e-Team Report, Oct. 1, 2012

Mitt Romney on Tape

In the same secretly recorded video as Mitt Romney called nearly half of all Americans freeloaders who do not “take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” he also took an extreme position on federal employees and labor unions.

At the $50,000-a-head fundraiser, a Romney bemoaned his inability, if elected president, to fire as many federal employees as he’d like.  His exact words regarding firing federal employees: “I wish we weren’t unionized so we could go a lot deeper than you’re actually allowed to go.”

To read more about Mitt Romney’s recently uncovered desire to clean house of federal workers, please click here.  

Prefund Mandate & Postal Reform

The prefund mandate, a congressionally-created weight on the back of the Postal Service, continues to wreak havoc on the Postal Service’s finances.  Yesterday, the Postal Service was once again unable to make another $5.6 billion dollar prefund payment to the U.S. Treasury.

House Republican leadership expects that they won’t go for full postal reform, but instead do some smaller adjustments in a possible lame duck session of Congress after the elections.  The unwillingness of House Republican leaders, such as Rep. Darrell Issa and Speaker John Boehner, to take up critical postal reforms is just one of many reasons that APWU President Cliff Guffey has called upon APWU members to elect new leadership to the House on November 6th.

To read more about the missed prefund payment, please click here.  To read about Issa's plans for "postal reform," please click here.

Friends and Neighbors

Workers’ Voice, the political action arm of the AFL-CIO, has introduced a new online tool ahead of the November elections to help working families take charge in the political process.  

The tool, called “Friends and Neighbors,” is both a phone-banking and e-mailing tool that works best when you sign-in using Facebook. With your permission, the tool will match your Facebook friends with voter registration records, and create a call-list for you to contact friends and neighbors to talk about what’s at stake in the 2012 elections. The tool provides a sample script for talking about the election, and allows you to record responses that can be used to help turn out the vote in November. If you don’t have a Facebook account, you can still use Friends and Neighbors by registering with the Friends and Neighbors website.

To learn more or to try out Friends and Neighbors, please click here.

NFL

The ongoing lockout of referees by the National Football Association and the league’s unwillingness to settle on a collectively bargained agreement with the refs serves as an important reminder: union workers mean quality.

While the union refs are sidelined, the replacement refs have been making a real mess of things, from missing penalties to awarding too many timeouts.  Last week’s Monday Night Football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Seattle Seahawks marked an embarrassing new low for the NFL, when their replacement refs were apparently unable to distinguish between a game-winning touchdown and an interception.

Things have gotten so bad with the replacement refs that one of the greatest foes of organized labor, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, called for the NFL to end their lockout of the union referees and get them back on the job.

To read more about Scott Walker’s newfound support for union workers, please click here.