and Senate.

Ah, we see. Today’s opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act are the moral equivalent of the Senators who opposed the Civil Rights Act.

We doubt that Gettelfinger wants an open discussion of business versus labor’s historical record on civil rights (Davis Bacon lives on, after all). No, what this appalling op-ed is about is playing the race card, attempting to silence critics by casting them as bigots.

But then, the Employee Free Choice Act is an attempt to silence employees who might oppose the unionization of a business. Intimidation is the consistent tactic in both cases.