Update: I found this table of where and what the stopped projects are. All of NJ's are at the same emerging South Jersey airport; search the table for Atlantic City.
Nearly 650 South Jersey workers were furloughed over the weekend at the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center near Atlantic City, as the FAA halted work on air travel infrastructure projects across the country. Construction workers. Planners. Engineers. All were sent home after Congress failed to pass legislation re-authorizing federal ticket taxes - these are used to fund building projects for facilities like new runways and new control towers and modernizing air traffic control systems. Nearly 4,000 FAA employees across the country are furloughed without pay. Plus 87,000 construction jobs stopped, across the US. To maintain a safety baseline, the shutdown can only be partial. Unaffected are air traffic controllers and safety inspectors, who will remain on the job. So will FAA employees who inspect planes and test pilots.
Today, senators Lautenberg and Menendez fired off a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urging him to steer his GOP conference to resolution that gets FAA back up. Our senators peg Republicans in both the House and Senate for the failure. GOP lawmakers tacked on a list of provisions to a long-term spending bill for the FAA approved by the GOP-led House this spring. On that list is a GOP-driven proposal, sought by the airline industry, that would make it more difficult for airline workers to unionize.
And they're not budging, even as the FAA warns that grinding these projects to a halt could significantly increase their ultimate cost to taxpayers. Even though FAA's also unable to collect the full measure of taxes on airline tickets bought, depriving the government of revenue (with most airlines pocketing that as a bonus instead of passing that savings on to you).
Senators' letter, after the jump.
Does anyone know what sort of pension and benefits Chris Christie will recieve after his term in office as governor? Also, any word with regard to any benefits from his other government jobs?
Any trade union leader who takes the reins in reducing worker benefits by legislation instead of bargaining, no matter how valid or necessary the changes, deserves to have their union card taken away.
Public workers, meet your betrayers. Here, for your future reference, are the names of the Democratic legislators who sold you, the middle class public workers of NJ, out in the name of phony "reform."
Over the next few weeks, Blue Jersey will be taking a long, hard look at the careers of these folks - stay tuned.
Yesterday, somebody asked me if they should go off somewhere and do something else, or stay glued to the Assembly vote, which was in a dramatic holding pattern for five-and-a-half hours. Stay with the Assembly, I said. It will be national news. And it is. The Assembly vote, and Senate vote before it, are not a victory for New Jersey because too many of our neighbors, fathers, and co-workers are getting screwed. It's certainly not a victory for the Democratic Party, which now faces an enthusiasm gap and loss of reliable union ground troops, with a huge election looming. No, it was a victory for Christopher James Christie, delivered perhaps at their own cost, by a new class of Christie enablers with nominal "D's" on their backs. Watch Christie step out front now, before other one-term GOP governors getting ahead on the backs of their state's working people. Comer. Hotshot. Buzzmaster. And it was only a matter of hours before Gov. Christie was on TV letting Matt Lauer talk about his 2012 presidential sizzle, feeding into that by wasting no time going after President Obama. And thanking the Democratic leadership that put him in the Today Show's exclusive interview chair, thanking his enablers inside 10 seconds after he opened his mouth.
So, in case you missed it, is Chris Christie on the morning after. Right below it, for counter-point, is CWA President Hetty Rosenstein on MSNBC's boutique, and NJ-savvy The Ed Show (MSNBC):
To begin to dissolve the collective bargaining rights that New Jersey's public workers have counted on for decades, Gov. Chris Christie employed a masterful communications strategy. It isn't easy to convince well-educated voters that the people who live down the street, or across town, are your enemy.
To do it, Christie had to turn ... the bus driver you see every day ... your kid's math teacher ... the guy who works at the library ... the lady who makes lunches for the folks at Vineland Developmental Center .. the cop ... the firefighter ... the woman sitting up all night helping a WWII veteran die peacefully ... into caricature. They are middle class, or working class. But he calls them rich, tells you they're cheating you every day, that they're the ones responsible for a deadened economy. Because they're greedy. Bloodsuckers.
