Down Wit OOP? Nikki Haley Versus “Short Stack”

Why I applaud Rep. Stavrinakis for his recommendation of Mary Schweers for the “Order of the Palmetto,” we don’t know all the details that went into the decision by Gov. Haley to present this award to Dawn Staley.

If we review S.C. history we see that there have been teachers who have given their lives and suffered injuries in the course of teaching.

October 12, 1995 at the Blackville Hilda High School, a suspended student sneaked in the school with a gun, shot a math teacher in the face while he was teaching, and then shot another teacher in the back as she attempted to escape.

This shooting resulted in the death of one teacher, and the death of student when he took his life. You can read about this tragedy at this link. http://bit.ly/1bICoTp

President Obama recently presented the “Presidential Medal of Freedom” to 16 recipients. All the recipients that the media could focus on was former President Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. The general public was not aware there were 14 additional people who received this award.

There was an astronaut, two U.S. Senators one who had received the Medal of Honor, Civil Rights activists, a baseball player, singer, basketball coach, jazz musician, editor of newspaper, federal judge and women activists.

Just for the record the 14 other Americans receiving the award were Sens. Daniel K. Inouye (D-HI/M.O.H) & Richard Lugar (R-IN), Sally K. Ride, Dean Smith, Loretta Lynn, Gloria Steinem, Ernie Banks, Benjamin Bradle, Bayard Rustin, Daniel Kahneman, Mario Molina, Arturo Sandoval, Cordy Tindell Vivian, Patricia Wald.”

Some would argue that Bill Clinton should not have been one of the recipients. One of those who make this argument is WJS’s columnists Joseph Epstein, who was a recipient of this award in 2003, and writes this op-ed; “Bill Clinton needed his award this week about as much as the pope needs a bowling trophy.” You can read this op-ed at this link. http://on.wsj.com/18dvHNP

This isn’t going to be easy for Haley to fix. Getting on her knees to make it right just isn’t possible with Short Stack. She’s gonna have to be sitting on her ass.

At least she’ll be able to to fondle his nuts at the same time from that position.

In a remarkable act of courage and solidarity with the next
generation, last week Boeing workers in Seattle soundly rejected
corporate extortion, by voting down a contract which traded job
guarantees for concessions that would severely erode the pay and
benefits of younger workers. In doing so, the members of the Machinists
are risking their jobs to save an America built on the middle class.

The
dramatic fight of fast food workers for a minimal living wage, risking
their jobs every time they take a day off to demonstrate, is one end of a
corporate economy based on low wages, no benefits and no unions. That
corporate strategy, aimed at maximizing profits, is destroying America’s
middle class, wrecking the engine that powered the U.S. economy.

On
the other end of the middle class are workers like Boeing’s, who have
fought together through their union for the good pay, pensions, health
benefits and job security that characterized the increased prosperity
and lowered income inequality of America in much of the second half of
the 20th Century. But despite being a hugely profitable corporation,
with dominance in the world aerospace market, Boeing is eager to follow
the Wal-Mart/fast-food model of the 21st Century economy.

Boeing is the aerospace and defense industry’s largest company,
with its highest profits. In 2012 just the increase in Boeing revenues
alone, $13 billion, would be equivalent to the 15th largest company in
the industry. With a $319 billion backlog of orders – about 3,700
planes – the company is set for years and is outpacing its only
competition, Airbus. Last year, Boeing made $6.3 billion in profits and
rewarded its CEO $27.5 million in compensation, a 20% hike from the previous year.

Historically,
Boeing’s Seattle workforce has shared in that wealth. With a 100-year
history in the Puget Sound region, Boeing is still the area’s largest employer,
its 70,000 employees dwarfing the 40,000 who work for Microsoft. Boeing
workers are anchors of Seattle communities, both economically and
civically. And with good schools and colleges, transportation, and
stable communities, the Seattle area has provided key public structures
that have enabled Boeing to prosper.

But
none of that matters – the high profits, the educated workers, the
civic history – to a modern corporation that is driven only to maximize
profits for its shareholders and pay for its top executives. Boeing
moved its headquarters to Chicago in 2001 and decided to build its new
787 Dreamliner in South Carolina, with the first planes rolling out in
2012, assembled by 6,000 workers who earn $15 per hour, almost 50% less than what Washington assembly line workers earn.

Early
this month, Boeing tried to blackmail both its union members and
Washington state. Declaring that it would consider moving assembly of a
new line of 777X planes out of state, the corporation asked for mammoth
tax incentives and huge concessions on wages and benefits. The Governor
and State Legislature caved immediately, passing the largest development tax break for a company in American history, $8.7 billion over 16 years,
in a special weekend session. The leadership of Machinists Local 751
also wavered, agreeing to put the contract up for a membership vote,
over the objections of most of the union’s management council.

