Saturday, January 31, 2009

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

Wall Street’s Socialist Jet-Setters

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Barack Obama gets it, but I’m not sure Congress does. “Yes,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday, “we’ll put people to work repairing crumbling roads, bridges and schools by eliminating the backlog of well-planned, worthy and needed infrastructure projects. But we’ll also do more to retrofit America for a global economy.” Sure that means more smart grids and broadband highways, he added, but it also “means investing in the science, research and technology that will lead to new medical breakthroughs, new discoveries and entire new industries.”

Tax Cuts for Teachers

Moving forward with 'clean coal'

By James Wood, Saskatchewan News Network; Canwest News Service

SaskPower and the provincial government will face a major decision this year as they attempt to move forward with a groundbreaking "clean coal" project near Estevan.

After inviting 15 vendors to bring forward proposals last summer, SaskPower has received five responses from companies interested in providing the technology for its $1.4 billion pilot project.

The government expects to announce a shortlist in early February and make its technology
choice in the last month of 2009, Saskatchewan Party Crown Corporations Minister Ken Cheveldayoff said this week.

"I'm told that the five who've come back are very strong so I guess the bottom line is if you can get five strong competing ones that is satisfactory," said Cheveldayoff, expressing confidence

Read More From Woods Here

The Effects of High Blood Pressure on your body

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Labor Calls for Unity After Years of Division

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE Published: January 7, 2009

The presidents of 12 of the nation’s largest labor unions called Wednesday for reuniting the American labor movement, which split apart three and a half years ago when seven unions left the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and formed a rival federation.

The union presidents issued their joint call after the transition team for President-elect Barack Obama signaled that it would prefer dealing with a united movement, rather than a fractured one that often had two competing voices.

Read More From Greenhouse HERE

Unions: A Surprise American Favorite

There's a remedy for that - the Employee Free Choice Act that's been before Congress for several years. It would greatly increase the penalties on employers who violate workers' union rights, fining them up to $20,000 per violation. And employers who stall in contract negotiations with workers who vote to unionize - another common tactic - would have the contract terms determined in mediation or dictated by an arbitrator.

More From: Labor - And A Whole Lot More

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Murray Mandryk Attacks Labour......

What Do The Auto Worker's Really Make Murray Mandryk ?

Collective shake of the head required

By DAVID LEONHARDT - $73 an Hour: Adding It Up
Published: December 9, 2008 NY Times

Let’s start with the numbers. The $73-an-hour figure comes from the car companies themselves. As part of their public relations strategy during labor negotiations, the companies put out various charts and reports explaining what they paid their workers. Wall Street analysts have done similar calculations.

The calculations show, accurately enough, that for every hour a unionized worker puts in, one of the Big Three really does spend about $73 on compensation. So the number isn’t made up. But it is the combination of three very different categories.

The first category is simply cash payments, which is what many people imagine when they hear the word “compensation.” It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour. (The numbers vary a bit by company and year. That’s why $73 is sometimes $70 or $77.)

The second category is fringe benefits, like health insurance and pensions. These benefits have real value, even if they don’t show up on a weekly paycheck. At the Big Three, the benefits amount to $15 an hour or so.

Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit’s unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour. It’s a little more than twice as much as the typical American worker makes, benefits included. The more relevant comparison, though, is probably to Honda’s or Toyota’s (nonunionized) workers. They make in the neighborhood of $45 an hour, and most of the gap stems from their less generous benefits.

The third category is the cost of benefits for retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix — dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so — and end up at roughly $70 an hour.

The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn’t mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It’s a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You’d never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the “$73/hour” pay of Detroit’s workers with the “up to $48/hour” pay of workers at the Japanese companies.
These retirees make up arguably Detroit’s best case for a bailout. The Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the middle class in a country where individual companies — as opposed to all of society — must shoulder much of the burden of paying for retirement.

So here’s a little experiment. Imagine that a Congressional bailout effectively pays for $10 an hour of the retiree benefits. That’s roughly the gap between the Big Three’s retiree costs and those of the Japanese-owned plants in this country. Imagine, also, that the U.A.W. agrees to reduce pay and benefits for current workers to $45 an hour — the same as at Honda and Toyota.


Do you know how much that would reduce the cost of producing a Big Three vehicle? Only about $800.


Factcheck: Do auto workers really make more than $70 per hour?

Hubich: It's time to stop blaming the workers

Senate to Middle Class: Drop Dead ...a message from Michael Moore

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Hubich slams auto CEOs

By Neil Scott January 3, 2009

Top auto industry executives should be thrown into jail and the keys to the companies seized by workers who actually manufacture cars, the top Saskatchewan labour leader said Friday.

Larry Hubich, the firebrand president of the Saskatchewan Federation of Labour, said top executives with auto companies and other big businesses "don't do anything'' other than collect big salaries and travel the world on corporate jets.

"It's time for the workers to take over some of these companies,'' Hubich said Friday, the first regular working day of the new year.....

Hubich's comments were partly in reaction to a report released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives indicating that -- four minutes into the first working day of the new year --

Canada's best-paid CEOs had already pulled in what the average Canadian worker earns in a year.

Or at least that's what they pulled in during 2007, the latest full year for which figures are available.

"The 100 highest paid CEOs of Canadian publicly traded corporations received an average of $10,408,054 in total compensation in 2007," the report by the left-of-centre research organization said, noting that was a record average 22.7-per-cent increase from the year before and brought their combined pay packet to a record of more than $1 billion.

"At that rate of pay, Canada's richest CEOs pocket the average Canadian wage of $40,237 by 9:04 a.m. Jan. 2, before most Canadians have booted up their computer for another year of work," said Hugh Mackenzie, association researcher and author of the report.

Read More From Scott HERE

CEO pay in Canada to come under spotlight

New TFSA offers tax haven but risks involved

Philip Stavrou, CTV.ca News

If you've visited your local bank lately you've probably been asked if you'd like to open a Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA).

The new account offers Canadians a vehicle where they can deposit up to $5,000 annually without paying taxes on the interest earned.

TFSA holders must also consider how they want to invest their cash -- through an interest-earning savings account or through higher-risk choices such as stocks that could provide better returns.

Read More From Philip HERE
Your first resolution: Open a tax-free savings account