He has to depersonalize them in order to do all that. He's good at it, too. We hear he's going places. And some Democrats stand behind him. The ones that do not deserve to know how many people are standing behind them. Waving across the country now, with some powerful interests behind it, is an effort to get people to turn against each other, blame each other, instead of seeking better governmental solutions, better lawmakers, better spending priorities.
Tomorrow, the NJ Assembly votes on a bill hostile to our public workers. It will make national news. If you can get there, come to the State House at noon. Thousands of people will await the vote. As Couch Potato Politics tells us, it's not too late to call Assembly members.
Meanwhile, here's a reminder of who Chris Christie's talking about when he tells you who New Jersey's public workers are:
Are you ready to give $25 from your pocket to Xanadu ($100 for a family of four)?
That is one of several important questions to be decided this week in Trenton, each of which we'd be seriously fixated on if not for the undoubtedly even more important anti-union armageddon currently unfolding. Still, these things are worth keeping an eye on because they all have a huge impact. Here are the top five, in no particular order:
1. Will thousands of working families be kicked off of Medicaid? Gov. Christie (R-Rove) has decreed that working families earning more than $6,000 a year should be dropped from Medicaid. Thus creating new incentives to go from work to welfare. Will the Democrats stand up and try to block this change (not clear from the reporting exactly how much power the Legislature has, but at the least they could pass a resolution telling the Obama Administration to reject the waivers needed)?
2. Will we have to pay $25 each to bail out Xanadu? Sens. Ray Lesniak (D-Progressive Social Causes and Crony Capitalism) and Kevin O'Toole (R-Tool) have introduced a bill to expand the ability of the Christie Administration to give away our money to large developers to include the Meadowlands. If you have driven the Turnpike recently, you may be aware that the Meadowlands includes a large eyesore called Xanadu which has been a total failure. Apparently the solution to this problem is for everyone in the state to pay $25 (that is $200 million divided by the 8 million people in NJ) to a large Canadian developer in order to get the mall ready for opening. I have two questions: could those of us below I-195 at least have the option of giving the money to a more local mall that is not 100 miles away, or perhaps have it go to the casinos and at least get $25 in chips back? And if this expert is right that even with $200 million of our tax money the project only has a 50-50 chance of success (after all four prior owners have failed), do we get double our money back if it fails again? Seriously, is this really something that the Democrats are going to support instead of using to bash Christie?
4. Women's health: what happens next? Planned Parenthood, our own Sen. Weinberg (D - Actually a D), and many others have been running probably the best progressive campaign of the year against Christie's deeply unpopular cuts in women's health. What happens next? Do the Dems take it up a notch? Like hold Xanadu, which costs over 20 times as much, hostage? Now, you may say: those are the kind of techniques that Republicans use, not Democrats. Which brings us to the next and final point...
5. Will the Democrats reverse all of their progress in making Chris Christie unpopular? For a while, Senate President Sweeney (D-Sorry About that Marriage Thing) and Speaker Oliver (D-What Happened to that Awesome State Convention Speech?) were on a roll - and Christie was having bad week after bad week - jobs numbers, helicopters, women's health - and looked more arrogant than strong. Now, Christie is going to have a new round of bragging rights from overcoming the unions' power. Christie this week looks more strong than arrogant. Are there any other tricks up leadership's sleeve to help boost Christie's sagging poll numbers?
It is going to be an interesting week with a lot at stake for our state's future. And please post additions to this list if I missed something.
S2937, the Christie-Sweeney plan to dramatically alter collective bargaining rights in New Jersey, passed the Senate this afternoon 24-15. The Assembly version - A4133, as introduced by Lou Greenwald (D) and Declan O'Scanlon (R) - is next, first in Assembly Budget (which Greenwald chairs), then to the full Assembly for a vote. Gov. Christie will almost certainly sign it into law if it reaches his desk. Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver, who has pushed this bill despite a body that may not be warm to it, said "bold, demonstrative large steps" are what's needed now.
