WHAT IS YOUR PURCHASING POWER?

AFT Public Employees affiliates have a new lobbying and negotiations tool: state cost-of-living measures developed by Workplace Economics Inc. The measures complement the AFT Public Employees annual compensation survey. At press time, the 2004 survey was to be released in early September.

The cost-of-living indexes will let affiliates determine the purchasing power of their members’ salaries compared to those of public employees in other states, says Stan Wisniewski, president of Workplace Economics, noting that no such measures are produced at either the state or federal levels.

2004 COLLECTIVE BARGAINING STATS

Forty percent or 6.9 million federal, state and local government employees in the United States do not have the right to negotiate wages, hours or employment terms, according to the 2004 survey of trade union rights conducted by the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

“Union-busting is big business [in the United States], where use of union-busting consultants by employers is common practice,” according to the ICFTU. To review the survey, visit www.icftu.org.

THE R&D MYTH DECONSTRUCTED

Pharmaceutical companies—and the Bush administration—maintain that research and development drive the cost of drugs in America. But Marcia Angell, a senior lecturer at Harvard University’s department of social medicine, dispels that myth in “The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.”

Angell asserts that government and academic research labs often develop the drugs marketed by pharmaceutical companies. Laws passed in the 1980s enable universities and other taxpayer-supported institutions to patent discoveries and license them to drug companies for production and sales. “Instead of being a free market success story,” Angell writes that the pharmaceutical industry “lives off government-funded research and monopoly rights.”

OFFSHORE CONTRACTORS TARGET STATE WORK

Eighteen offshore outsourcing firms are aggressively pursuing state government contract work, according to a report released in July by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First.

Of the 18 firms in “Your Tax Dollars at Work … Offshore,” 11 are on Connecticut’s state vendor list and five are on Montana’s vendor list. Altogether, the report lists 30 states with connections to at least one of the 18 firms.

The estimated value of state contracts with these 18 firms is about $75 million. But the total amount of state contract offshoring “cannot be estimated because most state governments do not know where their contracted-out service work is performed,” the report notes.

The study is the first national analysis of offshore outsourcing of state government work. Good Jobs First has the report posted on its Web site at www.gjf.org.