Friday News Flyover - October 27, 2023 - UAW strike, KS medicaid expansion, cannabis on the ballot in Ohio, MAGA Mike Johnson is full of it and more
October 27, 2023 - UAW strike might be ending | Kansas GOP peddles lies about working poor | Ohioans may legalize cannabis on Issue 2 in November | Dark money floods into Denver school board elections | Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announces $402MM in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law funding to replace lead drinking water service lines | SCOTUS smacks down another racial gerrymander from a GOP state legislature in the South
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What started at three plants at midnight on Sept. 15, has become a national movement,” said Fain. “We won things nobody thought possible. Since the strike began, Ford put 50% more on the table than when we walked out. This agreement sets us on a new path to make things right at Ford, at the Big Three, and across the auto industry. Together, we are turning the tide for the working class in this country.”
Ford confirmed the deal in a news statement Wednesday night.
“We are pleased to have reached a tentative agreement on a new labor contract with the UAW covering our U.S. operations,” the company said.
“Ford is proud to assemble the most vehicles in America and employ the most hourly autoworkers. We are focused on restarting Kentucky Truck Plant, Michigan Assembly Plant and Chicago Assembly Plant, calling 20,000 Ford employees back to work and shipping our full lineup to our customers again,” the automaker said in a statement. “The agreement is subject to ratification by Ford’s UAW-represented employees. Consistent with the ratification process, the UAW will share details with its membership.”
While Ford did not detail the terms of the tentative agreement, the UAW released some of the terms:
- It provides more in base wage increases than Ford workers have received in the past 22 years.
- The agreement grants 25% in base wage increases through April 2028.
- It cumulatively raises the top wage by over 30% to more than $40 an hour.
- It raises the starting wage by 68%, to over $28 an hour.
- The lowest-paid workers at Ford will see a raise of more than 150% over the life of the agreement.
- Some workers will receive an immediate 85% increase immediately upon ratification.
- The agreement reinstates major benefits lost during the Great Recession, including Cost-of-Living Allowances (COLA) and a three-year wage progression, as well as killing wage tiers in the union.
- It improves retirement for current retirees, those workers with pensions, and those who have 401(k) plans.
- It also includes a historic right to strike over plant closures, a first for the union.
During a Friday livestream, Fain had detailed the latest proposals at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis, highlighting the shortcomings of the latter’s current offer. The union represents about 150,000 members.
The latest picket site on Tuesday at GM’s Arlington Assembly plant in Texas brought the total number of UAW members on strike at the Big Three automakers to more than 45,000.
The UAW remains on strike against GM and Stellantis, but the Ford deal could become the blueprint to settle those contracts.
The strike began on Sept. 15 with a walkout against three assembly plants in Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. It has since grown to include eight assembly plants and 38 parts distribution centers in 22 states.
President Joe Biden in September made a historic visit to the picket line alongside Fain at the Willow Run Redistribution Center in Belleville. He said in a statement Wednesday night that he applauds the “UAW and Ford for coming together after a hard fought, good faith negotiation and reaching a historic tentative agreement tonight.
“This tentative agreement provides a record raise to auto workers who have sacrificed so much to ensure our iconic Big Three companies can still lead the world in quality and innovation. Ultimately, the final word on this contract will be from the UAW members themselves in the days and weeks to come. I’ve always believed the middle class built America and unions built the middle class. That is especially the case for UAW workers who built an iconic American industry,” Biden said.
Recently, Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins and Senate President Ty Masterson were quoted as calling Gov. Laura Kelly’s campaign to expand Medicaid a “welfare” tour for “able-bodied adults” who “choose not to work.”
This deception is both a wildly inaccurate portrayal of uninsured Kansas who could benefit from Medicaid expansion and also directly harmful in its disability-related stereotypes. Though I should note that we disabled people do not need to work to deserve dignity, decent living situations and have our needs met (as well as a reasonable amount of our wants). We deserve legislators’ respect.
Hawkins and Masterson are playing into well-rehearsed tropes and biases. I will seek to spread some facts to these dishonest politicians, who are supposed to be representing all their constituents, about disability and employment.
