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The picketers marching in a circle in front of a downtown Washington office building chanting about low wages do not seem fully focused on their message.
Many have arrived with large suitcases or bags holding their belongings, which they keep in sight. Several are smoking cigarettes. One works a crossword puzzle. Another bangs a tambourine, while several drum on large white buckets. Some of the men walking the line call out to passing women, "Hey, baby." A few picketers gyrate and dance while chanting: "What do we want? Fair wages. When do we want them? Now."
Although their placards identify the picketers as being with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters, they are not union members.
They're hired feet, or, as the union calls them, temporary workers, paid $8 an hour to picket. Many were recruited from homeless shelters or transitional houses. Several have recently been released from prison. Others are between jobs.
"It's about the cash," said Tina Shaw, 44, who lives in a House of Ruth women's shelter and has walked the line at various sites. "We're against low wages, but I'm here for the cash."
Carpenters locals across the country are outsourcing their picket lines, hiring the homeless, students, retirees and day laborers to get their message across. Larry Hujo, a spokesman for the Indiana-Kentucky Regional Council of Carpenters, calls it a "shift in the paradigm" of picketing. ...
Supporters of the practice consider it a creative tactic in an era of declining union membership and clout. But critics say the reliance on nonunion members -- who are paid $1 above minimum wage and receive no benefits -- diminishes the impact and undercuts a principle established over decades of union struggles.
"If I was a member of the general public, and I asked someone picketing why they were there, and they said they don't work for the union and they were just hired to stand there, that wouldn't create a very positive impression on me, nor would it create a very sympathetic position," said Wayne Ranick, spokesman for the United Steelworkers of America. ...
The United Brotherhood of Carpenters is the only union that routinely hires homeless people for its picket lines, union leaders and labor scholars say. It targets locations where work such as carpentry and drywall and floor installation is done without union labor. In a June newsletter on the union's Web site, the union's president and chief executive, Bill Halbert, referred to the pickets as "area standards campaigns." ...
The best way to break the stranglehold the unions have on the economy is to outsource them. To remain competitive so we can further globalize our prosperous economy, we have to lower wages to global levels. So the union guy who gets 70 grand a year for turning screws in the car factory here should make no more than 20 grand. That's still four times what a guy doing the same thing in China makes. If the spouse makes about the same, that's 40 grand a year. That's plenty to live on if you do without luxuries. Then we'd have more of a chance to be competitive. Unfortunately, the greedy unions want more more more. I think the unemployment figures today verify my view. Our President, who was a successful businessman and understands these issues, needs to put through another major tax cut for the people who create jobs in our country. Second, our President has to abolish the unions so companies can cut labor costs down to global size. Third, the companies have to get rid of the health care insurance burden so people can buy their own insurance if they want it. Finally, our President has to abolish the environazi laws that prevent our companies from being competitive.
Are unions crossing line with homeless pickets?
Stand-ins hired to make a ruckus outside nonunion sites lack rank-and-file benefits.
WASHINGTON -- You've heard the panhandler's common refrain, "Will work for food."
How about: "Will picket for food?"
In Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta and elsewhere in the country, union organizers are scouring shelters and recruiting homeless people to staff their picket lines, paying just above minimum wage and failing to provide health benefits.
The national carpenters' union, which broke from the AFL-CIO four years ago in a bitter dispute over organizing strategies and other issues, is hiring homeless people to stage noisy protests at nonunion construction sites.
"We're giving jobs to people who didn't have jobs, people who in some cases couldn't secure work," said George Eisner, head of the union's mid-Atlantic regional council in Baltimore.
The carpenters who belong to his union, Eisner explained, are gainfully employed. With homes and offices being built or renovated and real estate booming in many urban areas, he said, the union carpenters are too busy to join the picket lines.
"Work is good, and our members are working," Eisner said. "This is just the best thing for us to do at this point."
But the new strategy of placing homeless in picket lines disturbs some labor experts.
Neil Bernstein, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in labor and employment law, said unions that use such a tactic are guilty of practicing a double standard.
"They're basically doing what they're criticizing the employers for doing -- getting the cheapest people to do the job," he said.
Douglas McCarron, the president of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, did not respond to interview requests.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said he saw nothing wrong with unions hiring homeless people as pickets.
"The fact that the people demonstrating were not members of the union doesn't make much difference," Sweeney said. "What matters is that the carpenters working on the building had no health care and no pension."
When it was noted that the homeless pickets also had no benefits, Sweeney responded: "Our hope is that those workers -- that all workers -- would have health benefits, but that is a bigger issue."
Sweeney expressed the hope that the homeless protesters "may work themselves into a full-time job where they would get benefits."
A demonstrator in Washington, Nicey Howards, said the temporary protesters earn $8 an hour -- just a dollar above the legal minimum wage in Washington -- with no benefits. While she felt the job wasn't ideal, Howards was glad she could earn a little money while looking for something better.
Each week, Howards said, she works 20 hours, the maximum time allowed by the carpenters' union, bringing home $160.
The union organizers allow the hired protesters to take two-minute breaks, Howards said, but dock their pay for the time off.
Thats shallot
I suppose to SOMEONE, that may mean something, could you enlighten me?
Vice President Joseph Biden heralded the Energy Department's $529 million loan to the start-up electric car company called Fisker as a bright new path to thousands of American manufacturing jobs. But two years after the loan was announced, the company's manufacturing jobs are still limited to the assembly of the flashy electric Fisker Karma sports car in Finland. "There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle," the car company's founder and namesake told ABC News. "They don't exist here."
Henrik Fisker said the U.S. money has been spent on engineering and design work that stayed in the U.S., not on the 500 manufacturing jobs that went to a rural Finnish firm, Valmet Automotive. "We're not in the business of failing; we're in the business of winning. So we make the right decision for the business," Fisker said. "That's why we went to Finland."
The loan to Fisker is part of a $1 billion bet the Energy Department has made in two politically connected California-based electric carmakers producing sporty -- and pricey -- cutting-edge autos. Fisker Automotive, backed by a powerhouse venture capital firm whose partners include former Vice President Al Gore, predicts it will eventually be churning out tens of thousands of electric sports sedans at the shuttered GM factory it bought in Delaware. And Tesla Motors, whose prime backers include PayPal mogul Elon Musk and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, says it will do the same in a massive facility tooling up in Silicon Valley.
An investigation by ABC News and the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News found that the DOE's bet carries risks for taxpayers, has raised concern among industry observers and government auditors, and adds to questions about the way billions of dollars in loans for smart cars and green energy companies have been awarded. Fisker is more than a year behind rolling out its $97,000 luxury vehicle bankrolled in part with DOE money. While more are promised soon, just 40 of its Karma cars (below) have been manufactured and only two delivered to customers' driveways, including one to movie star Leonardo DiCaprio. Tesla's SEC filings reveal the start-up has lost money every quarter. And while its federal funding is intended to help it mass produce a new $57,400 Model S sedan, the company has no experience in a project so vast.
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