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Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

“He’s a real nowhere Man,
Sitting in his Nowhere Land,
Making all his nowhere plans
For nobody.”

These lyrics to “Nowhere Man,” written and recorded in 1965 by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, describe the Republican Party of 2009. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter rejected that party and returned to his Democratic roots because, even at the age of 79, he’s got plans that go somewhere.

The GOP’s leaders and their inactions have placed the party at the corner of Unpopular and Nowhere. GOP voter registration fell in every western state in 2008, including Colorado where it dropped a whopping 9 percent. That year, the Pew Research Center found that voters calling themselves Republicans declined six points over four years, for the lowest percentage of self-identified Republican voters in 16 years of Pew polling.

Pennsylvania voters, not always in step, were this time. More than 200,000 Republicans switched registration to Democrat in 2008. Arlen Specter, who was a Democrat the first 16 years of his adult life, this spring joined those fellow Pennsylvania Republicans and returned to his Democratic roots.

The Republican response typifies why voters continue to convert the GOP to D on their party membership cards. The Republican National Committee posted on its web site nasty automatic e-mails to Specter that can be sent with the click of a mouse. Mean spirited is bad enough, but these lack a certain introspection.

One is supposed to be the White House teleprompter welcoming Specter to the Democratic Party. The text says, “Welcome to the Democrats. I look forward to working together to borrow more money from China.” Another is supposed to be a welcome from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, saying, “You’ll love how much we can spend taxpayer money.” Both are blind to a fact that taxpayers clearly see – Republican majorities during the Bush administration spent so much that they created the largest budget deficits known to man or nation, compelling excessive borrowing from China.

He’s as blind as he can be,
Just sees what he wants to see,
Nowhere Man can you see me at all? – Nowhere Man

The leader of Specter’s new party – President Barack Obama – stood before the American people on his 100^th day in office, assessing progress and promising to press forward to aid people in need during the worst recession since the Great Depression.

He spoke of accomplishments, such as the stimulus bill that will create or save 3.5 million jobs, the extension of health insurance for 11 million children whose parents work full-time, and a measure to help homeowners refinance their mortgages. He talked of changing the tone of foreign policy from threats to diplomacy, forbidding torture and closing the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

This Democrat has his sights set on the next hundreds and hundreds of days and pledged to continue working on priorities he established during his campaign, including health care reform and clean energy development.

Even those who disagree with him know he’s got plans. He’s going places.  This guy’s definitely not at the corner of Unpopular and Nowhere.

He has offered to bring Republicans along with him, to negotiate with them, to include them in the process. But they’ve smacked him down at every turn. They’re not just fighting with him, either. They’re also bickering among themselves. And it isn’t pretty.

There was the infamous back and forth between GOP mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh who is calling for the president of his country to fail, and GOP chairman Michael Steele, who made himself famous by promising an “off the hook” public relations blitz “to uptick our image with everyone, including one-armed midgets.”  After Obama’s chief of staff said Limbaugh was the representative of the GOP, Steele shot back saying he was the head of the party, adding that Limbaugh was incendiary and “ugly.” Limbaugh responded with a rant on radio that Steele was unfit to lead, to which Steele responded by crawling on his belly to apologize to the “ugly” one.  There’s some inspiring leaders for you!

Now a group of Republicans has split from the RNC, calling itself the National Council for a New America. They contend they are upset that the GOP has failed to provide alternatives to the Democrats’ plans. The group includes former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. “It’s no secret that we’re in a seriously troubling time for the Republicans,” said Mike Murphy, a strategist who has advised Romney and Sen. John McCain.

It’s also seriously troubling that this new cabal, supposedly trying to solve the old group’s problems, called itself National Council for a New America. Clearly they are not satisfied with the current America, the America that is rejecting Republicans. So their plan is to remake America rather than to remake themselves.  Good luck with that.

