Showing posts with label workers rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label workers rights. Show all posts

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Approaching the Twilight of the Labor Movement

We're Sunk
by DAVID MACARAY


Private sector union membership in the U.S. stands at about 7-percent, meaning that 93-percent of all private sector jobs in this country are non-union, which makes those accusations of unions of being “too powerful” even more ridiculous and hysterical than they already were. (Not to resort to one of those tiresome Nazi analogies, but didn’t Hitler use the Big Lie to great effect?)

Yet, even with these depressingly low membership numbers, if America’s non-union workers rooted for unions to succeed, and aspired to join a union themselves, it would mean, at least in theory, that the labor movement was alive and well and had a decent chance of succeeding.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Alas, many (too many) non-union workers not only don’t admire or respect labor unions, they hate them. They envy them. They fear them. They resent them. It’s as if America’s corporate masters had gathered together all the underpaid, under-benefited non-union workers and done some hideous Manchurian Candidate brain-washing number on them, convincing them they could trust the profit-motive more than they could trust a workers alliance.

As a college student, I worked part-time as a breakfast cook. I’m not exaggerating when I say that, back in those days, it was the dream of every cook to get a job in a union manufacturing plant. That was their life goal. These guys didn’t dream of being millionaires or lottery winners or entrepreneurs; they dreamed of working in an industrial setting where the wages, benefits, and working conditions were first-rate.

Which is why it’s such a stunning disappointment to see so much antipathy directed toward unions today. One of the main complaints you hear is that workers shouldn’t be forced to join a union or forced to pay dues. That objection has always puzzled me. You hire into a union shop because the wages and benefits are roughly 15-percent better than non-union facilities, and yet you balk at having to embrace the very organization that made those wages and benefits possible?

In an odd way, the resentment at being “forced” to join a union (despite the obvious advantages) reminds me of the South’s resistance to desegregation. Southerners wouldn’t accept the fact that the federal government could tell a restaurant in Alabama that it no longer had the right to choose whom it could and couldn’t serve. Even though this was private property, your “Whites Only” signs had to come down. It was a concept people couldn’t absorb. Perhaps that same mind-set applies to union membership.

This classic labor vs. management adversarial relationship has been in place in the U.S. ever since the mid-19th century, and has existed in Europe far longer. Because everything and everyone—the Congress, the media, the police, the banks, the city fathers—were arrayed against the unions, it was a constant struggle, and any progress labor made came at a steep price.

But the one enduring resource unions could always count on—the one built-in advantage they had—was the support of working men and women. Because workers felt they were all pretty much in the same boat, this was truly an all-encompassing “labor movement.” Moreover, it was this grassroots, across-the-board solidarity that management feared the most because they had no way of combating it, other than by giving workers a larger slice of the pie.

Which is what makes the current anti-unionism so disturbing. Despite statistics clearly showing that the middle-class is losing more ground every year, the average worker, for whatever reason, continues to place more faith in the generosity and infallibility of the so-called “free market” than he does in the only lobbying organization working people have ever had.

If the support of decent, hard-working men and women continues to evaporate, it means we’re sunk. It means we’re more or less finished. It means Corporationism has won and the Working Majority has lost. And who knows? Maybe this is a done deal. Maybe we’ve already crossed that dreadful threshold.

Friday, March 30, 2012

If Big Labor Would But Fight, Millions Would Join Them on the Ramparts

Friday, March 30, 2012 by Common Dreams
An open letter to Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO
by Ralph Nader


Dear Mr. Trumka,

You have come to your leadership position of our country’s labor federation of unions with 13 million members the hard way. Starting by working in the coal mines, then becoming a lawyer, heading the United Mine Workers, then becoming the Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO before assuming your present position in 2009, who can pull rank on you in the formal labor movement?Yet, the AFL-CIO’s public leadership in three major areas has been far less effective than one would expect. I am referring to your less than assertive response to President Obama: 1) turning his back on raising the federal minimum wage; 2) failing to advance his card check promise to you in 2008; and 3) dropping the ball on backing long-overdue safety and health responsibilities of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

I say this with the awareness of your group’s public stands in favor of these three crucial matters to working families. But as you well know, there is a very marked difference between being on-the-record, as the AFL-CIO is, and being on-the-daily ramparts pushing these issues, as your organization is not.

Even just making a statement, however, took a back seat in your March 13, 2012 endorsement of Barack Obama for a second term as president. In what ways has Mr. Obama “moved aggressively,” as you declared, “to protect workers rights, pay, health and safety on the job?”

He has neither championed nor pressed Congress, when the Democrats were in control in 2009-2010, to give you card check which you have long-said was needed to reverse the serious decline and expand the ranks of organized labor by millions of workers (you told me this in 2004).

Second, Mr. Obama appointed an excellent head of OSHA and then betrayed OSHA – an agency that has estimated 58,000 workplace-related American deaths a year from disease and trauma! That is over 1000 people a week, every week, on the average.

Dr. David Michaels, Assistant Secretary of Labor and the head of OSHA, cannot get White House approval for issuing long-overdue standards or strengthening weak and outdated standards such as the woefully inadequate silica rule, to save American lives not threatened by terrorists, but by corporate negligence or worse. Why have you not exposed this reality in public? Has Mr. Obama, whom you have socialized with at White House viewings of the Super Bowl, ever invited you to come across Lafayette Square to discuss this serious ongoing, preventable tragedy?

Had he taken worker concerns seriously, he might have asked you why the AFL-CIO for many years, has retained at its large national headquarters so few full-time advocates on occupational health and safety? And you in turn might have asked him why his politicos are blocking Dr. Michaels and why he is content in having only $550 million for OSHA’s annual budget while the U.S. spent $675 million in 2011 paying corporate contractors to guard the overbuilt U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Are these the Obama “values” you extolled in your endorsement statement?

More dismaying is your touting Mr. Obama for aggressively protecting workers’ pay. By pushing for more NAFTA type “pull-down” trade agreements through Congress, and not moving to revise NAFTA as he promised in his 2008 presidential campaigns, he is undermining both workers’ pay and jobs. By totally abandoning his pledge made to over 30 million workers in 2008 that he would press for a $9.50/hour federal minimum wage by 2011, he left them defenseless with more debt and fewer necessities of life.

The AFL-CIO wants at the least to catch up to 1968 with an inflation-adjusted $10/hour minimum wage law. Where is the visible muscular campaign for such legislation? Keeping up with inflation for the federal minimum wage is historically supported by 70 percent of the people. That includes many Republicans and even Rick Santorum and, until his latest flip-flop, Mitt Romney. A $10 minimum wage, after years of windfall price increases and executive compensation windfalls at labor’s expense, would annually pump tens of billions of dollars into greater consumer demand by low-income families in this recessionary economy.

What is the AFL-CIO waiting for? Hundreds of non-profit organizations will follow your lead. Talk is not enough. Resources and muscular lobbying are required along with far more relevant and tough public advertisements than your members are seeing and paying for on TV these days. Enough, already, of the general feel-good mood spots on TV.

The AFL-CIO is in a deep, defensive rut when in these tough times it should be in an aroused, innovative state of high alert and aggressive action. Workers in the 1930s’ Depression were in worse shape than workers today, yet organized labor was more militant.

As someone who in earlier days had been a dig-in-your-heels labor negotiator in fights with management, what did you receive for millions of American workers in your early, blanket endorsement of Mr. Obama? No wonder he can get away with giving the trade union movement and unorganized workers the back of his hand. You have unnecessarily allowed him to believe that you have nowhere to go. This is another way of saying that the Republicans, by being worse than the bad Democrats, are holding the American labor movement hostage to the corporatist Democratic Party.

