Who Owns West Virginia?
The West Virginia Center On Budget and Policy released an interesting report on just who the largest corporate landowners in West Virginia are and how these patterns have been changing.
Purchase of West Virginia’s land by timber management companies is perhaps the most interesting finding by investigators for this report, researchers also found:
- The top 25 private owners own 17.6 percent of the state’s approximately 13 million private acres.
- In six counties, the top ten landowners own at least 50 percent of private land. Of the six, five are located in the southern coalfields – Wyoming, McDowell, Logan, Mingo and Boone. Wyoming County has the highest concentration of ownership of any county.
- Not one of the state’s top ten private landowners is headquartered in West Virginia.
- Many of the counties – including Harrison, Barbour, Mineral, Lincoln, and Putnam – that had high concentrations of absentee corporate ownership (over 50%) in Miller’s 1974 study did not in this analysis.
- Only three corporations that were among the state’s top ten landowners in 1974 remained on that list in 2011. If the sale of MeadWestvaco properties to Plum Creek Timber is completed, only two of the 1974 top owners will still be on the list.
- Nationally timberland management concerns control about half of the nation’s timberlands that had been managed by industrial timber companies until the 1980s.
Workers Standing Together Still Middle Class America’s Best Defense
Tim Paulson is the executive director of the San Francisco Labor Council, and his recent article in SF Gate he outlines what many in unions already know; workers standing together is the last line of defense against an ever increaing income gap caused by corporate greed.
Paulson strings together the picture faced by most working Americans, whether they acknowledge it or not. Read his article and you’ll see it doesn’t matter if you’re union or not, east coast or west, or just struggling to stay middle class.
International Union Density
Those who are against unions like to pretend that the labor movement is some homegrown wacko movement that breaks out in a few confined geographical areas of the U.S. that’s usually led by troublemakers. The truth is that the labor movement is a worldwide struggle fought by workers in almost every developed or developing country.
You can read the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report on this by clicking here.
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No Secrets With Open Secrets
Open Secrets is a website dedicated to exposing the elephant in the room in American politics: MONEY! It’s a quality site that’s been used as a research tool by news organizations in discovering who is beholding to who in the political arena. Visit it today and learn!
Weingarten Tab Added For our Members
UWUA Local 304 has added a new “Weingarten” tab to our website to inform all our members of what Weingarten Rights are and how to use them to protect themselves.
The tab is under the TOP MENUS, under NEWS, go to UWUA LOCAL 304 NEWS and look for the little arrow on the right and click to open!