Actually, there’s a much easier option. Obama described it to Republicans during the press conference on his 100^th day in office. Even with Specter in the Democratic fold and the potential of a 60-vote supermajority for Democrats in the Senate, the President said he would like to work with Republicans. He said the majority will likely rule on core issues. But there are many matters on which Republicans could exert influence if they would come to the table and negotiate in good faith.

Republicans can continue to simply vote NO on everything. They can bicker among themselves and look ridiculous to the American people. They can get nothing done and be the party of “I’m-in-control-NO-I’m-in-control” nonsense. They can continue to lose members and statesmen like Specter. Obama suggested that would be an unwise strategy.

That would be a nowhere strategy.

Stewart Acuff

By Stewart Acuff
Special Assistant to the President, AFL-CIO

Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat makes the fight for the  Employee Free Choice Act much more fluid and passage much more likely.

Organized labor will re-double our already overwhelming efforts in Pennsylvania to convince the Senator to once again support the bill that he was a co-sponsor of in the last Congress.

Labor is re-energized by his decision.  Grassroots union activity-already at a fever pitch-is escalating even more.

Meanwhile, union leaders like Steelworkers President Leo Gerard are taking note of Democratic operatives who’ve sold out to Corporate America.

Last week in the Wall St. Journal, Thomas Frank exposed some of the Democratic lobbyists and loyalists who are doing all they can on behalf of Walmart and Corporate America to defeat organized labor’s number one priority-the Employee Free Choice Act.

The list-hardly exhaustive-includes the Podesta Group, D and P Creative Strategies, Ingrid Duran.  All on the payroll of Walmart.  All siding with Walmart and Corporate America against workers and the American Labor movement.

Is it any wonder that Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, home of Walmart, is having trouble supporting the Employee Free Choice Act when she once was once was a co-sponsor?

As Thomas Frank said, “Why does labor always get it in the neck?”

After all, besides its money, organized labor provided the tens of thousands of ground troops for Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008.  Who-other than educated and motivated union members-had those tens of thousands of hard conversations about race and class and inequality and the future of America in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana in white communities that opened up hearts and minds to Barack Obama?

Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act will have a lot to do with the survival of collective bargaining in America’s private sector.  We expect Corporate America and the radical rightwing to fight to defend the status quo of stagnant and declining wages, healthcare rationing by income or wealth, ballooning corporate profits and CEO pay, falling consumer demand, increasing unemployment-but Democrats?!

For any Democrat to side with Corporate America and the radical rightwing against organized labor and the Employee Free Choice Act today when it is clear that Corporate America and the radical rightwing are responsible for running the American economy into the ditch, are responsible for the highest inequality since 1929, are responsible for the meltdown of our economy, for 30 years of stagnant and declining wages, for our healthcare crisis, and for the squeeze on the Middle Class is inexcusable.

Say this for Republicans, they would never assault an element of their base so important to their party.

After NAFTA and PNTR for China and welfare reform and CAFTA and the incessant weakening of America’s labor laws, unions are watching closely. 

Having a D beside your name or on your lobbying shingle is no longer enough.

NAFTA, CAFTA, SHAFTA.  We’re fed up with Democrats that talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.  Stand with organized labor on the Employee Free Choice Act or stand with Walmart.  There’s no middle ground.  Which side are you on?

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Grading a president after 100 days always strikes me as presumptuous. The only real grade is an incomplete. And as good teachers will tell you, letter grades – as opposed to written evaluations – are inherently arbitrary and misleading.

One thing is clear. If we’re grading on a curve, Barack Obama ranks near the top, just below FDR. In changing course, getting bold things done, setting a tone, lifting our spirits and confidence, we haven’t seen anything like this since Roosevelt. Even Reagan, the great communicator, had a much harder time in his early days, starting with the limousine gridlock of his inaugural. He had to get shot to move his agenda.