The AFL-CIO is in a deep, defensive rut when in these tough times it should be in an aroused, innovative state of high alert and aggressive action. Workers in the 1930s’ Depression were in worse shape than workers today, yet organized labor was more militant.

People inside and outside the AFL-CIO know the problems. They are: complacent bureaucratic rigidity, fractious relations between member unions over how supine they need to be to Obama and the Democrats (with their costly wars), the lack of union democracy and competitive elections both within member unions and at the AFL-CIO plus, except for a few unions like the California Nurses Association, a distinct lack of sustained fervor and money for organizing drives.

You know all this only too well. Yet, as a 14th Century Chinese philosopher once said, “to know and not to do is not to know.” Unless you shake the AFL-CIO up and reorder its priorities against the corporate state, expect another four years of an Obamabush Administration.

Sincerely,
Ralph Nader

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

WI Supreme Court clears way for collective bargaining law to take effect

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 by Wisconsin State Journal
by Ed Treleven

A Dane County judge overstepped her authority when she voided Gov. Scott Walker's measure limiting public sector collective bargaining, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday in a fractious 4-3 decision.

In a nine-page decision -- followed by about 60 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions -- the court's conservative majority said Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi "usurped the legislative power which the Wisconsin constitution grants exclusively to the Legislature" when she voided the law.

Sumi ruled that a legislative conference committee violated the state's open meetings law when it hastily met in March to amend the bill, allowing the Republican-controlled Senate to get around a boycott by Senate Democrats.

But in a stinging dissent, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson wrote that the authors of the court's order -- Justices Patience Roggensack, Annette Ziegler and Michael Gableman, along with concurring Justice David Prosser -- lacked "a reasoned, transparent analysis" and incorporate "numerous errors of law and fact."

The court's order was met with delight by the Republican majority in the state Legislature.

"We've been saying since day one that Republicans passed the budget repair bill correctly, so frankly this isn't much of a surprise," state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said. "We followed the law when the bill was passed, simple as that."

State Sen. Alberta Darling, R- River Hills, said she was "thrilled."

"We knew we hadn't done anything wrong," she said. "Today was a day of justice. Today is a day of victory."

The court, however, declined to step into the dispute over whether the March 9 conference committee meeting violated the state's open meetings law, leaving it to the Legislature to set its own rules.

"In the posting of notice that was done, the Legislature relied on its interpretation of its own rules of proceeding," the court wrote. "The court declines to review the validity of the procedure used to give notice of the joint committee on conference."

State Department of Administration Secretary Mike Huebsch said DOA "is reviewing the Supreme Court's order and will begin implementing (the law) when appropriate."

Gov. Scott Walker said the court's ruling "provides our state the opportunity to move forward together and focus on getting Wisconsin working again."

Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, D-Kenosha, said the court's decision validates secrecy by the Legislature.

"The majority of the Supreme Court is essentially saying that the legislature is above the law. It's now clear that unless the constitution is amended, the Legislature is free to ignore any laws on the books," Barca said. "By this interpretation, the constitutional right of the people to know what its Legislature is doing has been significantly minimized."

The court also said that Sumi erred by barring publication of the law by Secretary of State Douglas La Follette, and it ruled that the constitutional requirement that the doors to the houses of the Legislature be open during business were met.

When the conference committee met, the court said, the doors to the Senate and Assembly and the room where the conference committee was meeting were open to the press and to the public.

"There is no constitutional requirement that the legislature provide access to as many members of the public as wish to attend meetings of the legislature or meetings of legislative committees," the court wrote.

In his concurrence, Prosser wrote that he was "troubled" by Sumi's "apparent indifference" to established law on the open meetings question.

"The circuit court second-guessed not only four legislative leaders but also the Senate chief clerk - an attorney - when it determined that no senate or assembly rule...governed the notice requirement of the special session conference committee," Prosser wrote. "The circuit court, in effect, told the Senate chief clerk that he did not know what the Senate rule meant."

Prosser wrote that only a clear constitutional violation would justify voiding the collective bargaining law, but only after the law was properly published.

In her dissent, Abrahamson said the high court erred in taking the case through "original jurisdiction" instead of waiting for one party or the other to appeal a lower court's ruling. She singled out Prosser, whose concurrence, she wrote, "is long on rhetoric and long on story-telling that appears to have a partisan slant" and, like the court's order, "reaches unsupported conclusions."

Instead, Abrahamson said she agreed with Justice Patrick Crooks' dissent, that the case should come to the Supreme Court as part of an "orderly appellate review of the circuit court's order with a full opinion."

"Only with a reasoned, accurate analysis can a court assure the litigants and the public that a decision is made on the basis of facts and law," Abrahamson wrote, "free from a judge's personal ideology and free from external pressure by the executive or legislative branches, by partisan political parties, by public opinion or by special interest groups."

Crooks wrote that the majority reached "a hasty decision" that doesn't address important questions about the Legislature's constitutional requirements to provide public access to its hearings and the courts' role in holding it to those requirements.

"Those who would rush to judgment on these matters are essentially taking the position that getting this opinion out is more important than doing it right and getting it right," he wrote. "It is rather astonishing that the court would choose to decide such an unusual and complex case without benefit of a complete record."

Thousands Protest at Capitol Against Walker Budget, Supreme Court Ruling


by Eric Carlson 
 
Crowds of protestors who flocked to the Capitol Tuesday anticipating Assembly action on the divisive collective bargaining bill, which essentially eliminates collective bargaining for public workers, were shocked to learn the state Supreme Court had reinstated the law in a hotly contested 4-3 decision.

Speakers at a planned 5:00 rally were quick to lift the faltering spirits of the Wisconsin Democracy Movement. Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, told the crowd of thousands, “We’re going to be here every day. We didn’t pick this fight, but if it’s a fight they want, it’s a fight they’re going to get.”

Mary Bell, a middle school English teacher from Wisconsin Rapids serving as president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, urged protestors to hold Republican legislators accountable for their actions by voting in various recall elections across the state.

“This extreme agenda has to be seen for what it is and what it does to our Wisconsin values. Change begins when we stand up and speak out for what we believe in,” Bell said.

Republicans Signal Approaching Court Ruling, File Fake Candidates The 4-3 ruling reflected the sharp conservative-liberal divide that many believed would determine the outcome of the Court’s decision. In her dissent, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson attacked the implicit “partisan slant” in Justice Prosser’s concurrence and the shaky rhetorical foundation of the majority opinion.

“In hastily reaching judgment, Justice Patience D. Roggensack, Justice Annette K. Ziegler, and Justice Michael J. Gableman author an order, joined by Justice David T. Prosser, lacking a reasoned, transparent analysis and incorporating numerous errors of law and fact,” wrote Abrahamson. “This kind of order seems to open the court unnecessarily to the charge that the majority has reached a pre-determined conclusion not based on the facts and the law, which undermines the majority's ultimate decision.”

The timing of the decision surprised those who had been keeping an eye on collective bargaining proceedings. Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald announced just yesterday that comittee hearings would be held Tuesday on the collective bargaining proposal, and that his Republican caucus was prepared to vote on it irregardless of a Supreme Court decision. The hearings were delayed several times throughout the day, raising a few eyebrows at the Capitol despite Fitzgerald's categorical denial of any wrongdoing or insider information.

Some protestors did in fact speculate that not all is as it seems.

“The way they passed the budget bill initially was wrong, and the fact they did this behind closed doors is wrong,” said Sarah Fuelleman, a writer at the UW-Madison Department of Ophthalmology, adding, “I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I’m starting to become one.”

Lauren Schmidt, a 22-year-old home health care worker from Madison, didn’t mince words.
“I think its horseshit,” she said, before joining a contingent of protestors screaming and blowing vuvuzelas outside the window of Rep. Stephen Nass’s office, where the Republican lawmaker quietly ignored, and at times playfully provoked, impassioned Walkervillians.

