As go the unions, so goes the nation: End the assault on public sector salaries and benefits

'Nuff said...

BY DANIEL MORRIS

New York Daily News

A bad job is still a job: Lately, some hiring managers have been exploiting the desperation of the unemployed to force workers to accept this logic and the worst deals possible. Now pundits and politicians across the country are getting in on the action by claiming that public-sector employees must sacrifice more and act like private sector employees who supposedly feel blessed and thankful to get a paycheck, any paycheck.

Welcome to the new race to the bottom - a race that is doing terrible harm to many Americans. The absence of well-funded pensions, reasonable hours and decent pay in many precincts of the private sector is being used to stir up rage at the presence of those standards in the public sector. Teachers, firefighters, cops and sanitation workers are derided as privileged compared to "everyone else." They recklessly pursue financial gain and swindle taxpayers!

How absurd. I mean, really, really, absurd.

The truth is hardly tabloid material: Most public- sector workers earn a modest middle- class living and are as worried as anyone else about the economy.

But the perverse argument gaining traction is that what public-sector jobs provide - fair compensation, adequate benefits and dignified retirement options - sets the bar too high for everyone.

It's enough to rouse the labor leaders and activists of the past from the grave - people who fought for eight-hour days, weekends off and other basic employment standards now once again under attack.

We forget how recent - and still fragile - some of these victories are. Consider retirement. "Until the 1950s," New School economist Teresa Ghilarducci has written, "only the wealthy could expect to retire." Now guaranteed pension income is getting assailed as lavish, as long as its recipients are unionized employees, not CEOs with golden parachutes.

But when anti-government anger is expected to translate into lots of swing votes, attacking the public sector is a surefire electoral strategy for Republicans and Democrats. Republicans want to discredit the federal stimulus package as a special interest sop to unions, while Democrats want to look like independents who don't answer to the labor lobby.

Such posturing does nothing more than harm our prospects for national recovery. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that every 100 public sector layoffs result in around 30 private-sector layoffs, because the subsequent loss of income dampens consumer spending and thus weakens the economy.

And if public-sector workers become cheap, expendable labor, they will contribute less to the tax base and spend less, blunting private-sector job creation. A healthy public sector is just as good for the investment banker as it is for the unionized electrician.

If the march against the unions and the public sector continues, the recession could hang around like an unwelcome guest, costing businesses and government more over time through vanishing growth, productivity and demand. The ranks of the working poor will swell and public assistance rolls will expand.

Upward mobility and shared prosperity cannot be created this way. In earlier eras, a robust middle class was built and sustained not by making jobs worse for more people but by making them better: Standards improved across industries and occupations.

Rebuilding the middle class today will be difficult. But ending the plight of American families who see their livelihoods under assault must be an imperative.

The race to the bottom is a callous attempt to lower expectations for employment at a time when millions of people are counting on them to be raised. No victory worthy of the name can be achieved on those terms.

Morris, director of communications at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, is co-editor of "From Disaster to Diversity: What's Next for New York City's Economy?"

Union jobs available in Columbia

First Student is looking for bus drivers for the Columbia Public Schools (http://www.firststudentinc.com/careers).  Drivers are represented by the Teamsters Local 833.  If you know someone who needs a part-time job with union representation, tell them about this one.

Study: Unions Make Even Nonmembers Happier

Now there is an academic study that confirms what we already knew.  

(Sept. 22) -- The American worker has never been more dissatisfied with his job. Meanwhile, union membership continues its 50-year decline. Coincidence? Benjamin Radcliff thinks not.

He's a professor of political science at Notre Dame and the co-author of a new study about unions in 14 nations. His research shows that people who live in countries thick with union membership are a happier lot -- regardless of whether they're in a union or not. "There's a direct effect of being a member and sort of an indirect effect," Radcliff tells AOL News. 

Damian Dovarganes, AP

Thousands of union workers from across the U.S. joined community and labor leaders Aug. 13 for a labor rally for good jobs in California and nationwide.