Rather than just grading the president, I suggest we might profitably assess our own 100 days. Obama has stormed the national and world stages in his first weeks. But how have we done – particularly the progressives who have such a large stake in the success of this president – in relation to Obama? He has demonstrated remarkable mastery of the powers of the presidency to lead the country. Have we mastered the power of the citizenry to empower the president?

There is sophisticated organizing being done in support of Obama’s agenda. New organizations – most notably the 13 million person Obama for America – and old have joined together to mobilize citizens around the president’s key initiatives. Major groups with large memberships – from unions to MoveOn, community and citizen action networks — have coordinated target lists, messaging, and activities. Increasingly their attention is focused on herding Democrats, which will intensify as Sen. Arlen Specter’s decision to switch jerseys makes Republicans even less relevant.

Similarly, on core issues — health care reform, new energy, college affordability, immigration, empowering workers- large independent efforts are underway. The unions and other progressive groups are taking on the corporate lobby over the Employee Free Choice Act. Health Care for Americans Now leads a range of coalitions pushing health care reform. Environment and labor groups have been actively mobilizing around green jobs and new energy.

These independent efforts will help define the scope of the reforms, engage the public to support them, and strengthen the hand (or stiffen the spine) of Democrats in negotiations. Neither the public plan in health care nor cap and trade on carbon emissions will survive without popular mobilization.

For the most part, progressives have been happy to support and reluctant to question the popular president. So the fateful commitment of 60,000 troops to Afghanistan was made without much opposition, nothing like that Obama joined when it came to invading Iraq. Human rights advocates did push the administration to open up the shameful record on torture and are now demanding investigation and prosecution. Progressives helped convince the White House to shelve a proposed task force to “fix” Social Security which would have been bad policy and bad politics. Progressive economists – Krugman, Stiglitz – and journalists – Greider and Kuttner and more – have challenged the administration’s banking bailout, and pushed hard for a stronger recovery plan. The call for a full investigation of the mess – a Pecora Commission – has gained some momentum in both the Congress and the media.

But what Obama has been missing has been an independent, obstreporous citizens’ movement demanding fundamental reform. Roosevelt had the labor movement, the Townsend Clubs, Huey Long, socialists and communists challenging him from the left. Johnson had the civil rights movement forcing his hand.

This kind of opposition isn’t easy. No president likes to face disruption particularly from what he would consider his base. There are similar stories told about both Roosevelt and Johnson meeting with leaders of the movements and saying something to the effect of “I agree with you, now go out there and make me do it.” But in reality, Roosevelt wanted to squelch Long and tame labor. And Johnson repeatedly ordered Hubert Humphrey to bring the civil rights demonstrations to an end, saying that they weren’t helping the cause. King got a lot of pressure – to say nothing of wiretaps and FBI investigations – to get back in step.

Yet it is precisely these movements – independent, disruptive, passionate, demanding bolder reform, taking on entrenched powerful interests – that enabled Roosevelt and Johnson to achieve far more than they ever thought possible. The New Deal we remember – Social Security, the Wagner Act, Fair Labor Standards, the SEC and Glass Stegall, progressive taxation – came not in the first 100 days, but as Roosevelt, under pressure from his left, geared up for re-election. The Voting Rights Act surely would not have been passed with Selma, and many other sacrifices transforming public opinion to enable Johnson to act.

The absence of these movements on the left opens dangerous space for ersatz populist movements on the right. We saw that with the tea-bag parties that Fox huckstered. We’ve seen conservatives conflate the trillions going to bolster the banks with vital spending in the recovery plan to get the economy going. They are weaving a corrosive message that ties big spending in Washington with Wall Street wastrels. The country would be far better served with an angry populist movement that indicts Wall Street but demands greater support for working families and Main Street. But anyone building that movement will have to understand that they might earn respect, but they won’t be loved in the White House.