Tuesday’s other big piece of news—that Republicans officially filed “fake Democrat” candidates in six Democratic primaries for the upcoming recall elections—didn’t come as much of a surprise. Republicans have openly admitted their intention of delaying the elections by fielding puppet candidates, but have been less forthcoming about the tactic’s collateral damage. According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation, the GOP plan would cost taxpayers upward of $428,000.

Budget Cuts Start to Hurt Teachers, steel workers, firefighters, and other union workers began their Capitol Square march at 11:00, hoisting signs that read “Recall Walker” and “RIP Democracy.” Many expressed concern that various budget provisions would leave their families reeling financially.

Stacy Farasha Rhoads, adance instructor from Milwaukee donning an all pink outfit to symbolize her opposition to proposed Planned Parenthood Cuts, worried that her two children, one of whom is autistic, would suffer from reduced funding for state-provided health services.

“I’m a single mother. I’ve got two children who are on Badgercare and I have a daughter with special needs. So all of the services that my family needs on a regular basis are under attack,” said Rhoads.

Rhoads marched in solidarity with other parents and families anticipating economic hardship, such as Chris Breihan, a part time teacher at Milwaukee Area Technical College. Proposed cuts to Family Care threaten to prevent her 21-year-old special needs son from attending an adult day services program recently recommended to him.

The mood was relaxed for most of the day, as Assembly Democrats and Republicans spent the majority of the afternoon behind closed door at party caucus meetings. At a midday press conference, Representative Peter Barca and his Democratic caucus announced their intention to offer “a couple dozen” amendments to Governor Walker’s proposed budget, as part of their effort to push back against budget cuts targeting working class families.

At the end of the rally, firefighters led protestors in a “hands around the Capitol,” ceremony. The Beatles’ “Revolution,” written in response to the anti-war protests of the late 1960s, blared from event loudspeakers as pro-union activists took their places along the square. Hand in hand, the group sang a Sconnified version of “We Shall Overcome,” signaling their intent to keep fighting back against Governor Walker’s anti-middle class agenda.

Debora Marks, a 1st grade teacher at Lindbergh elementary, vowed to keep returning to Walkerville for “as long as it takes.” The frequent trips to the Capitol haven’t, however, distracted her from what she considers her top priority.

“My job is about something far more important than Scott Walker: its about educating future generations, and that’s something teachers can not stop doing, whether the Governor wants us to or not,” said Marks.

Why the Republican War on Workers’ Rights Undermines the American Economy

Wednesday, June 15, 2011 by RobertReich.org
by Robert Reich

The battle has resumed in Wisconsin. The state supreme court has allowed Governor Scott Walker to strip bargaining rights from state workers.

Meanwhile, governors and legislators in New Hampshire and Missouri are attacking private unions, seeking to make the states so-called “open shop” where workers can get all the benefits of being union members without paying union dues. Needless to say this ploy undermines the capacity of unions to do much of anything. Other Republican governors and legislatures are following suit.

Republicans in Congress are taking aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a relatively minor rule change allowing workers to vote on whether to unionize soon after a union has been proposed, rather than allowing employers to delay the vote for years. Many employers have used the delaying tactics to retaliate against workers who try to organize, and intimidate others into rejecting a union.

This war on workers’ rights is an assault on the middle class, and it is undermining the American economy.

The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

For three decades after World War II – I call it the “Great Prosperity” – wages rose in tandem with productivity. Americans shared the gains of growth, and had enough money to buy what they produced.

That’s largely due to the role of labor unions. In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.

With the decline of unions came the stagnation of American wages. More and more of the total income and wealth of America has gone to the very top. Middle-class purchasing power depended on mothers going into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, finally, the middle class going deep into debt, using their homes as collateral.

But now all these coping mechanisms are exhausted — and we’re living with the consequence.

Some say the Great Prosperity was an anomaly. America’s major competitors lay in ruins. We had the world to ourselves. According to this view, there’s no going back.

But this view is wrong. If you want to see the same basic bargain we had then, take a look at Germany now.

Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).

What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.

How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.

That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.

Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.

The only way back toward sustained growth and prosperity in the United States is to remake the basic bargain linking pay to productivity. This would give the American middle class the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going.

Part of the answer is, as in Germany, stronger labor unions — unions strong enough to demand a fair share of the gains from productivity growth.

The current Republican assault on workers’ rights continues a thirty-year war on American workers’ wages. That long-term war has finally taken its toll on the American economy.

It’s time to fight back.

Monday, May 30, 2011

The End of Unions?

By Digby | Sourced from Hullabaloo
Posted at May 28, 2011
Here's yet more evidence of liberalism's rousing success rate in the age of the conservative movement. Harold Meyerson writes:
Many union activists viewed the 2009-10 battle for the most recent iteration of labor law reform — the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — as labor’s last stand. EFCA could never attain the magic 60-vote threshhold required to cut off a filibuster, despite the presence, at one point, of 60 Democratic senators. Given the rate at which private-sector unionization continues to fall (which in turn imperils support for public-sector unions), many of labor’s most thoughtful leaders now consider the Democrats’ inability to enact EFCA a death sentence for the American labor movement. 
“It’s over,” one of labor’s leading strategists told me this month. Indeed, since last November’s elections, half a dozen high-ranking labor leaders from a range of unions have told me they believe that private-sector unions may all but disappear within the next 10 years.
They're now trying to form a bloc of voters to pressure congress rather than organizing into a union which just seems so ... well:
The SEIU’s program — like its semi-counterpart in the AFL-CIO’s Working America program, a door-to-door canvass in white working-class neighborhoods — will surely help Democratic candidates, despite the frustrations that nearly all labor leaders feel toward the party. But, like Working America, it signals a strategic shift by American labor, whose ranks have been so reduced that it now must recruit people to a non-union, essentially non-dues-paying organization to amass the political clout that its own diminished ranks can no longer deliver. Since labor law now effectively precludes workplace representation, unions are turning to representing workers anywhere and in any capacity they can. It’s time, they’ve concluded, for the Hail Mary pass.
I suppose that might work in the shadow of Citizens United but it seems like a long shot.It does explain why the Republicans are going even more nuts than usual to enact vote suppression laws though. 

When all is said and done this whole thing may just end up being a fight for basic democracy. Can you have worker's rights without it?

Saturday, May 14, 2011

McJobs Economy/Cry for Jobs (2 articles)

Hollowing Out the Middle Class
By ANDY KROLL

Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald's was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.

It shouldn't be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald's hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.

On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald's appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "McJob" as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement."

Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward, from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs), beating economists' expectations.

Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages? Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery?

The Rise of the McWorker

The evidence points to the latter. According to a recent analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the biggest growth in private-sector job creation in the past year occurred in positions in the low-wage retail, administrative, and food service sectors of the economy. While 23% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession that followed the economic meltdown of 2008 were "low-wage" (those paying $9-$13 an hour), 49% of new jobs added in the sluggish "recovery" are in those same low-wage industries. On the other end of the spectrum, 40% of the jobs lost paid high wages ($19-$31 an hour), while a mere 14% of new jobs pay similarly high wages.

As a point of comparison, that's much worse than in the recession of 2001 after the high-tech bubble burst. Then, higher wage jobs made up almost a third of all new jobs in the first year after the crisis.

The hardest hit industries in terms of employment now are finance, manufacturing, and especially construction, which was decimated when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and has yet to recover. Meanwhile, NELP found that hiring for temporary administrative and waste-management jobs, health-care jobs, and of course those fast-food restaurants has surged.

