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| Andy Stern, SEIU President Emeritus |
SEIU
President Emeritus Andy Stern has once
again revealed his true colors.
Stern is working
as a highly paid consultant for Airbnb,
Handy, and other billion-dollar tech
businesses, according to a January 10, 2017 article (Josh Eidelson, “It’s
a New Game for Uber Drivers If New York Passes This Law,” Bloomberg
Businessweek).
In New York,
for example, Handy hired Stern to help push a bill through the state
legislature that would allow Handy and other gig-economy companies like Uber, Instacart, and TaskRabbit
to fend off lawsuits filed by workers who seek to be treated as employees
rather than “independent contractors.”
The bill is also backed by the trade
group “Tech:NYC,” whose members
include Uber, Facebook, Google, EBay, and Etsy.
The bill “would
make it easier for gig-economy app makers to continue to treat their workers as
contractors, loosening New York’s current standards,” according to Bloomberg. Handy,
co-founded in 2012 by two Harvard Business School students, sends workers to
people’s homes to clean up or make repairs.
Oh, and that's just the beginning of the pimping that "Handy Andy" has been doing for his billion-dollar tech patrons.
In a
separate gig, Stern last month co-authored a proposal with a right-wing D.C. political operative calling on the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress and White House to grant
“waivers” to states to allow them to do an end-run around federal labor laws.
The waivers would be a boon to tech companies, which are facing dozens of
class-action action lawsuits from workers alleging they are owed millions in
back pay after being misclassified as “independent contractors.”
Stern’s
proposal, which appeared in “National
Affairs” (Andrew Stern and Eli Lehrer, “How
to Modernize Labor Law,” National Affairs), is co-authored by Eli Lehrer, the President of the
right-wing “R Street Institute” in
Washington DC.
How do Stern
and Lehrer propose to “modernize” labor law?
Here's a shocker.
They propose a legislative agenda that’s virtually identical to the
tech industry’s. BTW, Stern's article just so happens to praise Uber and Handy as “sharing-economy companies” with “innovative
business models.”
In the
article, Stern successfully commits a serious ethical violation by failing to inform readers that he’s
actually a highly paid consultant for Uber, Handy, and other tech companies. The
article conveniently leaves aside this inconvenient fact, and simply identifies Stern as the “former president of the Service Employees International Union and a
senior fellow at Columbia University.”
What’s the
skinny on Eli Lehrer and the “R Street Institute”?
The R Street
Institute describes itself as “a free market think tank” that favors “limited
government.”
It was founded in 2012 by former members of the Heartland Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council
(ALEC). It’s an associate member of the “State
Policy Network,” which the Center for Media and
Democracy describes as “a web of right-wing ‘think tanks’ in every state
across the country” with deep ties to the billionaire Koch brothers and other conservative funders.
For example,
the R Street Institute opposes raising the minimum wage and supports legislation
to make it easier for companies to classify their workers as “independent
contractors.”
Who is Lehrer?
He’s the president
and co-founder of The R Street Institute. Formerly, he served as the senior
editor of The American Enterprise
magazine and was a fellow at the Heritage
Foundation, according to his bio.
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| Handy CEO Oisin Hanrahan |
It doesn’t
take a rocket scientist to realize that Stern’s and Lehrer’s proposal would cause great harm to workers.
Think about
it.
If the federal government decides to “decentralize” labor law by granting “waivers”
to states so they can “experiment” with alternative labor laws, what might
they do?
Just consider
the right-wing forces and Tea Party fanatics who now control many state
legislatures.
In Kentucky, where Republicans control
state government for the first time in nearly a century, legislators last
weekend passed a right-to-work law that was promptly signed by the Republican
governor. The new law also prohibits public employees from going on strike.
Next up? Kentucky
legislators are considering a bill to eliminate prevailing wages for public
works projects.
Meanwhile, state
legislatures in Texas, Kentucky, Missouri, Minnesota, and Virginia offer
another glimpse of the right-wing ideologues controlling many states. Each of these legislatures
will be considering so-called “bathroom bills” like North Carolina’s, which
would require transgender people to use restrooms in public schools,
universities, and government buildings that correspond with the gender listed
on their birth certificate. Many of the bills would also ban cities and
counties from approving ordinances aimed at protecting transgender rights.
So… what a f*cking great idea, Andy. An absolutely perfect
moment in history to give waivers to state legislatures so they can “experiment”
with crazy-ass changes to laws governing workers’ minimum wages, overtime
hours, anti-discrimination rules, pension rights, and rights to form unions.
Here are a
few excerpts from Stern’s and Lehrer’s “bold” proposal to “modernize” US labor
law:
It's time for a new path, one that takes advantage of one of the most successful public-policy innovations of the past 50 years: waivers from federal law to allow state experimentation… A system to allow state waivers from major labor laws similarly could give every interest group a chance to try bold reforms the federal framework doesn't currently allow.
The laws eligible for waivers should include, at minimum, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, and the Taft-Hartley Act.
What sort of
concrete innovations do Stern and Lehrer envision?
Here are a
couple described in the article:
Overtime Pay: Instead of the current
laws requiring companies to pay overtime wages after eight hours, “waivers
might also allow averaging of overtime over several weeks or a month,” thereby
allowing companies to reduce overtime pay to workers.
Wage Rates: Instead of current laws
requiring companies and labor unions to collectively negotiate a system of pay
rates covering all workers, waivers could “leave matters of wages or benefits
or both to negotiations between managers and individual employees.”
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| Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin |
WTF is Stern
doing?
Stern is a
pimp without a shred of principles or moral grounding… just a lust for lining his pockets
with as much cash as he can possibly stuff inside them.
Just weeks after resigning as
SEIU’s president in 2010, Stern began pocketing wads of stock options and cash
from billionaire
Ron Perelman, an employer of
SEIU’s members whom Stern reportedly negotiated secret
labor deals. SEIU officials, including Mary
Kay Henry, took no action to stop Stern’s apparent ethics violations. In
fact, SEIU continues to consider Stern its “President Emeritus.”
What’s next
on Stern’s agenda?
Here’s an
idea.
Perhaps he might want to propose giving “waivers” to allow Republican-controlled
state legislatures to “experiment” with “bold innovations” to the Civil Rights Act
of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and other federal statutes designed to
protect people’s fundamental rights.
Tasty is confident that if someone gives Handy Andy a thick wad of cash, he’d no-doubt oblige.
