Workers Rights

According to the federal law, not that much - a law upheld by the Supreme Court yesterday:

The nation's home healthcare aides are not entitled to minimum wages or overtime pay under federal law, even if they work for private employers, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The 9-0 decision, which keeps in place a long-standing rule that denies minimum wages and overtime pay to those who provide "companionship services" at home, could trigger a move in Congress to amend the law.

With an estimated 1 million workers assisting the elderly and the disabled in their homes, unions and civil rights groups had urged the justices to scrap the rule; they say it deprives many of the nation's lowest-paid workers of a living wage.

They say a large percentage of these aides are women and minorities who often work all-night shifts. Yet, under federal labor law, they are viewed the same as part-time baby sitters.

So with Medicare/Medicaid getting tighter on paying for nursing homes or assisted living communities, we are expected to turn the care of our loved ones over to people making slave wages?

Yes this law needs to be changed. The companies that employ these workers get government money and that money should be used to insure their workers are treated the same as others in the nation. Also we have the fact that most of these workers are women and minorities, so this is just another blow to Women's rights in this country.

Now here is the most ironic part of this. Think of the people doing these jobs as their sole source of income. They are then having to rely on government services to survive. These come from the same funds that pay their salaries. So instead of helping to alleviate the problem, this law is in fact adding to it.

Everyone needs to call their representative and urge them to pass a law remedying this crime against our citizens. The United States of America should not be treating employees this way.

When those miners died in West Virginia last year, a lot of the aim was at the White House and their lax enforcement of safety regulations. Just this past year, Bush issue an executive order putting a "political officer" at each enforcement agency, such as OSHA and the EPA. This officer will make sure the enforcement of safety regulations comply with the administrations policy.

This is the Republican idea of "businesses self regulating", and now we got another example of how this principal is severely flawed:

Overly lax federal oversight and cost-cutting by BP were factors in a 2005 explosion at the oil giant's Texas City refinery that killed 15 people and injured 170, the worst U.S. industrial accident since 1990, a government report found.

Though companies have plenty of safeguards for individual workers' safety, there is a potentially deadly lack of sound procedures to measure process safety, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, which released the report Tuesday.

At a public meeting Tuesday night where the board approved the report, Chairwoman Carolyn W. Merritt vowed that the agency would follow up on the report's safety recommendations until they are adopted.

We need strict oversight of these companies. This serves as a safety insurance to the American worker. The right tries to say that this sounds like some communistic tactic. Well, as I said Bush has placed political officers in government enforcement agencies to insure the administrations "policy" is followed. I know of one other country that used to follow that same policy - The Soviet Union. Now which idea sounds like communism?

Well imagine this. The Republicans are holding the lower class citizens hostage yet again:

Republican leaders are willing to allow the first minimum wage increase in a decade but only if it's coupled with a cut in future inheritance taxes on multimillion-dollar estates, congressional aides said Friday.

A package GOP leaders planned to bring to a vote Friday or Saturday in the House also would renew several popular tax breaks, including a research and development credit for businesses, and deductions for college tuition and state sales taxes, said a spokesman for House Majority Leader John Boehner.

The wage would increase from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour, phased in over the next three years, said Kevin Madden, the aide to Boehner, an Ohio Republican.

The maneuver is aimed at defusing the wage hike as a campaign issue for Democrats while using its popularity to spur enactment of the Republican Party's long-sought goal of permanently cutting taxes on millionaires' estates.

These greedy fucks all need pulled the hell out of their plush offices, their salaries taken away, their bank accounts stripped and their homes taken away then sent out to try and live on $5.15 an hour. Not a single one of them would make it. Instead of realizing that, these inconsiderate asshole go out and try to push through the tax break that will only help them and their friends. These god damn Republicans do not care one single bit about the common people in this country, only themselves.

This is a very interesting read and should make all American workers worry:

The last thing America's workers need is another economic kick in the groin, but the Bush labor board may soon deliver what could be its lowest blow yet.

In a series of pending cases known as Kentucky River, the Bush board could strip what remains of federal labor law protections from hundreds of thousands-perhaps millions-of workers whose jobs include even minor, incidental or occasional supervisory duties. The pending cases involve charge nurses in a hospital and a nursing home and lead workers in a manufacturing plant, but these workers could be just the tip of the iceberg.

The Bush National Labor Relations Board is easily the most anti-worker labor board in history, but even against this sorry backdrop, the scope of what they now are contemplating is breathtaking.

The consequences of bad labor board rulings in these cases have the potential to strip coverage in every nook and cranny of the workforce and create innumerable new opportunities for mischief by employers bent on denying workers' their fundamental human right to form a union. Long established collective bargaining relationships will also unravel, as employers emboldened by the NLRB's rulings assert that they no longer have a duty under federal labor law to recognize or bargain with their employees' unions. It will be back to the law of the jungle in industries like health care, where disruptions from labor disputes became so severe in the early 1970s that Congress passed special legislation to bring employees of private non-profit hospitals under federal labor law coverage.

You can read the rest of it here.

This just goes to show you even more that Bush cares only about big business. He is taking us back to the 1800's with his policies surrounding the workplace.