No matter how many stories and blog posts I write about not mixing politics and work, people still keep asking me whether it’s a good idea or not.

Yes, this is America, land of free speech. But folks when you go to work today you’re not protected if you spout off about the Republican convention, or any other political topic.

The First Amendment says Congress can’t pass laws curtailing speech, but taking political sides or appearing to take sides can be hazardous to your employment, even if you’re not doing it during work time. There is no free speech in the private-sector workplace.

To make matters worse many of you are not only engaging in political conversations with co-workers face to face, many of you are also increasingly using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, or blogs, e-mail and instant messaging, to get your opinions out this political season.

This from ‏@VCUPav on Twitter today:

“Gov Christie is so fat he doesn’t follow polls, he changes them by altering planetary alignment.”

While this one is funny, if I read another how-fat-is-New-Jersey-Governor-Chris-Christie joke I’m going to scream.

And you definitely don’t want to make your co workers or managers scream.

Here’s a scenario a lawyer from Proskauer, one of the top labor law firms, sent me yesterday:

(A man returns to his office from a lunchtime rally decked out in campaign buttons supporting a candidate or political party. On the way to his desk, he enters into a heated discussion with another employee with opposing views. His boss asks the man to remove the buttons and refrain from engaging in politically-charged debates at work. He refuses, asserting his right to “free speech.” Who’s in the right?) (more…)

Gailen David has worked two decades plus as a flight attendant for American Airlines. It’s not surprising that he, like most employees, has some funny things to say about his employer.

Unlike most workers, however, he decided to share those humorous tidbits on YouTube via a series of parody videos about the airline’s business practices and the way cutbacks have impacted employees. Unfortunately, his employer isn’t laughing.

David was fired this week, but the big question is, was American Airlines legally right in doing so. It’s a common belief that your boss can fire you for whatever the heck you do in social media, but in reality that’s not the case. (more…)

For many years now, we’ve all heard about the terrible nursing shortage in this country. The line has been, people who went into nursing would be thrown buckets of money and treated like royalty by the healthcare administrators wanting to hire them. That caused waves of workers to head to nursing schools.

Well, it turns out, promises of milk and honey were hype. Nurses are now being asked to take cuts in compensation and to work more.

A nurse told me a few years back that she thought all the hyperbole about a shortage was caused by the healthcare providers themselves in order to end up with an oversupply of nurses and thus be in a position to pay nurses less. I’m not much for conspiracy theories, but the end result she predicted is happening. (more…)

There’s seldom good news lately when it comes to worker rights and the future of the American workforce. But yesterday there was a bit of good news.

Boeing Co. announced yesterday it would build its dreamliner 737 at its plan in Washington state. The company had threatened union workers in Renton, WA, who had gone on strike in the past, that it was going to take production of the jet to a non-union, lower-waged workforce at a plant in South Carolina. The threat caused a firestorm and the National Labor Relations Board stepped in calling Boeing’s decision a direct attempt to squash workers rights, particularly the right to strike.

Boeing’s turnaround marks an important victory for labor, that has been battered in recent years as jobs, particularly in manufacturing, have hit by cuts in wages, and have been outsourced to lower-cost nations.

“I think the Boeing case is a victory for labor, a small one but still a victory,” said Gary Chaison, professor of industrial relations at Clark University. (more…)

Another profitable company with well-compensated executives wants its employees to give a little.

So it should be no surprise that there’s an unusual event going on right now — a massive strike by workers. About 45,000 Verizon workers went on strike this week because contract negotiations have stalled.

I say the event unusual because strikes in the country have been on the decline for years. The number of major U.S. strikes, including those involving 1,000 workers or more, fell to just five in 2009, the lowest level since 1947, when the Department of Labor first began tracking the data.

“The bottom line is that unions know the strike weapon just doesn’t work that well anymore, especially in a tough economy,” said Phillip Wilson, president of the Labor Relations Institute.

But for some reason, Verizon’s workers think it can work, or maybe they’re just so frustrated they don’t know what else to do. You see, the company is quite profitable right now but company officials say they still need major concessions from employees. It’s a familiar story many workers have heard before, especially during this downturn. Workers are seeing their pay and benefits cut, in addition to ongoing furloughs without pay, but all the while the top dogs keep padding their bank accounts.

In the case of Verizon, the top six executives at the company pocketed about $45 million in compensation last year. When you compare that to average wages at the firm for the rank and file that seems pretty extreme during tough economic times. Software engineers at the company, who are not unionized, make about $87,000, and customer service reps, many of which are unionized get $16.64 on average, according to Glassdoor.com.

Executives at Verizon make 20 times more than their top-paid employees, and nearly 60 times more than what their lowest paid workers bring in.

The pay gap between employees and executives has been growing for years now across all industries, but companies still want to extract more and more from the rank and file.

What if there was a company that limited how much more the head honchos could make compared to the little guys and gals? Am I crazy to even suggest this? Did I not have enough coffee this morning? Turns out, there is one such company. (more…)

There’s an odd war of words going on in the world of organized labor, and the New York Times and Wall Street Journal appear to be on two different sides.