Before I get to that, however, I’d like to quickly point out that the Medicaid expansion Hawkins and Masterson are railing against likely would benefit both the Kansas economy and many hardworking Kansans, according to a Wichita Eagle report. Also, despite their claims that Medicaid expansion would be welfare for able-bodied people who do not want to work, according to WIBW, 74% of the non-elderly, uninsured, working-age Kansans these men represent, are, in fact, working.
With that aside, let’s look under the hood at that comment, which clearly also seems to be a dog whistle for several profoundly harmful stereotypes. These include the idea that flocks of able-bodied people fake disability and that disabled people don’t want to work. Both stereotypes ignore the immense barriers and biases that disabled people face while looking for jobs, the numbers of disabled people who are working for substandard wages and the substantial barriers disabled people face to receiving the education necessary to even have a foot in the door for many jobs.
To dispel the idea that able-bodied people are pretending to be disabled to receive welfare benefits, numerous reliable sources, including the Social Security Administration itself, find that Social Security fraud is less than 1%.
Let’s also look at the number of disabled Kansans working for far below minimum wage in sheltered workshops with sub-minimum wage certificates, which some GOP Kansas legislators tried to create tax breaks for and increase.
According to Russell, at least 420,000 disabled workers nationwide were working in these sheltered workshops, which paid 25-50% of the minimum wage. Goodwill was listed as one of the largest of these sheltered workspaces, paying disabled people as little as $2 an hour.
Not only do these figures indicate clear employment and education-based barriers to work for disabled people, they also show a large number of disabled people would prefer to be working if they could find jobs. Even Forbes Magazine has written about why businesses should focus on hiring disabled people, the benefits in doing so, as well as the significant gifts that disabled people bring to the table, including higher retention rates and significant adaptability.
In sum, though disabled people are often prevented from doing the work they would prefer to be doing, the statistics make clear that most, if not all, of those barriers come not from within disabled people but rather from the outside world.
Issue 2 would legalize and regulate the cultivation, manufacturing, testing and the sale of marijuana to Ohioans 21 and up. It would also create the Division of Cannabis Control within the Department of Commerce.
Recent polling shows majority support for Issue 2 is expected to pass in the November election. A total of 54% of lawmakers surveyed in last week’s Gongwer-Werth Legislative Opinion Poll think Issue 2 will pass. The poll showed 63% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans believe Issue 2 will pass. The poll had 35 lawmaker respondents.
A July Suffolk University/USA Today poll shows 59% of Ohio voters support Ohioans 21 and older buying and possessing marijuana. It showed 77% of Democrats, 63% of independents and 40% of Republicans support the issue. The Suffolk University/USA Today poll surveyed 500 registered Ohio voters and their margin of error is +/- 4.4 percentage points.
Ballot Language
The ballot’s language makes it clear it does not require an employer to “accommodate an employee’s use, possession, or distribution of adult use cannabis.”
It also doesn’t prohibit an employer from “refusing to hire, discharging, disciplining, or otherwise taking an adverse employment action against an individual … because of that individual’s use, possession, or distribution of cannabis.”
“An individual who is discharged from employment because of that individual’s use of cannabis shall be considered to have been discharged for just cause,” according to the ballot language.
https://coloradonewsline.com/2023/10/21/billionaire-dark-money-denver-school-board/
Colorado Newsline
The Denver school board race is off and running, and several key groups have announced their endorsements. MIKE DEGUIRE
The Denver school board race is off and running, and several key groups have announced their endorsements.
The Denver Classroom Teachers Association, the local teacher organization, endorsed Charmaine Lindsay, Scott Baldermann, and Kwame Spearman.
Denver Families Action endorsed Kimberlee Sia, John Youngquist, and Marlene Delarosa.
Who is Denver Families Action? Chalkbeat says it is the “political arm of a relatively new organization,” Denver Families for Public Schools, formed with the backing of several local charter school networks, and they get funding from The City Fund, a pro-charter education reform national organization.
What is City Fund? How much funding did they give to this new group called Denver Families for Public Schools? What Denver Public Schools “families” do they represent?