For citizens, as with Obama, 100 days is too early to judge. In these first weeks, we’ve done a good job of organizing to support key elements of the president’s agenda. But we’ve seen little evidence of a progressive movement that can challenge the limits of that agenda, and rouse an aggrieved citizenry to open up the space for the president to act far more boldly.

Grades for the first 100 days? The president, I’d say, is doing a lot better than we, his supporters, are.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

April 30, 2008, two days after Workers Memorial Day last spring, a mammoth steel girder crushed to death a 61-year-old crane repairman who worked at ArcelorMittal in Burns Harbor, Ind. A 33-year-veteran of the mill, the member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6787 left behind a wife and two sons.

He became one of the 21 to die that day at work, the 21 who die each day at work.  To reduce that daily toll, to make Workers Memorial Day less memorable, the U.S. Labor Department and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration must be properly funded and empowered.

The 5,680 workplace deaths each year are called “accidents” in hushed tones in funeral homes when widows or widowers speak of what befell the loved ones they’d kissed as they left for work, never suspecting they’d never return. But they’re not accidents if the employer failed to supply safety equipment, sufficient workers to safely perform the task, or, generally, a safe working environment.

Employers must provide safe workplaces. For those who don’t understand that moral requirement, Congress established a legal mandate with the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970. Under OSHA, the Department of Labor created regulations and enforcement mechanisms “to promote the safety and health of America’s working men and women.”

August 15, 2008, a 41-year-old electrical apprentice from Superior, Ariz. was fatally electrocuted while replacing the ballast in a 480-volt flood light on the edge of the Asarco LLC Ray Mine copper pit in Kearny, Ariz. He’d trained for a year and 20 weeks as an electrician, but for 13 years before that had worked at the mine as a member of the USW, and his former Steelworkers local union president, Celestino Flores, said of him, “He was such a hard worker. . . Such a good guy.”  The U.S. Department of Labor cited Asarco, saying, “The accident occurred because management policies and controls were inadequate and failed to ensure that the electrical circuit was deenergized, locked-out, tagged, and tested before work was performed.” But the Labor Department never imposed fines, and after all the mine’s electricians received training, it rescinded the citation.   

Something is wrong. Over the past eight years, the Bush Administration managed to emasculate many regulatory agencies, including the Labor Department and OSHA.  The federal OSHA program has 570 fewer inspectors today than it did in 1980, for example, and its budget of $486 million for 2008 amounted to only $3.89 per worker.

An Office of Inspector General audit report describes one terrible result of this government-shriveling process – additional deaths at workplaces with histories of deaths. The March 31, 2009 report carries an intimidating but also chilling title: “Employers with Reported Fatalities were not Always Properly Identified and Inspected under OSHA’s Enhanced Enforcement Program.”

That special enforcement program (EEP) is for “employers indifferent to their obligations” under the OSHA act. In the audit, the Inspector General found that under the Bush Administration, OSHA was not properly identifying employers for enhanced enforcement. And even when it did, OSHA failed to take proper action. For example, in 29 cases, it “did not take any of the appropriate enhanced enforcement actions. Sixteen of the 29 employers subsequently had 20 fatalities.”  In 14 of those, the violations were similar to the initial ones. But the employer suffered no OSHA penalty the first time. The violation recurred. And another worker died.

“While we cannot conclude that enhanced enforcement would prevent subsequent fatalities, full and proper application of EEP procedures may have deterred and abated workplace hazards at the worksites of 45 employers where 58 fatalities occurred,” the auditors wrote.

January 4, 2009, a 46-year-old municipal worker died of drowning and blunt force trauma when he apparently was caught in a conveyor system and dragged into a pit at the Galveston, Texas waste water treatment plant. A member of USW Local 13-1, he worked for the City of Galveston for a decade. The co-founder of the Galveston Hurricanes and the team’s coach for 14 years, he left behind a widow and three sons.