Indeed in 2010, one in four jobs added by private employers was a temporary job, which usually provides workers with few benefits and even less job security. It's not surprising that employers would first rely on temporary hires as they regained their footing after a colossal financial crisis. But this time around, companies have taken on temp workers in far greater numbers than after previous downturns. Where 26% of hires in 2010 were temporary, the figure was 11% after the early-1990s recession and only 7% after the downturn of 2001.

As many labor economists have begun to point out, we're witnessing an increasing polarization of the U.S. economy over the past three decades. More and more, we're seeing labor growth largely at opposite ends of the skills-and-wages spectrum -- among, that is, the best and the worst kinds of jobs.

At one end of job growth, you have increasing numbers of people flipping burgers, answering telephones, engaged in child care, mopping hallways, and in other low-wage lines of work. At the other end, you have increasing numbers of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and people in high-wage "creative" careers. What's disappearing is the middle, the decent-paying jobs that helped expand the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century and that, if the present lopsided recovery is any indication, are now going the way of typewriters and landline telephones.

Because the shape of the workforce increasingly looks fat on both ends and thin in the middle, economists have begun to speak of "the barbell effect," which for those clinging to a middle-class existence in bad times means a nightmare life. For one thing, the shape of the workforce now hinders America's once vaunted upward mobility. It's the downhill slope that's largely available these days.

The barbell effect has also created staggering levels of income inequality of a sort not known since the decades before the Great Depression. From 1979 to 2007, for the middle class, average household income (after taxes) nudged upward from $44,100 to $55,300; by contrast, for the top 1%, average household income soared from $346,600 in 1979 to nearly $1.3 million in 2007. That is, super-rich families saw their earnings increase 11 times faster than middle-class families.

What's causing this polarization? An obvious culprit is technology. As MIT economist David Autor notes, the tasks of "organizing, storing, retrieving, and manipulating information" that humans once performed are now computerized. And when computers can't handle more basic clerical work, employers ship those jobs overseas where labor is cheaper and benefits nonexistent.

Another factor is education. In today's barbell economy, degrees and diplomas have never mattered more, which means that those with just a high school education increasingly find themselves locked into the low-wage end of the labor market with little hope for better. Worse yet, the pay gap between the well-educated and not-so-educated continues to widen: in 1979, the hourly wage of a typical college graduate was 1.5 times higher than that of a typical high-school graduate; by 2009, it was almost two times higher.

Considering, then, that the percentage of men ages 25 to 34 who have gone to college is actually decreasing, it's not surprising that wage inequality has gotten worse in the U.S. As Autor writes, advanced economies like ours "depend on their best-educated workers to develop and commercialize the innovative ideas that drive economic growth."

The distorting effects of the barbell economy aren't lost on ordinary Americans. In a recent Gallup poll, a majority of people agreed that the country was still in either a depression (29%) or a recession (26%). When sorted out by income, however, those making $75,000 or more a year are, not surprisingly, most likely to believe the economy is in neither a recession nor a depression, but growing. After all, they're the ones most likely to have benefited from a soaring stock market and the return to profitability of both corporate America and Wall Street. In Gallup's middle-income group, by contrast, 55% of respondents claim the economy is in trouble. They're still waiting for their recovery to arrive.

The Slow Fade of Big Labor

The big-picture economic changes described by Autor and others, however, don't tell the entire story. There's a significant political component to the hollowing out of the American labor force and the impoverishment of the middle class: the slow fade of organized labor. Since the 1950s, the clout of unions in the public and private sectors has waned, their membership has dwindled, and their political influence has weakened considerably. Long gone are the days when powerful union bosses -- the AFL-CIO's George Meany or the UAW's Walter Reuther -- had the ear of just about any president.

As Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has written, in the 1960s and 1970s a rift developed between big labor and the Democratic Party. Unions recoiled in disgust at what they perceived to be the "motley collection of shaggy kids, newly assertive women, and goo-goo academics" who had begun to supplant organized labor in the Party. In 1972, the influential AFL-CIO symbolically distanced itself from the Democrats by refusing to endorse their nominee for president, George McGovern.

All the while, big business was mobilizing, banding together to form massive advocacy groups such as the Business Roundtable and shaping the staid U.S. Chamber of Commerce into a ferocious lobbying machine. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party drifted rightward and toward an increasingly powerful and financially focused business community, creating the Democratic Leadership Council, an olive branch of sorts to corporate America. "It's not that the working class [had] abandoned Democrats," Drum wrote. "It's just the opposite: The Democratic Party [had] largely abandoned the working class."

The GOP, of course, has a long history of battling organized labor, and nowhere has that been clearer than in the party's recent assault on workers' rights. Swept in by a tide of Republican support in 2010, new GOP majorities in state legislatures from Wisconsin to Tennessee to New Hampshire have introduced bills meant to roll back decades' worth of collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, the last bastion of organized labor still standing (somewhat) strong.

The political calculus behind the war on public-sector unions is obvious: kneecap them and you knock out a major pillar of support for the Democratic Party. In the 2010 midterm elections, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent nearly $90 million on TV ads, phone banking, mailings, and other support for Democratic candidates. The anti-union legislation being pushed by Republicans would inflict serious damage on AFSCME and other public-sector unions by making it harder for them to retain members and weakening their clout at the bargaining table.

And as shown by the latest state to join the anti-union fray, it's not just Republicans chipping away at workers' rights anymore. In Massachusetts, a staunchly liberal state, the Democratic-led State Assembly recently voted to curb collective bargaining rights on heath-care benefits for teachers, firefighters, and a host of other public-sector employees.

Bargaining-table clout is crucial for unions, since it directly affects the wages their members take home every month. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union workers pocket on average $200 more per week than their non-union counterparts, a 28% percent difference. The benefits of union representation are even greater for women and people of color: women in unions make 34% more than their non-unionized counterparts, and Latino workers nearly 51% more.

In other words, at precisely the moment when middle-class workers need strong bargaining rights so they can fight to preserve a living wage in a barbell economy, unions around the country face the grim prospect of losing those rights.

All of which raises the questions: Is there any way to revive the American middle class and reshape income distribution in our barbell nation? Or will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped McEconomy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between?

++++++++++++++

An Affirmation of Labor's Subordination to Capital
By GEOFFREY McDONALD

The crisis is now in its fourth year, and everyone agrees that it's all about one thing: jobs. First the politicians: Obama has declared that jobs will be his number one priority for the rest of his term. That is the decisive electoral issue; it's the standard according to which people should judge the government's performance. Economic experts of all stripes debate the effectiveness of the two stimulus packages in terms of job creation and offer various competing models for reducing unemployment. And then there are the main players in the economy, the businessmen who always complain about the difficulties they face in their efforts to create jobs: tight credit, tax burdens, overly regulated labor markets, and the new health care reform law, implying that their private interest in the use of wage labor is a service to the people. And finally the majority of the population for whom, of course, everything revolves around their only source of income: while most workers worry quietly about losing their jobs or about their prospects for finding one, others have gone out on the streets with signs reading, "save our jobs!" appealing to the government to do everything it can to save their employers.

In short, all sides seem to agree that employment is the yardstick for measuring the health of the economy and the well-being of the population. It is the overriding goal to which everyone is, or should be, dedicated. That is something everyone takes for granted, even (and perhaps especially) the left, who criticize government, business, and the overall spirit of "neoliberalism" for the failure and/or lack of efforts to create jobs. As if jobs are not what they really are: a means of profit for the capitalists, a place of exploitation and therefore drudgery for the workers.

That's why I want to step back for a moment and question this seemingly self-evident truism. I will argue that what critics of capitalism need to point out today is that the cry for jobs is not at all self-evident, but absurd and brutal. And that is not only true when workers say "American jobs for American workers!" and other xenophobic slogans. It is more fundamental than that: a society in which work is the ultimate need and desire of workers is one that is hostile to workers. All too many Marxists chime in with this call for work. As Marx once wrote, "to be a productive labourer [in capitalism] is ... not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." This basic insight is crucial, and it is irreconcilable with a cry for jobs. So I am going to develop this insight a bit more, and hope it will be taken more seriously.

