CPD IN THE NEWS

Un nuevo informe analiza el concepto de 'desinversión de la policía'. La controversial idea es fomentada por activistas latinos y afroestadounidenses, buscando menos discriminación y más apoyo a las minorías.

Lea el artículo completo aquí.

One former Walmart store manager tells the story that after discovering a pro-union flyer in his store’s men’s room, he informed company headquarters and within 24 hours, an anti-union SWAT team flew to his store in a corporate jet. And when the meat department of a Walmart store in Texas became the retailer’s only operation in the United States to unionize, back in 2000, Walmart announced plans two weeks later to use prepackaged meat and eliminate butchers at that store and 179 others.

With 1.3 million U.S. employees—more than the population of Vermont and Wyoming combined—Walmart is by far the nation’s largest private-sector employer.  It’s also one of the nation’s most aggressive anti-union companies, with a long history of trying to squelch unionization efforts. “People are scared to vote for a union because they’re scared their store will be closed,” said Barbara Gertz, an overnight Walmart stocker in Denver.

Walmart maintains a steady drumbeat of anti-union information at its more than 4,000 U.S. stores, requiring new hires—there are hundreds of thousands each year—to watch a video that derides organized labor. Indeed, Walmart’s anti-union campaign goes back decades: There was “Labor Relations and You at the Wal-Mart Distribution Center,” a 1991 guide aimed at beating back the Teamsters at its warehouses, and then in 1997 came “A Manager’s Toolbox to Remaining Union Free.” The first half of a statement in that toolbox has been repeatedly snickered at for being so egregiously false: “We are not anti-union; we are pro-associate.”

Early last year, Anonymous, a network of hacker activists, leaked two internal Walmart PowerPoint slideshows. One was a “Labor Relations Training” presentation for store managers that echoed the “Manager’s Toolbox” in suggesting that unions were money-grubbing outfits caring little about workers’ welfare. “Unions are a business, not a club or social organization—they want associates’ money,” the PowerPoint read. (Walmart confirmed the PowerPoints’ authenticity.) “Unions spend members’ dues money on things other than representing them,” it added.

Walmart is perfectly within its rights to communicate its stance to employees. While employers are legally barred from threatening store closures, layoffs, or loss of benefits because of unionization, they are free to tell workers why they oppose unions.

Walmart has battled for years against the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which represents employees at many grocery stores and retailers, and its offshoot, OUR Walmart, an association of Walmart employees. Walmart insists that the UFCW is out to damage Walmart’s business. The second PowerPoint that Anonymous leaked last year attacked OUR Walmart, asking, “Is OUR Walmart/UFCW here to help you? Answer: NO.”

Tensions have risen between the retailer and OUR Walmart in recent years, with the labor group organizing nationwide protests outside hundreds of stores each Black Friday. The National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint in January of last year, accusing Walmart of illegally firing 19 OUR Walmart members and illegally disciplining more than 40 others after strikes and protests demanding higher pay. Walmart maintains that the firings and disciplining were legal and not in retaliation for protesting.

Getting a glimpse of Walmart’s internal PowerPoints and training manuals is rare, but one of Walmart’s orientation videos was leaked recently, and it again revealed Walmart’s anti-union efforts. Labor experts and Walmart employees say they were surprised at the blatant untruths in many of the video’s pro-company and anti-union statements.

Walmart confirmed the video’s authenticity and said the company showed it to new hires from 2009 through last year. Early on in the course of the video’s nine minutes, an actor dressed as a Walmart employee says, “You’re just beginning your career with us. It’s hard to grasp everything that’s available to you, like great benefits.”

Ken Jacobs, the chairman of the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center, suggested that this was essentially propaganda. “Walmart's benefits are well below the standard for union groceries,” he said. “They are not ‘great benefits’ by any standard.” A discounter like Walmart certainly doesn’t have the generous pensions or Cadillac health plans offered by some companies. Gertz, the overnight stocker in Denver, says her health plan is so stingy that she often doesn’t see a doctor when she’s sick because the deductible requires her to pay the first few thousand dollars out of pocket. Gertz said that when workers call in sick, their first day off comes out of their vacation days or personal days, not their paid sick days.

A spokesperson for Walmart says it will soon revamp its policy so that employees can use paid sick days starting on their first day out. The spokesperson added that its bonuses, 401(k) plan, and health plan are considerably better than at most other discounters—its 401(k) plan gives a dollar-for-dollar match for the first six percent of pay and the premium for its most popular health plan is just $21.90 every two weeks. That said, part-time workers, who represent nearly half its work force, don’t qualify for many of these benefits.  

The leaked video also boasts, “There’s no retail company that offers more advancement and job security than Walmart.” Considering that some retailers are unionized with strong job-security provisions in their union contracts, some labor advocates wondered how Walmart could begin to assert that its job security is as strong as any other retailer’s.