But
then a remarkable thing happened, in an age in which Americans, scared
that they will lose what they have left, seem resigned to shrinking pay
and disappearing benefits. A grassroots swell of membership opposition to
the contract rose up, leading to 67% of the member rejecting the
contract. The members did so with their eyes wide open, understanding
that Boeing might not be bluffing and despite the fact that Boeing
combined bribery with their extortion; the contract would have provided a
$10,000 signing bonus to each worker. So why did they show such
resolve?

In making their case, the members who organized against
the contract focused on the fact that they would be giving up “hard
fought contract negotiations and strikes by generations of Fighting
Machinists that came before us. ” They warned, “Boeing is hoping you will deny the next generation many of the benefits we have today.”

While
the proposed contract came with skimpy pay increases and benefit
cut-backs for all workers, younger Boeing workers and new hires would
have been hit the hardest. Instead of a steady progression to higher
wage rates as workers stayed with the company and acquired new skills –
which is what Boeing contracts have guaranteed for years – under the
proposed contract, recent hires and new hires would be locked into low
pay, with glacial increases. The contract would have frozen current
pensions and replaced future pensions with a 401K, the
defined-contribution accounts that have no guaranteed pay-out and are
subject to market risk. Boeing would have been allowed to transfer money
from the over-funded workers’ pension fund to the under-funded
executive retirement fund.

Angered at the company’s “corporate
threats and intimidation,” the members declared, “The one thing Boeing
can’t take away is our solidarity.”

Unlike Boeing, which has no allegiance to anything but the bottom line, the workers care about their community. As the 751voteno.com website
stated, “We must be prepared for a decision they [Boeing] may make and
understand that if they take the work elsewhere, they are responsible
for that decision. We just could not destroy ourselves in order to keep
the company from making a decision that destroys union and non-union
workers alike, our communities and the investors.”

That statement
reminds me of a memorable insight I received in the first lecture of a
finance class at the University of Chicago School of Business, delivered
by Robert Hamada, a future dean of the School. Hamada pointed out that
in the class we would be learning how a firm calculates return on
investment (ROI), but that there was no reason that the calculations
needed to be applied to ROI for shareholders. The same methods could be
used to maximize ROI for workers, the community or society at large.

As
a society, we do not have to accept that the mammoth entities that
control so much of our economy should operate just to benefit their
shareholders. We can require that corporate decision making take into
account its impact on its workers, our communities and the broader
economy.

That is what unions have done historically and still do
at companies like Boeing, which pay high union wages, and in countries
that support high rates of unionization. To give workers a say in
decision making, German corporations are required to have works
councils, which have union members sharing in decisions – which the UAW is now trying to win in a Volkswagon plant in Tennessee – and union representatives have the right to sit on corporate boards of directors.

Two years ago there was a huge uproar from conservatives when
the National Labor Relations Board accused Boeing of moving to South
Carolina in 2009 because of anti-union bias, which is prohibited under
the National Labor Relations Act. The Board was roundly attacked for
second guessing a corporate decision on where to locate jobs. But the
Board’s action was based on a Boeing memo, which admitted“the
only consistent advantage attributed to Charleston was the ability to
‘leverage’ the site placement decision toward ‘rebalancing an unbalanced
and uncompetitive labor relationship.’” The Board dropped the case
after the union and company agreed to a new labor contract, the very one
that Boeing now wants to replace with the concessions that the union’s
members just rejected.

Part of the controversy around the Board’s
decision was its novelty; cases are rare because it is difficult to
prove that a company made relocation decisions based on anti-union bias.
If we are going to reign in corporate destruction of wages and
communities, we should instead imagine a labor law in which corporations
are not able to expand into non-unionized facilities and make long-term
investment decisions at the expense of jobs at already unionized
facilities. These and other changes aimed at giving workers a powerful
role in corporate governance are needed to balance the grip that
corporate America now has on our economy and democracy.

We will
find out in the next year whether Boeing is bluffing or serious.
Production problems at the South Carolina plant give the union some hope
that Boeing might return to the bargaining table, although only after
looking to see what they can extort in concessions for anti-union
states.

But regardless of where Boeing builds the 777X, the fight
for an America in which hugely profitable corporations – whether it be
Wal-Mart, McDonald’s or Boeing – share their wealth with their workers
and their communities is just heating up. The bold vote by Boeing
workers, like the wave of fast food strikes, are encouraging signs of a
new movement of workers, supported by our communities, to build an
America that again promises broadly based prosperity.