The study crunched life-satisfaction data from several European countries, as well as Japan, Australia and the U.S. As its write-up notes, happiness with one's life increasingly means happiness at work, and so Radcliff and his colleagues looked to see what brings nine-to-fivers joy. 

In a (oversimplified) word: unions. For those who are members, there are all the obvious gains, such as job security, decent salaries, decent hours, decent benefits. But for workers who aren't, there is Radcliff's indirect effect: "People who have union jobs like their jobs better," Radcliff tells AOL News. "And that puts pressure on other employers to extend the same benefits and wages to compete with the union shops." 

As if to pre-empt the complaints of the good people at the Cato Institute, the study also says that the subset of union members making the highest salaries don't attribute their happiness to unions. It's the lower-paid people who find contentment through organized labor. 
Also, happiness itself is only somewhat quantifiable, even viewed through the prism of work, Radcliff says. To take the best measure of it, one needs to consider the unemployment rate, the level of trust among countrymen, even church attendance.

But, on the whole, there is "a causal relationship" between happiness and the density of unions, Radcliff says. Denmark ranks near the top in both categories. The United States, by contrast, ranks in the bottom third for happiness among the 14 countries studied. "There's a reason for that," Radcliff says.

Labor Got It Right--Who Could Have Known?

This is part of a post by Dave Johnson of the Campaign for America's Future.  Nice.

Add organized labor to the list of those who got it right, time after time.

Organized labor was right about the 40-hour workweek.
They were right about the middle class.
They were right about the weekend.
They were right about paid vacations.
They were right about paid holidays.
They were right about paid sick leave.
They were right about providing good, secure retirement plans for everyone.
They were right about providing unemployment benefits to tide people over.
They were right about providing maternity leave, child care and family leave for families.
They were right that trade agreements like NAFTA and letting China into the WTO would lead to massive trade deficits and job losses.
They were right about workplace and consumer safety.
They were right about keeping manufacturing in America.
They were right about fighting discrimination in the workplace.
They were right about raising the minimum wage and the effect that low-wage policies would have on the economy.
They were right about the effect of excessive CEO pay on the economy.
They were right about the devastating effect of the Bush tax cuts.
They were right about the need to maintain and modernize our country's infrastructure.
They were right about going green.
They were right ab out the dangers of Wall Street's financialization of the economy.
They were right about providing good health care to everyone.
They were right about strengthening, not cutting Social Security.
They were right about democratizing corporate governance.
They were right about fighting privatization.
They were right about fighting deregulation.
They were right about providing good education opportunities to everyone.
They were and are right that we need a national jobs agenda
Labor was right about people joining together instead of being on our own.

(List continues into infinity...) They were right and they continue to be right.

And unions have been fighting for these things for all of us, not just for their members.

Labor Day 2010: Puppets of the plutocrats

Just when you think the main stream media is passed out at the wheel, this appears in the Post Dispatch.  Alright.

St. Louis Post Dispatch Editorial Board

September 3, 2010

America should just go ahead and cancel Labor Day. Really.

Other than as an excuse for a picnic, what’s the point? Three hundred and sixty-four days a year, we honor plutocrats, and one Monday holiday in September is going to make up for it?

Organized labor no doubt would object. Big deal.One worker in eight belongs to a labor union. And last year, for the first time in history, more public-sector workers (500,000 more) belonged to a union than did private-sector workers.

Oh, the irony. For the second year in a row, Americans “celebrate” Labor Day with unemployment at 9.6 percent or higher. Corporate profits are 5.7 higher now than then they were in the fourth quarter of 2007, when the recession began. The number of jobs is 5.9 percent lower.

Labor — by which we mean not only organized labor but the entire working class — should just give it up. Roll over. Turn turtle. Admit it: The class war is over, and you lost. You not only lost, you collaborated.

Organized labor still may be fighting the good fight. But a lot of the working class is out there marching in the streets on behalf of the monied class, puppets of the plutocrats, angry as hell at all of the wrong people.

Oh, it wasn’t always like this. Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894 because President Grover Cleveland and Congress were frightened of labor’s power.