First point: Work is not a human need

"The American people need work." That is a phrase that everybody takes for granted, especially in times of high unemployment. In fact, it doesn't get any more absurd. Nobody needs work. What people need are the products of work. Work is necessary toil for producing useful things. Work is a means to an end and not an end in itself. So if the necessities are produced in less time and there is less work to be done, then everyone is happy, not worried.

But in capitalism, things are apparently not that simple. Here, there is a shortage of work – not of goods. Nobody is concerned about or claims that there is a shortage of goods. And yet people are poor and getting poorer because of a shortage of work to produce more goods. That is the first, best and most simple proof that in capitalism the purpose of work is not to satisfy people's needs. Apparently, it serves a different purpose – and everybody, especially those here in this audience, knows what that purpose is: profit.

For profit there can never be enough work. The more the better. Could there be a better indicator of the antagonism between the purpose of work and those who have to do that work? And yet, because profit is the purpose of work, any work that is not useful for profit doesn't get done. So the livelihoods of those whose work isn't useful for profit are superfluous. This is yet another indicator of how little work in this society is a means for the people.

The truth is that people depend on work because they need the wages work pays. Otherwise, they remain excluded from the goods that exist in abundance, but that are the private property of those that have these goods produced for the sake of their profit.

So the brutality of this society does not begin when people need work and can't find any; it begins when they have this need for work in the first place. All the problems they have finding work are a guaranteed result of this absurd need for work — and always more work.

Second point: Workers can't create any jobs

Workers might be able to work, they might say they want to work, and in capitalism they certainly have to work — but they are unable to work on their own power, on the basis of their own need for goods. After all, the means of production are the private property of someone else. Workers are mere labor power, a mere possibility of employment. They are completely powerless to turn this possibility into a reality. They can't just decide they will work and then go do it — that's why they demand work, because they are dependent on somebody else giving it to them. Clearly, work isn't their means; it's not something they can control. In order to perform the work they need to do for their own livelihood, they have to prove useful for a different interest, that of the capitalist.

The capitalist, as the owner of the means of production, has the freedom to decide whether work is done, and thus whether workers who need work can earn a livelihood. So the only thing the workers can do is to demand, or better, plead for work. In short, people can live only if their labor is useful for profit. The reason for this perverse "need" to find work is their subordination to the interests of capital and its accumulation. Marx's explanation of class society, his condemnation of capitalism, can be summed up in this strange need: Workers are excluded from the means of production, which exist as private property, and thus find themselves in the dire predicament of needing work, needing to sell the only thing they own in order to survive: their own labor power.

Third point: It is harmful to cry for jobs!

If anyone still needs more proof of how little work is the means of the workers, then take a look at how the work that is done is organized and the criterion according to which that work gets paid. Not only are most people dependent on their labor-power being useful for profit in order to live, the usefulness of their labor-power for profit consists in their working as much as possible and earning as little as possible. That's because their work is the source of profit, and because their pay is a deduction from profit. When a business wants work, it wants as much of it as possible and it wants to pay as little as possible for it so that its interest, the difference between cost and profit, is as large as possible. Because it is about profit, workers are costs — an entry on the balance sheet no different than other costs, like energy or machines, so they are squeezed for as much work as possible. So a worker can never say, "now I have a job, I'm ok" — he ruins himself at work and still has a hard time making ends meet.

So a job is an inadequate means of subsistence — to say the least! And it is not only an inadequate means for a livelihood, but when people have a job it restricts them and harms them. The very way they earn a livelihood is a threat to their health and well-being. The need for jobs expresses an ugly truth about capitalism: people need exploitation in order to live; they are compelled to be interested in making themselves useful for economic interests that succeed at their expense. To say people need jobs is to show how dependent they are. This is an indictment of capitalism — the subordinate position that people are forced into and the role they play in it.

So the call for jobs is never addressed to workers. How could it be? Workers don't have any control over jobs; jobs are not their means. So it is appropriate that the call for jobs is always addressed to business and the state. After all, they are the activists and profiteers of work in this society. Which brings me to my fourth point:

Fourth point: Jobs are in the interest of the state and business

On the one hand, when politicians say that job creation is their number one priority, and when businesses talk about their desire to create jobs and the difficulties they have doing so, they are being dishonest. Jobs are not the goal, profit is their goal. On the other hand, politicians and businessmen might be dishonest, but they have a good reason to call for jobs. That's precisely what their interest is in jobs: other people's labor is the source of capitalists' enrichment, and the source of the growth that the state is interested in. In that sense, they really are interested in creating jobs. They say it is difficult to create jobs, but what they really mean is that it is difficult to create the conditions for profitable jobs. That is the measure of whether capitalists are producing wealth that counts.

So how do governments and businesses go about improving the conditions for more jobs? Logically, they do this by improving conditions for business. And that involves, above all, increasing the profitability of labor. There are plenty of methods for doing so, but essentially it comes down to having people work longer hours for less pay and with greater flexibility and insecurity. That also demonstrates how jobs aren't a means for people's livelihoods, but the means by which capital enriches itself at the cost of those who perform labor.

So for politicians and capitalists, it makes sense to call for jobs because jobs are the source of their wealth and power. But leftists should not join this call, because (again) jobs means being extorted. If leftists call for jobs, they are not addressing workers; after all, that is not something that workers can decide on. All they can do is make their exploitation more attractive. And even then, they are still powerless to create any jobs. Who they do address, whether they like it or not, is business and the state – those who benefit from other people's exploited labor and also create unemployment in the pursuit of their interest in profit.

Fifth point: Leftist wishful thinking

Of course, when those on the left call for job creation, they don't have in mind the profits of capital and the power of the state. They don't say "get rid of unions" and "no taxes," but "prevent outsourcing" and "tax the rich and use the money for schools and health care." Green Jobs initiatives are particularly popular right now. But here it is noticeable that in capitalism even socially desirable things are not produced if there is no prospect of profit. And these projects are realized only and insofar as the state considers them necessary for capitalist society and they are financed by the society as a whole. This is something that needs to be criticized instead of asking whether the state could or should do something different than what it always does. Leftists have to explain the interests and systemic purposes at work and how subordinate the workers' interests are to those of capital and the state, rather than seeking to reconcile these interests. This never works in capitalism, because this society's purpose is the accumulation of capital rather than taking care of people's needs. And if the state has to step in to create new industries, like with a Green Jobs initiative, it is naïve to think things will turn out any different, because what the state will be fostering is new fields of business opportunities, and nobody should be surprised by what this will look like for workers — it will mean low wages, long hours and bad conditions.

So back to the core of my topic:

What is so harmful about the call for jobs is that by calling for jobs, leftists affirm the dependency of the workers on, and their subordination to, the profits of capital. And this affirmation isn't just an implicit theoretical act; it's not just the premise of the call for jobs. Thats why, when it comes to practice, one solution is prominent and the call for jobs always ends up in disappointment and the complaint that exploitation increases and the workers are worse off. That's something that unions and especially their members have been experiencing all over the world. In capitalism, the only way to fight for jobs is to accept and offer sacrifices on the part of those who need jobs, on the part of the workers.

In summary: It is a mistake to think that a job is something good because losing a job is something bad. Workers end up offering themselves at reduced, cheaper prices, and begging for jobs undermines the very reason they go to work in the first place — to get a paycheck. Instead, not only should workers "take a serious look" at their position in this system of exploitation, but a proper critique of capitalism involves telling them about that position instead of affirming it in the call for jobs.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Workers Against the Bosses’ Economy

by David D'Amato on Mar 14, 2011
Detailing “the blowback from Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s union-busting crusade,” The Nation’s Mike Elk commented on a campaign to boycott one among the governor’s chief supporters. Elk notes that Wisconsin workers, led by a group of local unions, are “threaten[ing] to pull their money from M&I Bank unless it denounces Scwott Walker’s attack on workers’ rights.”