“That’s patently false,” said Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, a division of the UFCW. “At Walmart you can be fired for any reason at all or no reason.” He contrasted Walmart, one of the nation’s many “at-will” employers, with retailers that are unionized or partly unionized, including Costco, Macy’s, H&M and Modell’s. At unionized stores, workers can only be fired “for cause,” meaning managers need a strong reason to fire someone—for example, stealing from a store or arriving 30 minutes late five days in a row. Moreover, workers in those unionized stores can usually challenge their dismissal by bringing in an impartial arbitrator who helps determine whether a firing was justified.  

Walmart, in its orientation video, makes other attempts at belittling unions. It features an actor who says, “I was a union member at my last job. Everyone actually had to join the union . . . The thing I remember most about the union is that they took dues money out of my paycheck before I ever saw it, just like taxes.” The character’s assertion that he “had to join the union” diverges from the truth. The Supreme Court ruled in 1963 that workers cannot be required to join the union at a unionized workplace—although they can be required to pay union dues or fees (unless they live in one of the 25 states with “right to work” laws).

In the video, an actress standing in front of a rack of produce continues to hammer the message. “I always thought that unions were kind of like clubs or charities that were out to help workers,” she says. “Well, I found out that wasn’t exactly the case. The truth is unions are businesses, multimillion-dollar businesses that make their money by convincing people like you and me to give them a part of our paychecks.”

Although some union leaders have generous salaries, Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard, said that unions aren’t for-profit businesses. “If unions are businesses, they’re the best example of the sharing economy we’ve seen,” Sachs said. “Here’s the business model: By sharing their resources, including their financial resources, workers make better lives for themselves and their families.” Thomas Kochan, an MIT professor of management, said that the phrase the actor uses—“clubs and charities”—“insults any new hire’s intelligence.”  “Most people know what unions are and what they try to do,” Kochan said.

Indeed, one might ask, if unions are doing as little for workers as Walmart maintains, why then does Walmart bother to battle unions so aggressively? Walmart takes a far more jaundiced view of unions than do many Americans—for instance the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops. “The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions,” the bishops once wrote in a pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All. And Pope John Paul II, never known as a raging liberal, called unions, “an indispensable element of social life.”

Brian Nick, a Walmart spokesman, explained why the company made the video. “The core reason to have the training and information on video, in and of itself, is we know that third-party groups often reach out to our associates,” he said. “This is an opportunity for us to provide accurate information that gives our associates knowledge about their work environment and their own rights as associates.”

In boasting about Walmart, the video says, “Walmart jobs are flexible jobs, giving associates the opportunity to balance our personal life with our worklife.”  But Carrie Gleason, director of the Fair Workweek Initiative at the Center for Popular Democracy, an advocacy group, strongly disagreed. “I’ve spoken with countless Walmart associates who talk about how erratic their work schedules are, about how managers regularly disregard their requests for basic accommodations so they can go to school or take care of their families,” she said. Some Walmart workers say their stores slashed their hours when they asked managers to accommodate their college schedule or their efforts to hold a second job to make ends meet.

Brian Nick, the Walmart spokesman, said the company was improving its scheduling practices. Beginning next year, it will offer some employees fixed schedules each week—many employees complain that their work schedules change vastly week-to-week.

In urging workers to shun unions, the Walmart video says, “In recent years, union organizers have spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to convince Walmart associates to join a union, all without any success.” But that’s not quite true. The UFCW hasn’t sought to persuade Walmart employees to join a union in recent years, although it did help form OUR Walmart to push for better wages and working conditions. OUR Walmart claimed a victory in February when Walmart announced it would raise its base pay to $9 this year and $10 next year. A spokesperson for Walmart said it was responding to a tighter labor market and boasted that the move would mean raises for 500,000 workers.

The Walmart video is correct about at least one thing: Most of the recent unionization votes at Walmart stores in the U.S. were unsuccessful. For example, the tire and lube workers at two Walmart stores, in Colorado and Pennsylvania, voted overwhelmingly in 2005 against unionizing. But the UFCW had a big success in 2004, when it unionized a Walmart in Jonquiere, Quebec—a first in North America. Walmart closed that store shortly afterward, and Canada’s Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the shutdown was an illegal ploy to avoid having a union. Walmart has long argued that it closed the Jonquiere store because it was unprofitable and that the closing had nothing to do with the union. As for Walmart’s decision to suddenly begin using prepackaged meat after that meat department in Texas unionized in 2000, the company said that the timing was just a coincidence and that the decision had nothing to do with unionization.

This past April, Walmart abruptly announced it was closing its store in Pico Rivera, California, along with four other stores, for six months. Many workers saw that as a daunting anti-union statement—the  Pico Rivera store has the nation’s most militant OUR Walmart chapter, having staged a sit-in and numerous other protests. Walmart, however, insisted that the closing was necessitated by “ongoing plumbing issues.”

