Interesting how allegations of corruption in Philly get more attention when Democrats are involved, as supposed to Republicans like these:

Employees of the Republican-controlled Philadelphia Parking Authority said they were told by their superiors to contribute to the GOP, or risk losing their jobs, a newspaper reported. Five employees said they were pressured on the job to contribute $275 per year, the Philadelphia Daily News reported for Tuesday editions. Campaign finance records show dozens of $100 contributions this year from workers making $25,000 or less. State law forbids demanding political contributions from public employees or contractors. “It’s extortion,” said Michael J. Vecchione, who was hired two years ago to work in the authority’s impoundment lots. The four other employees spoke to the Daily News on condition of anonymity. Vecchione, 38, said he had been on the job about a month when his supervisor asked him to buy a $100 ticket to the Republican City Committee’s fall dinner.

Perhaps the best example yet of the emptiness of the political discourse on “special interests”:

Mr. Thune repeated the obstructionist charge that Republicans have long leveled against Mr. Daschle, saying Mr. Daschle failed to secure passage of an energy bill last fall that included help for the ethanol industry. “It had everything that the South Dakota ethanol industry wanted,” Mr. Thune said. “Tom decided to listen to his members of the liberal Democratic caucus and the special interest groups.”

Now, I know I had to read that one over a couple times to figure out that it’s the ethanol industry on one side of this fight and the special interests on the other. Because apparently that industry doesn’t count as a special interest. And yet they managed to get, as Thune says, everything they wanted into the bill. Lucky for them I guess…

The NYT fashion folks have put together a peculiar article and photo spread bemourning that Yale students no longer dress like 19th-century English aristocrats. As my roommate said, “Now we dress like people.” Thank God.

Sasha Abramsky offers profiles in discontent:

So Indiana, and Shelbyville, will vote for Bush in 2004, just as they did in 2000. But neither will do so with anywhere near the same enthusiasm the second time around. There is a nascent sense of frustration here that will lead quite a few traditional Shelbyville Republicans to vote against Bush, and others to vote for the Republican ticket with fingers firmly clenching their nostrils shut. With weeks before the Republican convention, Mayor Furgeson tells me he hears Bush is ahead by only about seven points in Indiana, way down from the normal Republican presidential majority here…In one breath, Shelbyville residents will express confidence in the government and say that while they supported the initial decision to topple the Iraqi regime, they wish more time and energy had been spent planning for the post-Saddam occupation. They’ll say the actions at Abu Ghraib were aberrational, and they’ll defend the soldiers by saying privates wouldn’t do things like that unless they were following orders. And they’ll point out that they should know, because they were in the Army themselves once. “Everybody I talked to [about Abu Ghraib],” says Chamber of Commerce head Lin Sexton, “said the chain of command went to Bush. It didn’t stop at Rumsfeld. It went right to the top. There was so much empathy for the soldiers already. When that happened, the empathy escalated. These guys are getting court-martialed because of mismanagement at the top.”

Others, like Anna Deen, will say Bush is an honest man, then they’ll turn around and blame his underlings for all the problems–Rumsfeld and Cheney, anybody except the President himself. “I don’t know how to put it,” Deen says, pausing between words, her voice a pent-up crescendo of frustration. “They just make decisions in their little room and don’t think about the outcome for myself. Or, on the news ‘private so and so is dead,’ and that’s somebody’s son or daughter. I don’t appreciate what they’ve done to our boys, what they’ve done to families in the United States, and the situation we’re in because of what they’re deciding and how they’re directing. But I have to believe that everything’s going to work out–because of my son. He is my army. They put my boy in harm’s way, and that’s being very selfish. That’s the government we live under–like it or not.”…”I didn’t vote in 2000, but I’ll vote against Bush this year,” says Trish Jones, whose son Brandon is a Marine serving in Iraq, and who has two younger boys also thinking of joining up. A cashier in the nearby town of St. Paul, she’s a skinny, tired-looking woman in blue jeans and a Marines T-shirt. “I don’t think we should have been there [Iraq], and I still don’t think we should be there. There’ve been more people killed since [the war officially ended] than in the war. If it wasn’t for the war, the economy wouldn’t be like it is. As long as we’re at war, it’s going to get worse.”

Nathan Newman on the NLRB’s targeting of disabled workers:

This is not just an assault on labor rights, it’s a general attack on the idea that accomodation of the needs of the disabled should not turn them into second-class citizens with fewer rights. It also converts the disabled into a source of potential scabs who have no rights under the law and are therefore dependent on management for any privileges they might wish to offer or withdraw from them. All in all, one of the nastier decisions by the NLRB recently.

Edwards attacks Cheney for being out of touch with the plight of regular Americans – and uses some humor to do it:

“He said people are selling a lot of stuff on eBay. When we count the bake sales and lemonade stands, we’ll have a roaring economy,” Edwards told a union hall rally. Last week in Cincinnati, Cheney told voters that indicators miss the hundreds of thousands who make money selling on eBay. “That’s a source that didn’t even exist 10 years ago,” the vice president said. “Four hundred thousand people make some money trading on eBay.” Since President Bush took office in January 2001, Ohio has suffered economically, with 229,600 jobs lost and an unemployment rate of 5.9 percent, slightly above the national average. The battleground state, which went for George W. Bush in 2000, is being fiercely contested by the Republican and Sen. John Kerry. At stake are 20 electoral votes. Edwards used his appearance in the swing state to criticize the Republicans, praise Kerry and pledge his support for a federal program aimed at helping workers from the government’s nuclear facilities. Responding to the GOP criticism that Kerry would be soft on terrorism, Edwards said, “John will actually do the hard work of leading alliances around the world. We’ll do what must be done to keep the American people safe, and we’re going to restore the image of America we all know and love.”