As part of the plinth on which his political career stands, the Bank’s execs have lavished contributions on Walker, providing a generous well from which he’s been able to draw. But the Bank’s union clientele, estimated to have upwards of $1 billion in accounts at M&I, is flexing its own muscle in an attempt to send a clear message of disapproval at M&I’s political alliances.

Those alliances — which paid dividends when the Bank collected $1.7 billion in bailout money back in 2008 — provide an expository lesson in the foul interdependences that make up state capitalism, a thing quite apart from an authentic free market. The state’s banking establishment, centered on the Federal Reserve System, grew out of the desire of the big banks to create an intuition that — in the words of Murray Rothbard — “would always stand ready to bail out banks in trouble.”

The state, then, allows banks like M&I to undertake all sorts of risky, exploitative courses of action through coercively-maintained positions of privilege and an implied guarantee against failure. So the Fed cartelizes banking for the ruling class, severely limiting entry into the marketplace and destroying the disincentives to sound banking — wherein banks must actually balance their books.

Another feature attending central banking rooted in state violence is, Kevin Carson points out, the promotion of “what they consider a ‘natural’ level of unemployment.” Through its autocratic manipulation of interest rates and the money supply, elements that the market would otherwise organize through voluntary, cooperative means, the Fed aims at a “sweet spot” for employment levels; those levels must be high enough to keep workers’ expectations down (“well, I’m lucky just to have a job”) without being so high as to critically disrupt the functioning of the state capitalist system.

Because the primary interventions of the state capitalist system are so deeply embedded, those interventions closer to the surface — state action like minimum wage laws, etc. — are often more easily recognized; the mistake, so often made by well-meaning champions of the working man, is to see these more trivial interventions and take them to prove the state’s backing of labor. The state, though, born out of economic exploitation and class subjugation, has never been anything but a tool of the elite.

The idea that it can be used for good is the great illusion, the deceit through which the state makes us participants in our own enslavement to it. The bold actions of workers in Wisconsin remind of the truth, that the state never intrudes into economic life but for the interests of the powerful. Workers’ rights are an afterthought in the overall structure of the statist economy. As a voluntary means to social change, boycott represents a vital element of the way forward and out of the state’s constrained economic system.

The great majority of working people, the productive force in society, have the power if we’ll take it, and violence is not required to transform society. To torpedo the bosses’ system, nonviolent protests, strikes and boycotts are in order. Wisconsin workers are setting an example for all of us.

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Wage Theft Is Rampant in America -- Is Your Boss Ripping You off?

U.S. employers are stealing millions of dollars from their own employees -- often right out in the open, unchallenged.
By Dick Meister, AlterNet
Posted on December 28, 2010

There are lots of thieves in this country, as in any country. But no thieves anywhere are more blatant than the U.S. employers who steal millions of dollars from their own employees -- often right out in the open, unchallenged. It's called "wage theft," and it happens everywhere.

The cheating bosses don't take the money directly from their employees. No, nothing as obvious as that. The employers practice their thievery by underpaying workers, sometimes by paying them less than the legal minimum wage. Or they fail to pay employees extra for overtime work, or even force them to work for nothing before or after their regular work shifts or at other times. Some employers make illegal deductions from employee wages. And some withhold the final paycheck due employees who quit.

Such employer cheating is rampant in restaurant, retail and construction businesses, where undocumented workers make up much of the workforce. The undocumented are so vulnerable, given their illegal status, that they're particularly easy pickings for unscrupulous bosses.

The full extent of employer cheating is not known. But one study shows that in New York City alone, workers are cheated out of more than $18 million a week.

Another study, covering more than 4,000 workers in Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as New York, found that more than one-fourth of the workers had been paid less than the minimum wage. That and other employer violations cut their paychecks, which averaged about $300 a week, by more than $50.

It's not just the cheated workers who are harmed. We are all harmed, notes former Obama White House adviser Van Jones, since wage theft "keeps lawfully earned pay from being spent where it will do the most to strengthen our economy."

Under heavy pressure from immigrants' advocates and unions, New York State recently enacted an anti-wage theft law that hopefully will set a national pattern.
Beginning in April, New York employers caught shortchanging workers will have to fully reimburse them and pay a fine of up to twice that amount -- four times the previous penalty.

The previous penalties were so slight -- about one-fourth of the new penalties -- that many employers treated them simply as a cost of doing business. That obviously is the attitude of wage-cheating employers in other states, where penalties are minimal.

It's particularly important that New York's law calls for up to $10,000 in penalties for employers who fire or threaten workers who protest their underpayment. That's apparently a common practice nationwide.

The movement to enact similar laws elsewhere has been growing, most importantly in Congress, where a proposed national law has been introduced.

The Labor Department has meanwhile stepped up enforcement of the current law against wage theft, using public service announcements, a Web site and a telephone hot line to encourage workers to report employers who cheat.

The department is especially urging immigrant workers to turn in employers who are shortchanging them, and is lining up worker support groups to help with enforcement of the wage and hour laws. The Department itself has hired more than 250 new investigators to search for wage cheaters.

All of that is important, but it's not enough. We also need more tough state laws against wage cheating, or even more, the proposed national law against wage cheating.

That would not only help some of our poorest and most needy workers, as Van Jones says, it also would "increase consumer spending at a time we need it most." He says, "We should invest in bringing those cheaters to justice. It's right for the economy -- and the right thing to do."

Who but cheaters could possibly argue with that? Congress should act -- now!

Sunday, November 7, 2010

Basic Income in Times of Economic Crisis

The War Social and Working Rights
By RUBÉN M. LO VUOLO, DANIEL RAVENTÓS
and PABLO YANES

The economic crisis has not ended, but the consequences for broad sectors of the population have been evident for months: more poverty, higher unemployment, inferior working conditions, salary cuts and reduction of social security benefits. The IMF and ILO report published in September specifies that 30 million people have joined the ranks of the unemployed worldwide since the start of the crisis, almost 10% of whom are from the Kingdom of Spain. This crisis is the result of a previous growth period driven by the financialisation of capital and a marked regression in the distribution of income and wealth. In the European Union of the 15, for example, the income from labour now represents 56% of national income when just a few years ago it accounted for nearly 70%. In Latin America, even after a slight improvement in the growth of some countries over the last decade, the figures for participation in the total wage bill are well below these estimates, and the Gini indexes still show this to be the most unequal region of the planet. This rapidly growing inequality consolidates a tendency described in 2006 by one of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffet, in strikingly graphic detail:
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” 
With the crisis that exploded in 2008, some rich individuals lost some money, but formal workers and informal and precarious workers, so legion in Latin America and whose numbers are growing in southern Europe, have seen their living and working conditions deteriorate even further. The financial rescue operations started by many governments have yet again favoured the wealthiest and those who are most responsible for the crisis.

In Latin America, the crisis brought an end to a growth cycle spurred on by improvement in the terms of exchange and major macroeconomic adjustments after the frustrating experience of the policies of opening up and economic liberalisation of the nineties. The economic recovery shown by some countries in the region in recent months (such as Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay) along with that of the so-called “emerging” economies (such as China and India) recreates in some the illusion of a new stage of growth and job creation and of a positive re-alignment of the global economy. However, it would be a grave mistake to let this engender confusion about the diagnosis. Beyond the different particular situations we are faced with a global crisis which, spawned in the very core of the capitalist powers, shows the thoroughgoing contradictions and non-viability of a regime of accumulation based on devaluing the work force, job instability, massive concentration of wealth, and the commodification of nature and all social relations. This regime of accumulation has led, on the global scale, to the profound incongruity of a model of global production operating without global consumption, and the incompatibility between the growth model hitherto applied and preservation of the environment and reproduction of life itself.