Labor - CWA Political Director Bob Masters told the Assembly minutes ago that "real Democrats" would have killed this bill. Charlie Wowkanech, NJ AFL-CIO President said, "Where labor has no voice, democracy has no future."
Gov. Christie owes Steve Sweeney - Senate President, Democrat and 'union man' - a great deal for introducing and championing this bill. Its motive and agenda is largely Republican, as any student of current events can see. And Sweeney is choosing to use his position in the Senate to ram home legislation that threatens the long tradition of pubic employee labor having the power of collective bargaining negotiation to help determine working conditions, a fundamental of the Party he leads.
As 12mileseastofTrenton notes, Sweeney's own caucus voted against him 2-1, and the calls for his ouster as Senate President may grow louder.
The Norcross Provision As we noted earlier, the Senate bill was amended today to remove a much-disputed and cost-ineffective provision to limit public workers' access to out-of-state medical care. But Assemblyman Greenwald appears interested in restricting public worker medical care to inside-Jersey, a highly debatable concept given for example that of the top 50 cancer hospitals in the U.S., none is in New Jersey. The part of the bill snidely referred to as the "Norcross provision" comes about as New Jerseyans calculate who might have stood to benefit from this legislation, or at least that part of it. Several of the world's best hospitals in the world are just outside New Jersey's borders, in NYC and in Philadelphia. Norcross, Sweeney's benefactor and South Jersey Democratic Party boss, is Chair of Cooper Hospital in Camden, which has recently stepped up advertising to compete with premiere hospitals in Philadelphia. Restricting public workers to NJ facilities would certainly have boosted traffic to Cooper, and the fact that the provision would have furthered Sweeney's benefactor's interests added to the sense that this was payback to Sweeney's benefactor for Sweeney's monumental effort to ram this home against a rich ethical tradition of his own Party.
Note: We don't normally post press releases, but I thought this info was interesting and germane to the proceedings going on right now in the State House, in terms of their impact, according to NAACP, on a particular population segment of African-American women & professionals. And, with all that's going on, I don't have time to tease this into a diary. So, here word-for-word is what NAACP has to say -
Study: Black Women, Professionals Would be Disproportionately Affected by Trenton's Cuts
Ben Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP issued a strongly worded statement, calling on Trenton leaders to respect the right to collective bargaining as a new report says moves to significantly cut the health care and pension benefits of state workers could fall hardest on New Jersey's black middle-class - particularly on black women and black workers with professional degrees. Ben Jealous:
We see this same pattern in many states and cities across the nation. Public sector jobs are critical in communities of color and attacks on bargaining rights and health care disproportionately affect our communities. The NAACP nationally and in NJ supports bargaining rights, not stripping these rights at this critical time. This recession will never end if benefits and wages continue to decline in all sectors. Now public workers are under attack everywhere and we stand with them.
Public sector jobs have served as the gateway to the middle-class for thousands of black New Jerseyans," said Jeffrey Keefe, a professor of Labor and Employment Relations at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations and author of today's report. "But those quality jobs are now threatened by Trenton's proposed cuts to public workers. These cuts will fall disproportionately on African-American workers and their families, further damaging a community still struggling to recover from the economic downtown. Black women, who make up 78% of the black public sector workforce, and Black workers with professional degrees will be particularly hard hit.
The report's key findings include:
Black workers earn 93% more each year working in the public sector than the private sector ($38,091 compared to $19,698).
89% of Black public employees have employer-provided health insurance, compared to just 50% of Black workers in the private sector.
Public sector jobs are particularly important for Black women. 78% of the Black public sector labor force is female, compared to 53% of the private sector Black work force.
The public sector employs five times the proportion of Black professionals as the private sector. 40% of Black workers employed in the public sector are professionals.