The two newspapers had very different accounts of a worker movement at Walmart that has recently surfaced and is trying to get better wages and benefits from the retail giant. The group is called Organization United for Respect at Walmart, or OUR Walmart.

Yesterday a story in the Times called OUR:

a new, nonunion group of Wal-Mart employees that intends to press for better pay, benefits and most of all, more respect at work.

But today, a story in the Journal on OUR called the group:

a new, union-financed organization and the latest salvo in the long and so far fruitless efforts by U.S. labor unions to organize the 1.4 million U.S. workers at the world’s largest retail chain.

Even the headlines of the two stories were diametrically opposed:

Times: Wal-Mart Workers Try the Nonunion Route

Journal: Wal-Mart Is Facing Latest Salvo From Union

No, the reporters of these stories haven’t lost their minds. Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, and Journal reporters Miguel Bustillo and Kris Maher are all very good at what they do. But the problem here points to how loaded the word “union” is in our country. (more…)

New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie has garnered much of his fame in the last year by blaming teachers for all the economic ills of his state. Endless YouTube videos show the governor taking on teachers and accusing them of bringing in lavish paychecks on the backs of taxpayers.

Well, his fiscally conservative rants seem a bit hollow today. Turns out, he took a state helicopter to his kid’s baseball game on Tuesday and lots of folks are up in arms.

“Gov. Christie obviously doesn’t include himself in his hollow call for shared sacrifice,” Democratic state Assemblyman Paul Moriarty told the Associated Press.

Yes, this is all part of the political gotcha game that we’ve all come to know and love, but it also points to an odd conundrum for me, a labor columnist and blogger.

I’m not big on politicians attacking hard-working people, especially teachers, so his apparent hypocrisy shows how empty his attacks have been.

But I’m also going to go out on a limb here and defend the guy, who is not just a governor but a father. (more…)

What is it about politicians today and their ideas on job creation? Lately it seems both parties have convinced themselves that cajoling CEOs will help reignite job growth in this country.

First President Obama held a CEO summit to find out why businesses aren’t hiring. Now the Republicans — who have spent so much time on budget cutting that they forgot one of their main promises, creating jobs — are feeling the political heat and turning their attentions to the job market. And guess what, they want to meet with business leaders as well. They’ve scheduled a big teleconference with the business community for next week.

Well, Obama’s power powwow in December didn’t do much to light the fire under CEOs, and I suspect the Republicans won’t get much job blood from the not-hiring stone that has become Corporate America. Companies are making big profits, and your productivity is skyrocketing, so they figure why rock the profit boat.

It got me thinking about a politician who actually did create jobs after an economic catastrophe, and while I don’t know for sure, meeting with CEOs probably wasn’t at the heart of his strategy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt created jobs programs and gave new rights to workers and labor unions.

It seems the opposite is going on right now. (more…)

The nation has been given a crash course in collective bargaining thanks to the battle going on in Wisconsin between union workers and the governor, who says he wants to kill employee collective bargaining rights.

But it turns out Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker may not really know what it is. While he wants to take away state workers’ collective bargaining rights, he’s actually posting things on Twitter that say otherwise.

Yesterday he tweeted this:

With all the people for & against the budget repair bill at the Capitol today, I pray that everyone is respectful 2 those w/different views.

OK, Gov. Walker, that’s at the heart of what collective bargaining is all about. Two sides sit down and listen to each other, and should be respectful of each other.

And it’s also about negotiating, which is sort of what Walker is doing indirectly on Twitter. Ten hours ago he tweeted:

Union leaders SAY they r open 2 pension & health care payments but they can’t guarantee budget savings 4 schools & local gov’ts.

And then, he tweeted…

These r same union leaders who tried to ram through employee contracts in Dec (after election, but before I took office).

He’s engaged in a back and fourth that is just what you might hear during, dare I say, collective bargaining sessions. And tons of Wisconsin state workers have been tweeting responses to Walker’s words and tweets, so essentially, the parties are engaged in collective bargaining, no?

I know it’s not face-to-face at a bargaining table, but this cyber bargaining table shows that even if the state legislature is successful in stripping state workers’ rights away Walker may end up missing negotiating just as much as employees. In fact, thanks to social-media collective, the negotiations may never end.

Before you buy a product from a company, or send your resume to an employer, wouldn’t it be great if you could find out which companies in your town outsourced the most jobs to China, or consistently thwarted the nation’s labor laws?

Well, one organization has put together an online service to try and do just that.

Yesterday, the AFL-CIO, a large federation of unions, introduced a service called JobTracker that offers people a window into information that was next to impossible to get before, especially in one place —

Companies that
*outsourced jobs.
*had mass layoffs.
*violated health and safety laws.
*engaged in union busting.
*or discriminated against workers.

Maybe we should start calling the federation the AFL-SeeIKnow.

“This resource gives working people new ammunition,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO. (more…)