This is the first global overproduction crisis and the spectre of deflation is looming, along with the tendency for long-term stagnation. In the best of cases, sporadic bursts of recovery of economic growth will not be sufficient to generate employment in the quantity and quality required to guarantee the wellbeing of the majority of the population. In other words, we may be trapped in a long-lasting economic cycle dominated by hard crises and soft recoveries.

Responsibility for the crisis is clearly attributable to the capital – especially financial capital – bosses, including owners, administrators and government officials in charge of control and regulation. Yet, these selfsame guilty parties are launching a new offensive against work and social rights. Thus, in the bosom of the European Union, so-called “austerity measures” are being launched, measures that mean, in practical terms, adjusting consumption and loss of social and labour benefits for workers and the broad-based sectors.

These adjustment recipes were frequently applied in Latin America in recent decades, and their consequences have been damaging to the wellbeing of the most vulnerable population and for the stability of economic, political and social systems. Yet they are now being adopted in many European countries with the main objective of rescuing banks and patching up financial speculation mechanisms in the hope of re-launching a new cycle of growth spearheaded by finance. To paraphrase the clear depiction of the situation offered on 10 May by a British banker on 10 May at the latest meeting of the ECOFIN, the ECB and the IMF, it is easier to sell the plan saying it will save Greece, Spain and Portugal, than to confess that first of all it must save and help the banks. The budgetary austerity plans set underway to ease public deficits are, in effect, a wholesale attack on the living and working conditions of the working classes and a broadside against the Welfare State regimes that emerged after World War II. Hence, the very crisis brought about by the irresponsibility of the administrators of capital, becomes an additional pretext to justify policies that impose heavy adjustments on workers’ remuneration, affecting both direct wages derived from employment and social protection systems. The excuse of the urgent need to recover competitiveness and stimulate economic growth (or, in the European Union, the much-vaunted pretext of “saving the euro zone”) is wielded in the project of degrading the living conditions of the most vulnerable groups.

Faced with this situation, some assert that this is a temporary crisis arising from the supposed “imperfections” in financial markets and that it will be overcome with a few corrective regulatory tweaks (which are yet to appear in the required dimension). On the contrary, it is evident that this is an emergency of structural problems in the form of organisation of contemporary societies, which have been apparent for quite some time and that will foreseeably continue for a long time yet, although with short periods of recovery and economic growth. What is in crisis is the myth of permanent economic growth and quality job creation as a way of guaranteeing the economic and social integration of citizens as a whole. The current situation raises serious doubts about the ability of the regime of capitalist accumulation to offer, in any reasonable way, a horizon in which it might be materially and politically viable to expect development based on a scheme of full employment for men and women and, in consequence, that employment, or wage labour, would constitute the key, or only path of access to social rights, social mobility and the wellbeing of people.

A clear manifestation of these structural problems is that the apparent solution to the crisis is leading to a widening of the “gaps” between established rights, which citizens should enjoy in keeping with what is enshrined in constitutions and laws, and the rights they actually have. These gaps encourage hypocrisy, fear and sectarian attitudes of all kinds and are conducive to degeneration into resignation and impotence, which are then manipulable by far right groups. The democratic sovereignty of peoples is close to being definitively mocked by the interests of private groups that operate through “the market”, putting pressure on the inability of the political leadership to apply government programmes in which the public interest prevails, thereby ensuring that the rights of their constituents are effective. In the apposite words of US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his State of the Union address in 1935, “[…] Americans must forswear that conception of the acquisition of wealth which, through excessive profits, creates undue private power over private affairs and, to our misfortune, over public affairs as well.”

These and other elements should be reason enough to seek new organisational principles for contemporary societies. In this evermore imperative re-design of our societies, it is of paramount importance that access to social rights should cease to operate on a differentiated status to become general rights of citizenship, rights deriving from the mere fact of existing, which is to say that they should cease to be mediated, segmented, conditioned and pared-back rights, which are diminished, inter alia, by the volatile, transitory and unequal position of each person in the increasingly precarious labour market.

For all these and other reasons, we are advocates of what is known as Basic Income. This proposal, which has been championed in different geographies in recent years, already has well-organised supporters in Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Oceania. Its postulates are simple: all citizens and all people of recognised residence are entitled to a universal, unconditional monetary income integrated into a progressive taxation system. We believe that BI could be a sound basis for a structural reorganisation of public policy and are convinced that this is a good proposal in situations of economic prosperity, but even more necessary in times of economic crisis and of attacks on the living and working conditions of great sectors of the population, such as we are now witnessing. Among others, the following reasons stand out:
1) Involuntary loss of employment causes a situation of great economic and living uncertainty. Losing one's job but having a BI would make dealing with the situation less stressful. This obvious characteristic of BI is a plus in any economic situation. In a crisis, where unemployment is much more widespread and prolonged, having a BI takes on greater social importance and still more so with the growing weakness or outright non-existence of any broad and long-lasting unemployment insurance. It is worth noting that if labour relations were dominated for many years by prolonged employment and cyclical or frictional unemployment, what is transitory and unstable today is employment itself (and especially quality employment).

2) If within a framework where undermining of the organisational instruments and representation of the working class is proceeding apace, we add the negative impact of unemployment, the precariousness of work and the adjustments being made in Welfare States, the result is that there are more and more workers being left without union representation. BI could play an important role in re-creating collective interest within the working class and in the struggles of those who are trying to resist, both those with organised representation and those who are left to struggle alone. This would enable consolidation of the worker’s identity in a period of growing labour fragmentation, making possible new forms of association and representation for the increasingly divided interests of the working class. In these times of crisis one can see perfectly well that BI is not an alternative substituting for salary and neither does it weaken the defence of working class interests, but rather it is an instrument that strengthens the position of the entire workforce, both on the job itself and in the search for employment. BI would allow for unification of the working class around a universal right that would benefit a considerable number of citizens, regardless of their specific occupation, while at the same time offering greater leeway for resistance against adjustments to working conditions or to the level of employment itself. In addition, BI would become, in the case of strikes, a kind of unconditional resistance fund whose effects in offering leverage for workers are easy to gauge. The availability of BI would allow them to face the labour-related conflict in a much less insecure manner since, today, depending on the length of the strike, salaries can be reduced to unsustainable levels if, as is the case for most of the working class, no other resources are available.

3) BI would also lessen the risk for people who have undertaken self-employment ventures. In this regard, BI would be more efficient than micro-credits for stimulating the creation of micro-businesses and cooperatives, as it would mean a permanent, stable income that would not generate debt (or abusive interest). In a situation of economic crisis such as the current one, BI would also be an instrument that could facilitate self-employment tasks and even cooperative organisation of its beneficiaries, while also representing a better guarantee of being able to face, if only partially, failure of small businesses.

4) One of the most notable consequences of BI would be a substantial abatement of poverty. It could even realistically raise the possibility of its complete eradication. Not only would it make it possible to remove millions of people from situations of impoverishment, but it would also constitute an additional support to avoid relapse. For the first time, this would represent an active policy against poverty with a preventive dimension, which would thus go beyond the impotence of the conditional focused monetary transfer policies that are currently being applied in Latin America and other developing countries. Some claim that these programmes are a first step in the direction of BI. Not so. While they have a positive impact of alleviating the precarious situation of want of many families in the region, these programmes (Bolsa Familia in Brazil, Oportunidades in Mexico, Familias en Acción in Colombia, Juntos in Peru, Familias solidarias in El Salvador, Asignación Universal por Hijo, in Argentina, et cetera) are opposed to the basic principles and operating rules of BI. Instead of being universal, unconditional and integrated into a progressive taxation system, they are focused and means-tested, demanding conditions in which lack of compliance is punished with loss of the benefit, and they also represent minimal outlay in a profoundly regressive fiscal system. Hence, they reinforce the strategy of conditional, focused assistance that, for decades, has characterised social policy in the region under the patronage of international proponents of structural adjustments that are today being imported to European countries.

