Monday, March 12, 2012

Today's Teamster News 03.12.12

National union fight over 'right to work' comes to Minnesota Capitol  Associated Press   ...The Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing this morning on a proposal to ask voters in November whether Minnesota's Constitution should be amended to make private and public union membership voluntary...
Labor unions rethinking their role in politics  Los Angeles Times   ...Concluding they need to be more independent of the Democratic Party, many unions are increasingly financing their own efforts instead of writing large checks to candidates and the(Democratic) party...
NAACP to challenge state voting laws before U.N. panel in Geneva  McClatchy   ...the NAACP will go before a United Nations panel in Switzerland next week to argue that new voting laws approved by some U.S. states violate civil and human rights by suppressing the votes of minorities and others...
The 1 percent recovery  Reuters   ...In the 2010 recovery, 93 percent of the gains were captured by the top 1 percent. That’s because top incomes grew 11.6 percent in 2010, while the incomes of the 99 percent increased only 0.2 percent. That gain is particularly painful because it comes after an 11.6 percent drop in income for the 99 percent, Saez reports, the largest such fall over a two-year period since the Great Depression...
What Greece Means (opinion)  New York Times   ...when Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, delivered the Republican reply to the State of the Union address, he insisted that “we’re only a short distance behind Greece, Spain and other European countries now facing economic catastrophe.” ... nobody told him that Spain had low government debt and a budget surplus on the eve of the crisis ...what Greek experience actually shows is that ... trying to eliminate deficits once you’re already in trouble is a recipe for depression...
10,200 trucking jobs added in February  Overdrive   ...February represents the largest one-month gain in trucking employment since February 2011, when the industry added 12,400 jobs...