CANDIDATE QUESTIONNAIRE
We reserve the right to publish the results of this questionnaire on our website – www.cnylabor.org
NAME: Howie Hawkins OFFICE YOU ARE SEEKING: Mayor of
1. A Project labor agreement is a comprehensive pre-hire collective bargaining agreement that establishes standardized conditions and wages for all contractors and subcontractors on a PLA covered project. PLAs offer:
Stable labor costs so you can bid without guessing.
Reliable supply of local skilled workers for the project duration.
Apprenticeship trained and certified workers.
A no-strike, no lockout commitment.
Binding procedures to settle disputes, so no work stoppages.
Management flexibility to meet special project needs.
Do you support Project Labor Agreements? Yes If not, explain why.
2. Private school vouchers and other schemes like education tax credits for K-12 private school expenses undermine public education by taking scarce public funds away from public schools that are open to the public and shifting them to private schools.
The AFL-CIO strongly supports legislation that would strengthen public education by helping states and local school districts reduce their class sizes and finance school repair, construction, and modernization projects with protection for prevailing community wages. A growing number of public schools all across the country are being forced to set up classrooms in trailers, hallways, and closets in order to accommodate their rapidly rising enrollments. One-third of all public schools also need extensive repair or replacement.
What is your view of proposals to provide for private school vouchers and/or charter schools?
I oppose both private school vouchers and charter schools. Public money should be used for public education.
What would you do to improve the state of disrepair many of our public schools are currently experiencing?
I support investing more public money to repair and modernize public schools. I support aggressively pushing the state legislature and governor to pass as soon as possible the $600 million construction program for
3. Ninety-four percent of workers say firing an employee for supporting union representation is an "unacceptable action" and 80 percent say they are aware that such actions are against the law. Nevertheless, employers illegally fire union supports in 31 percent of organizing campaigns and many use other tactics to thwart workers' efforts to form unions.
A recent report by Human Rights Watch shows that existing laws are too lax and unenforced to prevent employer attacks on workers' rights. For instance, while employers can prevent unions from contacting workers at their work places to discuss the advantages of union membership, they are free to deluge workers with anti-union messages.
Do you believe employers should be held accountable for their anti-union activities?
Yes.
If yes, what actions should be taken against companies that violate workers' rights to organize?
They should be barred from receiving municipal contracts and economic development benefits.
How could labor laws be improved to guarantee workers' right to organize?
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Repeal anti-work Taft-Hartley Amendments
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Card check recognition of union bargaining status
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Establish the right of new union members to have a first contract submitted to binding arbitration at the request of the union.
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Full collective bargaining rights for all local, state, and federal workers.
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Repeal the Hatch Act so public employers have full political rights.
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Amend Fair Labor Relations Act to include agricultural and other excluded workers.
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Require employers who purchase or merge with other companies to honor all existing collective bargaining agreements and contracts.
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Stop all use of prison labor in the
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Litigation and legislation to fight for using the First and Thirteenth Amendments to the US Constitution to establish the rights of workers to free speech, assembly, and association on as well as off their employers' premises.
4. While the economy has been growing, this growth has been accompanied by a sluggish job market that seems to provide too few with a rising standard of living or greater economic security. Economists have attributed this unique predicament to several factors, including corporate downsizing, global competition, the introduction of labor saving technologies, and a pattern of increasingly large rewards to more highly skilled employees. Indeed, a recent study found that most Americans today are worse off than they were before the 1989-1991 recession.
Many northeast communities have lured businesses or encouraged them to stay through tax incentives. However, these incentives have not prevented those companies from downsizing the jobs of those very same taxpayers who offered the tax breaks in the first place.
Should companies be able to accept such tax breaks only to downsize thereafter?
No.
How would you correct this apparent inequity?
1.
Tie economic incentives to performance goals, such as jobs created; taxes paid; affirmative action; environmental standards; neutrality on union organizing; prevailing or living wages, which ever is higher. Include in the contract a clawback provision that requires repayment of the subsidy if performance goals are not met.
2.
For economic development, rely less on corporate welfare for absentee-owned corporations and more on public investment in social ownership (municipal, cooperative, and private where voting shares are restricted to residents, like the
5.