This was after Eugene V. Debs of the Railroad Workers Union had brought the country to its knees over thePullman car strike. Cleveland had put the strike down with the Army, probably illegally, killing 13 people in the process.

At one point Debs had 250,000 workers off the job. Labor Day, which was rushed through Congress in six days flat, became a way to pacify them.

Labor Day signaled the beginning of the end of what Mark Twain called the “Gilded Age,” when there was more disparity between rich and poor than at any time in the nation’s history, except maybe this one.

More important were the real gains that labor achieved in the next few decades: higher wages, shorter work weeks, the progressive income tax and acceptance of the fundamental concept that labor was as important as capital in the production of goods and the provision of services.

That concept is all but gone today, a victim not only of industrialization, the technological revolution and globalization, but also of shrewd, cynical and effective politics.

Working-class America got distracted by its own success. It had houses in the suburbs, 500 TV channels and cheap credit so it could go to Wal-Mart and buy all the foreign-made toys it wanted.

In the 1970s, conservative billionaires began funding think tanks to attack the forces of progressivism. The Reagan Revolution co-opted a lot of labor votes with jingoism. The late Lee Atwater perfected the use of “wedge issues” — God, guns, gays and abortion — to distract the working class from economic issues.

In the 1990s, Roger Ailes, an old Nixon and Reagan hand, helped launch the career of Rush Limbaugh and turned Fox News into an advocacy platform for the political goals of America’s billionaires. Working-class America was so busy applauding that it didn’t notice that its pockets were being picked.

Banks and big business bought control of Congress, which passed a series of tax and banking laws that fostered the largest transfer of wealth in America’s history. The money went not from the rich to poor — that would be socialistic “income redistribution.” No, it went from the working class to the rich.

Today, the Tax Policy Center, a non-partisan arm of the Brookings Institution, projects that in 2011 that the top 1 percent of all wage earners will take home 18 percent of all income. The top tenth of that 1 percent will take home 8.2 percent all by itself.

Between 1979 and 2007 (before the Big Recession) the average after-tax income of the top 1 percent of the population nearly quadrupled, from $347,000 to over $1.3 million.

Things aren’t so rosy for the middle class. Median household income dropped 2.5 percent between 1999 and 2009 in inflation-adjusted terms, the Census Bureau reports. That is, unless you live in Missouri, where median household income dropped by 14.6 percent.

Here’s one our favorite class warfare facts, from this year’s “Executive Excess” study by the Institute for Policy Studies: “American workers ... are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s. Back in those years, precious few top executives made over 30 times what their workers made. In 2009, we calculate ... CEOs of major U.S. corporations averaged 263 times the average compensation of American workers.”

Layoffs pay. The study found that the chief executive officers of the 50 firms that laid off the most workers during the recession took home an average of nearly $12 million last year — 42 percent more than the average pay of all the CEOs at S&P 500 firms.

No wonder workers are angry. No wonder they’re massing in large protest rallies.

No, wait. Those are the Tea Partiers and the Becksters.

They’re angry at federal health care reform, even though it will save them money and reduce the deficit.

They’re angry about the Wall Street bailout. Except for the fact that it was absolutely necessary because the titans of Wall Street had a gun at the head of the world economy, they should be angry.

They’re angry about the $787 billion in stimulus spending, even though it returned a fat tax break to them, saved the jobs of cops and teachers and state employees and paid unemployment compensation to the victims of the Wall Street manipulators.

Workers need to be angry, but at the right people — the ones who for 30 years have been steering ever more of the wealth of this nation into fewer and fewer hands.

Ironically, it is those plutocrats — oil and insurance company executives, big bankers and other Wall Street tycoons — who are orchestrating many of these protest rallies.

This is where labor is most effectively organized on Labor Day Weekend 2010: against the interests of working America.

Posted in The-platform on Friday, September 3, 2010 9:00 pm Updated: 4:20 pm. | Tags: Labor Day,Organized Labor, Workling Poor, Wealth Disparity, Tax Policy, Roger Ailes, Fox News, Pullman Strike, Tea Party, Tax Policy Center, Institute For Policy Studies, Executive Compensation, Unemployment