Let’s hear more like this.

The Farm Labor Organizing Committee signs the first American guest worker union contract:

The North Carolina Growers Association, which represents 1,000 farmers, signed a union contract yesterday covering 8,500 guest workers from Mexico – a move that the association and union said was the first union contract in the nation for guest workers. At the signing ceremony at a church in Raleigh, the Mount Olive Pickle Company, the nation’s second largest pickle company, announced that it had signed a separate contract with the union, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, ending a five-and-a-half-year boycott campaign against the company. The two contracts end a long, bitter dispute in which the Farm Labor Organizing Committee accused Mount Olive of using cucumber growers who mistreated their workers. In organizing a boycott that was backed by the National Council of Churches, the union said that workers employed by Mount Olive’s growers often lived in squalid housing and that one worker had died of heat prostration and another of heat prostration or exposure to pesticides.

“The company is tremendously relieved to have the boycott ended,” said Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, which is based in Toledo, Ohio. “They were getting tired of all the negative publicity.” Bill Bryan, Mount Olive’s president, said the boycott hardly hurt the company’s sales, except in pockets of the Midwest. But he acknowledged it was time-consuming and annoying to have to respond to questions about why his company was being boycotted.

To whoever came here searching for leonard cohen democracy symbolism:

It’s an awesome song, isn’t it? Sorry there isn’t more on this site in the way of discussion of Leonard Cohen’s symbolism about democracy – but hey, at least you found more for your troubles than whoever was looking for

sample mission statements for chefs

The world’s first Wal-Mart union wins in court:

The Quebec Labour Relations Commission (QLRC) has rejected Wal-Mart’s challenge to the union certification of its store in Jonquière, Québec – leaving it the only unionized Wal-Mart in the world. The QLRC dismissed Wal-Mart’s argument that the bargaining unit certified at the store was not valid because it didn’t include store management personnel. In a six-page written decision the QLRC rejected Wal-Mart’s application to stall the process leading to a first contract, and confirmed that the bargaining unit certified by the commission in August should stand. The Jonquière employees gained union accreditation on August 3rd after a majority of employees at the Saguenay-region store, about 220 kilometres north of Quebec City, signed UFCW Canada Local 503 membership cards. Wal-Mart applied to challenge the certification. A single-commissioner QLRC hearing was held on September 2nd to hear the challenge, but Wal-Mart’s lawyers declined to attend. Wal-Mart could also appeal this latest decision to a three-commissioner hearing but “we hope Wal-Mart respects the ruling and stops stalling,” said Louis Bolduc, head of the Quebec region of UFCW Canada. “We’re sending Wal-Mart a letter to begin contract talks,” said Bolduc, “and we will also soon be meeting with our Jonquière Wal-Mart members to discuss their goals in the upcoming negotiations. Today’s ruling confirmed what we said all along – that the bargaining unit is legitimate, and that Wal-Mart will try its best to stop the inevitable.”

UNITE HERE members vote to strike hotels in three cities:

Thousands of hotel and restaurant workers in three major American cities have voted by overwhelming margins to authorize a strike. Contracts in San Francisco and Los Angeles expired in April and September, and the Washington DC contract expires today. Despite extensive negotiations, hotel industry representatives have refused to drop their demands that workers accept reduced health benefits and pensions, and increased workloads. “Hotel workers from every background and every nation share the same dream: to join the middle class through hard work and fair pay,” says John Wilhelm, President/Hospitality Industries, UNITE HERE. “Throughout our nation’s history, immigrants, women, and people of color have had to fight for fair treatment. Today, our members are taking the next step on that long road to equality by demanding that the huge corporations that employ them respect their rights.”

Hotels corporations have amassed enormous bargaining power through consolidation. In fact, the four largest hotel companies (Marriot, Hilton, Starwood and Hyatt) now account for 22% of total sales in the industry. Within the top 15 lodging markets, 75% of the rooms are affiliated with national or global companies. “The hotel corporations are saying, in effect, that their employees can be separate but equal,” says Kweisi Mfume, President and CEO, NAACP. “We know from history that separate can never be equal. NAACP members will stand together with hotel workers in this important fight for equality.”

Not everybody’s hurting under the Bush economy:

Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison firm in the country, said severe overcrowding in the United States federal prison system is likely to help fatten the bottom line of corporate prison operators. Federal prisons are running at more than 130 percent of capacity, the company told investors. The majority of people incarcerated are male and between the ages of 18 and 24. With the overall population of this demographic increasing, the company assumes more people will be thrown into prison, also helping business. . . The company said the Bush administration’s post-9/11 immigration policy of mass roundups and increased police presence in urban areas over the last four years has led to higher incarceration rates.

Another school whose reputation is more liberal than it deserves:

Workers at the University of California, Berkeley are being nickel and dimed, according to a report to be released by a group of UCB sociology graduate students working with author Barbara Ehrenreich. Interviews with about seventy janitors, food service workers, groundskeepers and clerical workers reveal that more than 90% of the UCB’s custodians and food service workers do not earn enough to cover basic household expenses of housing, transportation, and childcare. To make ends meet, some workers cram an entire family into a small apartment, others postpone getting braces for their children or planning for for college. Workers tell of foregoing treatment of work-related injuries for fear of termination or other reprisals.