The public sector employs college-educated Black workers at 2.5 times the rate of the private sector.
Approximately, 37% of Black public employees are college-educated, compared to 15% of private sector Black workers.
This is an open thread. Won't have time to live blog this today, but your comments and reactions to the video streaming of the hearing (link below) is welcome.
UPDATE - Senate Hearing begins about 45 minutes late - a full gallery in the Senate chamber will hear an historic vote on a bill proposed by 'union man' Steve Sweeney, President of the NJ state Senate. Watch here. Feed is not embeddable or we would post it. The hearing is starting late, with the Full Senate link still at this time showing Pending, which may mean there are furious negotiations going on outside the chamber.
#StandUpNJ - Twitter hashtag being used by union participants and their supporters.
Section 76 repealed - As we reported earlier, Senator Sweeney and Assemblywoman Oliver have backtracked on one of the most fiscally unwise and damaging parts of the plan, which would have blocked state employees from using their own health insurance at out-of-state hospitals.
Sen. Loretta Weinberg told Blue Jersey this morning she will not support the bill as currently construvted
Early this morning, outside a fundraiser in Trenton for Assembly Democrats, protesters jeered Assembly Democrats supporting the Christie-Sweeney plan, and cheered Democrats they know will not be selling them out today. Shouts of: "We will remember in November!"
A Tent City has sprung up behind the Trenton War Memorial - dozens of tents constructed there legally or illegally, I don't know yet.
March for Collective Bargaining - Led by historical re-enactors, union folks and their supporters marched into Trenton this morning to stage what they call Trenton Battle Two. Video:
Deciminyan is there, but couldn't get into the hearing itself. The room is full, and fire regulations prohibit any further crowding. Deciminyan's now headed over to Tent City.
This is Marie Corfield, who was pulled to the podium at yesterday's collective bargaining rally at the State House. This is who was speaking as testimony was being given by firefighters and police to members of the New Jersey Senate, who were about to pass a bill corrosive to their collective bargaining to the full NJ legislature for a vote.
Marie Corfield, an art teacher at a Hunterdon County elementary school, is a candidate for the New Jersey Assembly from the newly-drawn LD-16, in Somerset, Middlesex, Hunterdon and Mercer counties.
Apologies for the video quality. Best we could get.
This was posted very early this morning, before News Roundup, so maybe not everybody has seen it. Just pulling it back up top for a short while for those who missed it; the discussion in comments is interesting - Rosi
In an explosive tirade that fired up some demonstrators and embarrassed others, a national union leader went nuclear on Gov. Chris Christie, calling him a Nazi over and over.
"Welcome to Nazi Germany," Christopher Shelton, a top official at the Communication Workers of America, told thousands of protesters today outside the Statehouse in Trenton. "The first thing that the Nazis and Adolf Hitler did was go after the unions."
In an extreme example of disaffection with both parties, Shelton also went after Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex).
"Adolf Christie's generals," he called them, because both are backing a bill that would increase pension and health benefit costs for public workers.
We can't afford this kind of distraction - not now. Shelton's resignation needs to be on someone's desk this morning. If he doesn't write it, fire him.
Dear NJ Democrats: We've heard a number of passionate voices speaking out against the reported deal reached by Gov. Christie, Sen. Sweeney and Speaker Oliver to, among other things, strip public workers of their collective bargaining rights with respect to health benefits:
At what point do we stand up for the majority of New Jersey's residents and repudiate the middle class dismantling that this Administration so arrogantly defends?
- Asw. Bonnie Watson-Coleman
Our Democratic Party principles are to stand with the working families that unions represent. Public workers, teachers, police officers, firefighters and the many other employees who dedicate themselves to our state, deserve a seat at the bargaining table to decide their own fate.
- Bergen County Assembly Democrats
"In my 20-plus years experience as Passaic County Democratic Chairman, I have long felt that collective bargaining is a cornerstone of our Party and protects the rights of hard working men and women. The necessary reform needs to be done in a systematic and inclusive way, with two-sides negotiating across the table from one another.