Source: The Atlantic

Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and one of the few big-bank bosses to keep his job after the Great Recession, will keep advising President Trump even when they might disagree, Dimon told shareholders at the company's annual meeting at its Delaware Technology Center north of Wilmington.

"Trump is the pilot flying our airplane," and as "a patriot" Dimon will continue to serve on a Presidential advisory panel, even though he may not "agree with all his policies," he said during a shareholder question-and-answer session.

Read full article here.

Last month I returned to my native Puerto Rico to attend a wedding and was catching up with family still on the Island one evening. A couple of sips of whiskey in, and the truth came out: My wife’s father reported that he hadn’t received a paycheck in 3 months.

He is a doctor. A highly specialized one, And, with most of his patients coming through government insurance, he hadn’t seen a dime in payment.

Most Puerto Rican health care professionals try to hang on as long as possible. They want to stay in their homeland, be with their families and help make things better. But increasingly, they have no choice. Now many doctors are among the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans who have become economic migrants,  forced to flee  from home because they simply cannot survive on patriotism and hope.

In 2014, 364 doctors left the island,  the Puerto Rican Surgeons and Physicians Association reported. Last year, 500 practitioners packed up and got out.

“Don’t get hurt on a Sunday or a holiday,” one man recently told CNN after his uncle died because only 2 neurologists were on duty to serve the island’s 3.5 million “forgotten citizens.” (His family now calls the lines at the hospital “the walking dead.”)

Behind those staggering numbers is rapacious, hungry, heartless greed as embodied by two simple words: Hedge funds.

Just like Detroit, Greece and other places rocked by the recession and government mismanagement, Puerto Rico’s debt ballooned over the last decade, further exacerbated by colonial status and expiring tax incentives.

In 2012, hedge fund managers began to circle the Commonwealth, looking to reap billions – and experiment with new wealth extraction strategies that could be imported back to the American mainland. The short version: They bought Puerto Rican bonds after the price fell.

Now these “vulture” managers (as they are literally called for their creditor and distressed buying schemes – los buitres in Spanish) insist that any package from Washington that allows Puerto Rico to renegotiate its $72 billion debt puts Wall Street investors at the front of the line to get paid.

A handful are holding out for even more; refusing to accept any restructuring and demanding even more severe austerity measures and suffering so they don’t have to take any losses on their risky investment.

These carrion feeders are in fact, real human beings, acting in inhumane ways: Mark Brodsky, of the $4.5 billion Aurelius Capital and Andrew Feldstein, of the $20 billion BlueMountain Capital are two leaders of the vulture flock of hedge fund billionaires circling Puerto Rico trying to make huge profits from what’s turning into a full-scale humanitarian crisis.

Brodsky bought up the Island’s debt for as low as 29 cents on the dollar and now is demanding full repayment (Think Greece, and Argentina). He is helping fund economists who argue that vital government services must cease – and schools and hospitals must close -  to extract full payment.

Feldstein has teams of lawyers fighting basic protections for Puerto Ricans in court and lobbyists taking the same case to Congress.  On his dime they have launched a high profile and highly fraudulent media campaign to make sure Congress keeps working for the billionaires – and against teachers, students, the elderly… and my former neighbors and relatives.

Together with John Paulson – who literally bragged to his bros that together they could create the “Singapore of the Caribbean” and create a tax haven for themselves – these vulture investors are consuming the living, for their greed.

That’s why I’ve been working with Brave New Films and a large coalition, including Make the Road, New York Communities for Change, Organize NOW, Florida Institute for Reform & Empowerment, AFT, SEIU, NEA, New Jersey Communities United, Grassroots Collaborative , Center for Popular Democracy, Strong Economy for All, and Citizen Action, under the campaign banner Hedge Clippers, to help ordinary Puerto Ricans expose the truth about these bad actors and their flock.

Preying on Puerto Rico: Forgotten Citizens of Hedge Fund Island is a series of short film videos that Puerto Rican activists helped create to kick off an escalated series of large actions calling on those with the power to help to stand up for Puerto Ricans and stand up to los buitres.

These same leaders are behind a growing wave of protests on Capitol Hill, Wall Street, the Trump Towers and at the Federal Reserve Board offices in cities across the U.S.

They are getting attention and being heard, but the path forward is uphill. We need your help. With unemployment at 14% and 45 percent of Puerto Ricans living below the poverty line Puerto Rico is in a humanitarian crisis. PROMESA, the bill that just passed out of the US House and is on its way to the Senate, is a bad deal that will help the hedge funds, but not the Puerto Rican people.

Preying on Puerto Rico: Forgotten Citizens of HedgeFund Island is only the beginning of how we can use our voices and votes to help my father in-law remain on the Island to help save lives – and end this suffering caused by these vultures and the politicians that do their bidding.  

Join us today to share these films – and call Feldstein and Brodsky to ask them: how many more billions do you need to make before you stop pillaging the poor?

By Julio López Varona / Brave New Films

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