According to Influence Watch, The City Fund is an “education organization that funds initiatives that promote the growth of charter schools and other school choice organizations. It also funds activist organizations that support increasing charter school access and school choice programs.” Chalkbeat reports that City Fund was started in 2018 by two billionaires, Reed Hastings and John Arnold, who donated over $200 million to “expand charter schools or charter-like alternatives in 40 cities across the country.”
Reed Hastings has called for the elimination of democratically elected school boards, he serves on the national KIPP charter school board, and he built a training center in Bailey, Colorado, to house the Pahara Institute, an education advocacy and networking group that supports the expansion of charter schools. In December, 2020, he spelled out his vision. “Let’s year by year expand the nonprofit school sector … for the low-performing school district public school — let’s have a nonprofit public school take it over.”
The City Fund set up its own political group, a PAC, called Campaign for Great Public Schools (also called City Fund Action), to give money to organizations that promote charter schools and lobby to privatize education. Since its formation, the Campaign for Great Public Schools has given millions to Education Reform Now, which is the political arm of Democrats for Education Reform. DFER is a “New York-based political action committee which focuses on encouraging the Democratic Party to support public education reform and charter schools.”
Campaign for Great Public Schools also gave millions to the American Federation for Children, which is “a conservative 501(c)(4) dark money group that promotes the school privatization agenda via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and other avenues. It is the 501(c)(4) arm of the 501(c)(3) non-profit group the Alliance for School Choice. The group was organized and is funded by the billionaire DeVos family.”
The City Fund Action PAC also funds the National Alliance for Charter Schools, 50 CAN, and numerous other organizations that support the expansion of charter schools.
Denver Families for Public Schools received $1.75 million in 2021 from the Campaign for Great Public Schools to promote their three selected candidates in the current Denver school board race.
Denver Families for Public Schools functions as a 501(c)(4), which means it can donate unlimited amounts of money in political elections without disclosing its donors.
It functions as an “astroturf” group by engaging in the practice of creating the illusion of widespread grassroots support for a candidate, policy, or cause when no such support necessarily exists. It set up a website, Facebook page, hired staff and recruited others to lobby for its cause. It posts videos of parents who say they don’t like the current school board candidates if they are opposed to them. It participates in forums to promote its selected candidates.
When Denver Families Action announced its school board endorsements in August, the leading fundraiser in the at-large seat at that time, Ulcca Hansen, withdrew from the race since she did not gain its endorsement. Hansen stated she could not win without the significant financial resources that come from “soft side spending.”
This money is also referred to as outside spending or “dark money,” because the funders of the outside groups often remain secret. Hansen felt the dark money would outpace campaign spending by a 10 to 1 margin. The $1.75 million that Denver Families for Public Schools received from The City Fund will be a major factor in the DPS school board race.
Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources announced Monday that more than 100 municipalities across the state will receive $402 million in funding to improve local drinking water by removing lead service lines and addressing contaminants such as PFAS and nitrates.
The funds come from the DNR’s Safe Drinking Water Loan Program and a number of programs through the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Across the state, there are 167,000 known lead service lines — which are the city-owned pipes that connect a home’s plumbing to the water system. In his budget proposal earlier this year, Evers had requested $200 million to replace the lines.
Through the funding, the city of Milwaukee, which has many of the state’s remaining lead pipes, will receive more than $30 million to replace lead service lines.
The city of Wausau is set to receive more than $17 million in funds to help pay for a PFAS-removal treatment system at the city’s newly constructed water treatment facility. The city will also receive nearly $6 million to replace lead service lines.
Many communities around the state are dealing with the harmful effects of PFAS in drinking water. The man-made compounds known as “forever chemicals” have been found to cause cancer and don’t break down easily in the environment. The compounds enter the environment through products such as firefighting foams and household goods such as nonstick pans.
In rural parts of the state, communities are dealing with increased nitrates in their drinking water, which is often caused by runoff from agricultural operations. As part of the funding announced Monday, the village of Reedsville is set to receive $3 million for additional water treatment to address excess nitrates in its water.
What caught your eye?
Rachel
https://www.democracydocket.com/cases/georgia-congressional-redistricting-challenge/
Federal judge strikes down Georgia's congressional and legislative maps, ruling they violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of Black voters. New, fair districts must be drawn before the 2024 elections.
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