An honest day's work should be rewarded with an honest day's pay. That's what a
Living wage ordinances have been enacted in 80 localities across the nation and have been passed in
A living wage ordinance requires employers to pay wages that are above federal or state minimum wage levels. Only a specific set of workers are covered by living wage ordinances, usually those employed by businesses that have a contract with a city or county government or those who receive economic development subsidies from the locality. The rationale behind the ordinances is that city and county governments should not contract with or subsidize employers who pay poverty-level wages.
The living wage level is usually the wage a full-time worker would need to earn to support a family above the federal poverty line, ranging from 100% to 130% of the poverty measurement. The wage rates specified by living wage ordinances range from a low of $6.25 in Milwaukee to a high of $10.75 in San Jose ( A wage of $8.96 an hour with health benefits is recommended for Syracuse, NY.).
Living wage ordinances provide much needed raises for low-income workers. Wages for the bottom 10% of wage earners fell by 9.3% between 1979 and 1999. The number of jobs where wages were below what a worker would need to support a family of four above the poverty line also grew between 1979 and 1999. In 1999, 26.8% of the workforce earned poverty-level wages, an increase from 23.7% in 1979.
Can you provide a good reason why you would not support legislation that requires a living wage for workers? Please include your position on a living wage for Syracuse-area workers.
I first called for a living wage ordinance in
The living wage should cover private and public workers. As FDR put it in his “Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act
" no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
If President Roosevelt could call for a living wage in depths of the Depression, there is no reason why we can't provide it today when our output per capita is several times what it was in 1933.
6.
"Down-waging" has become a standard practice by highly profitable companies who
Reduced wages and benefits negatively impacts on families' ability to afford adequate health care. Forty-three million Americans do not have health insurance and another million lose it each month.
And, while many parents believe college costs will be the biggest expense they face for their children, in fact many will spend more in a year on quality child care than on public college tuition, according to a new Children's Defense Fund (CDF) report.
The AFL-CIO supports guaranteed high-quality child-care, health care, job education and training. What steps can elected officials take to ensure that these benefits are available to all Americans?
The best way to provide high-quality child care, health care, education, and job training is through public funding through progressive wealth and income taxes, centrally collected at the state and federal levels and allocated to democratic, local administrative bodies on a per capita basis (with some simple adjustments to bring poor communities up to standard).
What a local elected official can do to help lay the basis for a revitalization of the public sector in these areas through progressive local taxes and public investment is to stop repeating the idiotic mantras of market fundamentalism that say private industry is more efficient than government in all things. That is obviously not the case in such areas as health care and power utilities and local public officials should recognize that. Then they have some legitimate ground to stand on in helping to build public support and pressure on state and federal officials to tax progressively and allocate the revenues to social needs.
Specifically in these areas, I support:
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High-quality child care for all on the model of a universal Head Start program
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National health insurance through a single public payer
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Free public education through the college and graduate levels, including post-secondary job training
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Jobs for all through public jobs meeting community needs
7.
Those who advocate the privatization of government services seek a significant
Studies conducted by
Instead, privatization of government services has been shown to
·diminish the access to public services
·reduce employee morale, productivity and turnover
·exploit part-time workers through low wages and benefits
·increase discrimination against minorities
·cause the loss of government sovereignty
·weakens constitutional rights (e.g., whistle blowing, ethical conduct)
·reduce quality of services
·increase corruption, bribery and kick-backs
·lose accountability for public values and services.
Do you support privatizing public services? Please explain your answer.
No. As I explained in the answer to question 6, this whole privatization kick is based on the dogma of market fundamentalism, not real world experience. Rather than privatizing public services, I support socializing more of them in Syracuse, including the electric and gas utility, cable TV (the current Time-Warner franchise contract expires in 2007), and creating a municipal bank to serve as a yardstick for all banks in Syracuse in terms of community reinvestment and financing home ownership and improvement and local businesses on a nondiscriminatory basis. The municipal bank should also have a business planning arm that socializes the economic development process in
8.
As an elected official, how would you ensure that the voice of labor and community-based agencies are recognized on decision-making bodies such as the Industrial Development Authority?
The IDA board should be elected by the public, like the school board. Pending the changes in state law that would require, I would fight to make sure unions and community-based organizations get seats that the City of
SIGNED: ____________ DATE: