I READ THE NEWS TODAY:SUPR CT LIMITS CONTRACEPTN COVERAGE & UNION RIGHTS; UKRAINE TRUCE OVER; MORE GM RECALLS;

Court Limits Contraception Coverage Rule

Read it at Associated Press

Hobby Lobby won its battle against contraception at the Supreme Court on Monday, marking the first time the country's highest court held that a for-profit company can hold religious views and have them protected under federal law. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that a small set of privately owned corporations are not required to provide contraception coverage for employees. Hobby Lobby sued the federal government, claiming the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate for employer-provided insurance violated its religious beliefs and First Amendment rights.

"It's the first time that our court has said that a closely held corporation has the rights of a person when it comes to religious freedom," Hillary Clinton said in response to the decision. "I find it deeply disturbing that we are going in that direction."

The court ruled that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) allows for family-owned and closely held for-profit companies to enjoy the same exemptions as nonprofits for contraception objectors. The five conservatives who sided with Hobby Lobby qualified their opinion, though, making clear that the decision only applies to the contraception mandate. Authoring the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito said “Our decision should not be understood to hold that an insurance-coverage mandate must necessarily fall if it conflicts with an employer’s religious beliefs.” Other insurance mandates, like blood transfusions or vaccinations, may still proceed. The court also stressed that the ruling does not protect employers from engaging in illegal discrimination under the pretense of religious faith.

Birth-control coverage is one of the preventative services mandated to be free to employees under Obamacare. To maintain this regulation, Alito said there were two options. One, the federal government could pay for contraceptive services directly. Or two, as is the case with nonprofit, religious-oriented groups, employers could notify the government of their objections and shift the burden of coverage to third-party administrators or insurers.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg denounced the ruling, saying “it discounts the disadvantages religion-based opt-outs impose on others, in particular, employees who do not share their employer’s religious beliefs.”

 

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Ukrainian soldiers are detained June 28 by pro-Russia separatists after the separatists seized a national guard base in Donetsk during the unilateral cease-fire proclaimed by President Petro Poroshenko. (European Pressphoto Agency)

TRUCE EXPIRES

Ukraine Prez: We Will Attack Separatists

 
Read it at The Los Angeles Times

A 10-day ceasefire between Ukraine and pro-Russia separatists came and went on Monday, and the Ukrainian government pledged not to extend it, despite the wishes of European leaders.

"We will attack and free our country," President Petro Poroshenko posted on his website. In a phone call with French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Ukraine was urged to sign a genuine ceasefire and set up international monitors on the Russian-Ukrainian border.

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GM Breaks All-Time Record for Recalls

 

/Reuters  Read it at Detroit News

 

With 8.45 million more vehicles being called back by General Motors on Monday, the auto company has officially broken the all-time record for most vehicles recalled in a single year by a single automaker. GM's new round of recalls are related to "unintended ignition key rotation," the same problem that was linked to more than a dozen deaths and scores of accidents. So far this year, GM has recalled back 25 million vehicles in 54 campaigns. On the same day, GM announced victims' families could file for compensation of at least $1 million. The compensation fund is being administered by 9/11 paymaster Kenneth Feinberg.

One recall for unintended ignition key rotation covers 6.8 million vehicles in the United States including the 1997-2005 Chevrolet Malibu; 1998-2002 Oldsmobile Intrigue; 1999-2004 Oldsmobile Alero; 1999-2005 Pontiac Grand Am; 2000-05 Chevrolet Impala and Monte Carlo; and 2004-08 Pontiac Grand Prix.

The other covers about 620,000 2003-14 Cadillac CTS, 2004-06 Cadillac SRX cars.

 

Earlier this month, GM recalled about 4 million cars for ignition switch problems in two separate campaigns. GM linked its recall of 3.4 million Impalas and other cars to eight crashes and six injuries. GM also recalled more than 510,000 current-generation Chevrolet Camaros for ignition switch problems linked to three crashes in which air bags failed to deploy.

Unlike in the Cobalt recall, GM is not replacing the switches in any of these new recalls. It is adding new key inserts or using a new key ring to prevent the fob from getting jostled.

GM also announced four other smaller recalls Monday, with only one resulting in an injury.

■189,000 2005-2007 Buick Rainier, Chevrolet Trailblazer, GMC Envoy, Isuzu Ascender, Saab 9-7x, 2006 Chevrolet TrailBlazer EXT, GMC Envoy XL vehicles are being recalled for the second time because of an electrical short in the driver’s door that could disable the lock and window switches, and in rare cases overheat the door control module. In August 2012, GM had opted to offer special coverage rather than a recall; but after pressure from NHTSA, the automaker agreed to the recall last year to add a protective coating, inspect the module and replace if necessary.

After fires were been reported since the initial recall — including some with completed repairs — GM will now replace the door control module in all vehicles.

■20,000 models of the 2011-14 Chevrolet Cruze, 2012-14 Chevrolet Sonic and 2013-14 Chevrolet Trax, Buick Encore and Verano are being recalled because the heater power cord may become damaged during very cold conditions. One injury has been reported, GM said.

■About 100 2014 Chevrolet Camaro and Impala and Buick Regal cars are being recalled because they may not have had a joint fastener tightened to specification at the assembly plant.