- Passaic County Democratic Chairman John Currie
And, the 10,000-plus workers rallying in Trenton today have some strong words for this shift in policy as well (some too strong, reportedly). For a democratic party that has long relied on organized labor, and been a champion of the middle class it has helped produce, the idea that we would now strip public workers of some of their collective bargaining rights (resulting by all accounts in only modest savings that will have no substantial impact on the budget or property taxes) is a really bad idea.
But, I thought I'd add one more reason for democrats considering supporting the deal to think twice - policy aside, it's just bad politics. Ahem:
Hello, this year is a base election!
New Jersey Politics 101: year 4 of our 4-year cycle of elections (that's this year) produces notoriously low voter turnout. Although the entire legislature may be up for election, history shows that most voters - certainly undeclared and independent voters - stay home. Instead, the election is won by the party who best energizes their base. Guess who that might be this year?
Via Capitol Quickies, pretty much at the last minute, the pension and benefit reforms bill is out and will be formally introduced today.
It's 120 pages long. A plain-language conclusion starts at the bottom of Page 114, concluding on page 120. Haven't got time to parse it at the moment, so let's call this an open thread, for your comments as you read it.
We have learned that you are considering legislation that would strip health care from the bargaining table for tens of thousands of public workers in New Jersey. Nothing is more central to the future than the ability of working people to have a voice in decisions about their living standards, and that is why the entire labor movement has been fighting similar attacks in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states. The preservation of collective bargaining is critical to the very existence of unions in this country.
In this era of cynicism and declining trust across the board, working people are looking to stand with leaders who stand with them. We expect you, as a Democrat, to stand with working families and to defend collective bargaining rights. This is a vote we take very seriously.
I hope Couch Potato Politics doesn't mind. I added video of Jackson's event in Jersey City, one of several across the state over 2 days. Economic injustice was the theme in Jersey City, protesting Citigroup's decision to lay off 276 New Jerseyans at their Englewood Cliffs subsidiary, just weeks after NJ offered another Citigroup subsidiary $12.3 million in tax breaks to relocate 400 jobs to JC from New York. Jersey City video & stills from both days, after the jump - Rosi
The Rev. Jesse Jackson appeared in Downtown Jersey City yesterday to protest Citigroup's decision to lay off 276 workers at a subsidiary in Englewood Cliffs.
The layoffs were announced in March, mere weeks after the state offered another Citigroup subsidiary, Citibank N.A., $12.3 million in tax breaks to relocate 400 jobs to Jersey City from New York.
A prouder moment in my life is hard to define but introducing my children to the Reverend Jesse Jackson yesterday rates as one of the most significant. Having a photo of my daughter standing with Jesse Jackson captured a moment I'll not soon forget.
Jesse Jackson has been a participant and witness in some of the most significant changes in our American society over the last 60 years. He walked with Dr. Martin Luther King to face the dogs, firehoses, Billy-clubs and white-sheeted hate mongers threatening, and for Dr. King, delivering death as a response to the march for freedom and equality for all Americans and the ability of public workers to have a voice in bargaining their working conditions and rights.
As we stood at the foot of the Trenton War Memorial steps and listened to Reverend Jackson talk to the threats being levied against workers' rights, the rights of the poor and middle class to equal access to quality education and healthcare, I recalled the old footage of Dr. King speaking to the people about equal rights and social justice. I reflected on the image of a much younger Jesse Jackson standing at his elbow, learning the lessons of leadership and sacrifice for others. In Jesse's words, I could hear the influence of Dr. King's spirit, 43 years after his assassination.
As we stood and listened to Reverend Jackson, I wondered if these moments would be the cement that my children use to fortify the foundation of their sense of social responsibility and self-sacrifice. I can only hope that they will someday tell their children about the day they met Jesse Jackson and teach to them the lessons that he and Dr. King taught to us.
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