Not every project of monetary transfers works along the same lines as BI, because BI is not just another income transfer programme. Focused and conditional assistance programmes have a positive circumstantial impact on the income of some poor families but are ineffective when it comes to removing them from poverty, while they also reinforce client-based policies that work against the development of people’s autonomy. Neither do such programmes ensure that people will not relapse into poverty and homelessness, or prevent the formation of new impoverished groups. They do not cover all those in need and, by the time some groups are selected as beneficiaries (if, indeed, they really are), the crisis will have already unleashed its violence on all this vulnerable population causing irreparable damage. So far, the economic crisis alone has given rise to five million new poor in Mexico, half of all the new poor in Latin America, while the Oportunidades programme proposes expanding its reach by only 800,000 families over a period of two years. To this is added the steady undermining of people’s dignity and autonomy when they are constantly being called on to prove their condition of poverty so that some bureaucrat of the day will deem them “worthy” of assistance.

The economic crisis has demonstrated in the clearest possible way the need to reformulate cash transfer policies along the lines of a universal, unconditional BI. The “conditional” programmes that are now being exported even to the more developed countries are not enough to respond in time and in form to the needs of the most vulnerable groups whose income is in permanent oscillation. Such programmes select the beneficiaries, which means nurturing an expensive bureaucracy that is tasked with classifying (discriminating among) potential beneficiaries who may or may not “deserve” their assistance, and part of the job is permanently scrutinising and assessing their level and conditions of living, to the point of intruding into their private lives. This programmes generate typical “poverty trap” situations because they do not seek to help people overcome the problem but rather only aspire to manage it, thereby keeping the needy population under political control. BI not only saves on unnecessary bureaucratic costs, but delivers benefits based on rights that pertain to citizens, avoiding the kinds of intermediation that turn the needy population into a political clientele. Even ECLAC has singled out the example of the pension scheme for senior citizens in Mexico City, which is universal, non-contributive and unconditional, as one of the innovative measures in Latin America for “guaranteeing a basic level of income in a sustainable manner from the fiscal point of view, and fair from an intergenerational point of view”. It is therefore of tremendous importance that promoting BI was included as one of the objectives in the programmatic document, “Carta de la Ciudad de México” (Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City).

5) A much-debated subject regarding the crisis is the need to maintain consumption by families. In fact, in the boom years, many families were sustaining levels of consumption that were well above their means thanks to the inflated prices of financial assets and credits, especially mortgages, but also consumer credits. This debt-financed consumption by families in general has worked against the poorest groups. It not only eats up any extra income but, now, a reduced labour income must be used in part to pay off the accumulated debt. BI is unquestionably a consumption stabiliser that could be fundamental in maintaining consumption during times of crisis, especially for the more vulnerable groups and, in this manner, avoiding the widening of inequality gaps. In a world like the one today, where the accumulation of vast wealth coexists with crushing poverty, the freedom of hundreds of millions of people is severely limited by the need to find some means of survival. BI would be an institutional mechanism that could guarantee to the citizenship as a whole (including accredited residents) material existence on a basic level at the very least. It is evermore evident that in complex modern societies, if they are to be democratic and fair, one’s daily bread and dignified existence should not be rights “earned with the sweat of one's brow” but rather guaranteed as rights of citizenship so that, rather than the creative and productive capabilities of people being thus impaired, they given some space to develop.
In November 2007, within the framework of the Universal Forum of the Cultures held in the city of Monterrey (Mexico), the “Universal Declaration of Emergent Human Rights” was approved. This Declaration was in fact the continuation of the one that had already been declared in Barcelona three years previously, in September 2004, also within the framework of the Universal Forum of the Cultures. Article 1.3 enshrines:
The right to a basic income or universal citizen’s income that guarantees to every human being, independently of age, gender, sexual orientation, civil or employment status, the right to live in material conditions of dignity. To this end, a regular cash payment, financed by tax reforms and covered by the state budget, and sufficient to cover his or her basic needs, is recognised as a right of citizenship of every member-resident of the society, whatever his or her other sources of income may be.
In conclusion, if there are good reasons for upholding BI in situations of economic growth, falling unemployment and encouraging tendencies in the standard social indicators, there are even more cogent arguments in its favour in a situation of crisis and of attacks on social and labour rights. It might even be said, moreover, that the impact of this crisis will be exacerbated by the absence of a commitment to proposals such as BI in the times of economic prosperity. BI would not only be an important tool for combating poverty, closing the inequality gap and advancing towards providing the guarantee of a dignified life for all people, but it would also be a powerful instrument for social and political change that would permit a reordering of social relations in favour of freedom, autonomy, respect and recognition of men and women of all conditions. A society in which nobody lacks the basic necessities is good for everyone. It is the only society worth striving for.

Freeing men and women from the scourge of hunger and need, of fear on a daily basis, of lack of time, of insecurity over the present and uncertainty about the future, means building up citizenship, broadening the spaces for social and union organisation, strengthening the capacity for political struggle of the broad-based sectors, as well as creating better conditions for citizen participation and civil activism. BI is one of the badly-needed elements that should be taken into account as a driving force for a social transformation that guarantees the right to exist for all people and takes us closer to the longed-for objective of a freer, more equal and more fraternal society.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Walmart employee forced to wear yellow vest after telling boss he’s gay

By Raw Story | Sunday, June 20th, 2010

A Las Vegas man who held a temporary job at Walmart says he was stripped of all his responsibilities and made to wear a yellow vest after telling his manager that he's gay.

Fernando Gallardo has filed a complaint with the Nevada Equal Rights Commission claiming that his boss at a Vegas-area Walmart confronted him about his sexuality, and then began treating him rudely and alienated him from co-workers after learning Gallardo was gay, reports The Advocate.

"I was completely ignored and shunned," he wrote in a complaint to the rights commission. "I had nothing to do all day but wander around the store wearing a yellow vest no one else had to wear, much like Jews had to wear a yellow star of David in Hitler's Germany."

The Advocate reports that within two months of Gallardo's forced admission, "his supervisor and two other managers stopped talking to him completely."

Gallardo, who no longer works at the Walmart location, also claims the store management attempted to "bribe" some of the other temporary workers at the location with permanent jobs in exchange for claiming that Gallardo had offered up the information about his sexual orientation voluntarily.

A Walmart spokesman, Phil Keene, said that Gallardo's yellow uniform may have been nothing unusual.

"It is my understanding that the former associate was a temporary hire while the store is under remodeling," Keene told The Advocate. "Between the 50 or so temporary associates in that store, there is a rotation through the position of 'May I Help You' associate. The several associates in this role wear a vest so customers can identify them and ask for help in finding products that may have been temporarily moved to a new spot."

However, Gallardo claims he was the only one made to wear the vest, and that he was only told to wear it after his sexual orientation became known to his superiors.

While Walmart has an official policy against discrimination, the world's largest retailer has recently been embroiled in a massive lawsuit accusing it of gender bias.

A federal court recently allowed a class-action suit to go forward against the company. Lawyers for the plaintiffs say Walmart systematically paid its female employees less than their male counterparts, and put fewer women up for promotion.

It's estimated that anywhere from 500,000 to 1.6 million women could potentially be plaintiffs in the suit. If successful, the lawsuit could force Walmart to pay billions in compensation.