■12,000 2007-2011 Chevrolet Silverado HD, GMC Sierra HD trucks with auxiliary batteries because an underhood part could melt because of an electrical overload.

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Ruling Against Union Fees Limits Damage to Labor

 

            

The Supreme Court dealt a limited blow to organized labor on Monday by ruling that some government employees did not have to pay any fees to the unions representing them. But the court declined to strike down a decades-old precedent that required many public sector workers to pay union fees. Writing for the 5-to-4 majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. concluded that there was a category of government employees — a partial public employee — who can opt out of joining a union and not be required to contribute union fees.

 

Justice Alito wrote that home-care aides who typically work for an ill or disabled person, with Medicaid paying their wages, should be classified as partial public employees and should not be treated the same way as public schoolteachers or police officers who work directly for the government.

The court’s decision, on behalf of the five most conservative justices, was a partial, but not total win, for labor’s critics. And while labor sustained a defeat in this ruling, it did not amount to a crippling loss that unions had feared. If the court had overturned the precedent requiring many government workers to pay union fees, it could have greatly reduced the membership and treasuries of public-employee unions. Several legal experts said Justice Alito evidently had tried unsuccessfully to obtain the needed votes for a broader decision to overturn that precedent. Justice Alito wrote that unions played such a limited role for “partial public employees” like home-care aides that these aides should not be required to pay union fees. Indeed, he wrote that such a requirement would violate their First Amendment rights. He noted that states often set wages for these workers and that unions often did not bargain for them.

 

Wisconsin’s Fearful Legacy for Unions

N.Y. TIMES

LABOR WRESTLES WITH ITS FUTURE

HAROLD MEYERSON WASHINGTON POST

Since the emergence of capitalism, workers seeking higher pay and safer workplaces have banded together in guilds and unions to pressure their employers for a better deal. That has been the approach of the American labor movement for the past 200 years.
That approach, however, has begun to change. It’s not because unions think collective bargaining is a bad idea but because workers can’t form unions any more — not in the private sector, not at this time. There are some exceptions: Organizing continues at airlines, for instance, which are governed by different organizing rules than most industries. But employer opposition to organizing has become pervasive in the larger economy, and the penalties for employers that violate workers’ rights as they attempt to unionize are so meager that such violations have become routine. For this and a multitude of other reasons, the share of unionized workers in the private sector dropped from roughly one-third in the mid-20th century to a scant 6.6 percent last year. In consequence, the share of the nation’s economy constituted by wages has sunk to its lowest level since World War II, and U.S. median household income continues to decline.


Unions face an existential problem: If they can’t represent more than a sliver of American workers on the job, what is their mission? Are there other ways they can advance workers’ interests even if those workers aren’t their members?
These questions are anything but easy. Unions have begun to experiment with answers, even if, as the unions readily admit, they’re a poor substitute for collective bargaining. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has detailed dozens of organizers to fast-food joints in a number of cities: There have been one-day strikes of fast-food workers in New York and Chicago, and such actions are likely to spread. The goal isn’t a national contract with companies such as McDonald’s but the eventual mobilization of enough such workers in sympathetic cities and states that city councils and legislatures will feel compelled to raise the local minimum wage or set a living wage in particular sectors. This means, however, that the SEIU is helping to build an organization that won’t produce anywhere near the level of dues-derived income that unions normally accrue from collective-bargaining agreements. This new approach may not pencil out, but neither does the slow decline in membership that labor will continue experiencing unless it changes course.



The AFL-CIO has embarked on a similar — and perhaps even more radical — roll of the dice. “We’re not going to let the employer decide who our members are any longer,” federation president Richard Trumka told me in a recent interview. “We’ll decide.”
Instead of claiming as its members only the diminishing number of workers in unions whose employers have agreed to bargain, the AFL-CIO plans to open its membership rolls to Americans not covered by any such agreements. The first part of this plan is to expand its Working America program, a door-to-door canvass that has mobilized nonunion members in swing-state working-class neighborhoods to back labor-endorsed candidates in elections in the past decade. In New Mexico in recent months, Working America enrolled 112,000 residents on their doorsteps in a campaign that raised the minimum wage in Albuquerque and then in an adjacent county. But the goal of such campaigns, says Karen Nussbaum, the organization’s director, isn’t just to win a raise; it’s also “to get as many workers as we can involved in winning the raise and hope this carries over to specific workplace activism.” They aim to build a workers’ movement — even though, as with the SEIU campaign of fast-food workers, securing workplace contracts (and the kind of membership dues that sustain unions) isn’t on the horizon.

The AFL-CIO’s plans don’t end there. “We’re asking academics, we’re asking our friends in other movements, ‘What do we need to become?’ ” says Trumka. “We’ll try a whole bunch of new forms of representation. Some will work; some won’t, but we’ll be opening up the labor movement.” Forming a larger organization of unions and other progressive groups isn’t out of the question, though it would take time to pull off.
The labor movement that emerges from these reforms might resemble a latter-day version of the Knights of Labor, the workers’ organization of the 1880s that was a cross between a union federation, a working-class political vehicle (it championed the eight-hour workday) and a fraternal lodge. With working Americans unable — at least for now — to advance their interests in their workplaces, unions are looking to mobilize workers to wage those fights in other arenas. They don’t know exactly where they’re headed, but they’ve begun to make their turn.