Tuesday, April 28, is this year’s Workers Memorial Day. The date marks passage of OSHA, which clearly needs to be enforced so fewer bells are tolled on this day to commemorate dead workers and so fewer workers die ignominiously in waste water treatment plants.  Two weeks ago, on the deadline for filing federal income taxes, tea bag protestors cavorted across the country at the behest of conservative talk show hosts. Still conservatives are trying to shrink government, end regulation, strangle enforcement. For American workers, who depend on OSHA for their lives, smaller is perilous. For their very survival, workers need robust regulation immediately.

February 2, 2009, a tracked timber-loading crane ran over and crushed a 65-year-old crane operator at International Paper in Augusta, Ga. A 43-year veteran of the plant, he’d been scheduled to be off that day but went in anyway when called and worked a job not normally his. He left behind a wife, two children and five grandchildren, all of whom had hoped to see him retire next year. A member of USW Local 983, he was, ironically, EMS trained, functioned as a first responder for International Paper and taught CPR.

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Author of “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt”

In 2006, journalist Christopher Hayes wrote a little-noticed article for In These Times magazine about a proposal in Oregon to crack down on predatory lending. The initiative had become so popular that conservative legislators supported it fearing that if it were put on the state’s ballot, the resulting gusher of grassroots support would not only ratify the measure, but depose the bank-allied Republican Party, too.

Hayes’ piece was titled “Economic Populism Proves Popular,” the headline a sarcastic middle finger flashed at a political and media Establishment that portrays policies “supporting the rights and power of the people” — i.e., the dictionary definition of “populism” — as somehow anathema to the people. 

That depiction, of course, continues today. But now, populism isn’t just popular in America; it is becoming the dominant paradigm, and that has the Establishment frightened.

For years, the country watched its populist desire for health care, tax, trade and financial reform run into the reality of elite politicians handing out trillions of dollars worth of corporate welfare and bank bailouts as the economy collapsed. Not surprisingly, a new Rasmussen poll on attitudes toward government and corporations shows 75 percent of the country “can be classified on the populist or Mainstream side of the divide” while just 14 percent “side with the political class.”

As if to confirm the chasm, this “political class” — consultants, politicians, lobbyists and commentators — has been denigrating populism as too overwrought to be taken seriously. Listen to a typical pundit defending AIG’s bonuses or criticizing demands for a new trade policy, and you will inevitably hear the word “populist” accompanied by the word “rage” and/or “dangerous,” followed by tributes to the status quo. 

This elite propaganda, says Georgetown University’s Michael Kazin, dismissively implies “that anger from ordinary people is emotional, coming from people who don’t understand how the economy works and are just lashing out at their social betters.” 

The caricaturing cribs from Richard Nixon’s playbook. Whereas the 36th president got himself re-elected by steering the country’s anger at the Vietnam War into anger at countercultural war protestors, today’s political class portrays the public’s outrage as the nation’s biggest problem, rather than what the public is justifiably outraged at.

Today, though, Tricky Dick’s tactics aren’t working, and not just because 2009′s economy is far worse than 1972′s. 

This is the era when “You” are Time magazine’s person of the year — an era whose information and interactivity revolution now has us looking to ourselves for direction, not officialdom’s gatekeepers. Additionally, America has lately been taught to expect results from democracy. TV viewers get to decide “American Idol” winners, Facebookers get to change their site’s bylaws and voters get to autonomously use Obama campaign resources to win elections — and we get to do all this from outside the press clubs and smoke-filled rooms.

This profound rewiring of instincts and expectations is why the vilification of “populist rage” has failed as a political barbiturate, why the country still seethes, and why both parties are suddenly listening to “the people” instead of the Establishment. This is why, for instance, Republicans are staging “Tea Party” protests against federal spending and why Democrats are pushing bills to expand health care, re-regulate Wall Street and cap executive pay — because they know the political class, however offended, can no longer stop a voter backlash. 

Admittedly, contradiction is everywhere: Republican rallies bewail deficits the GOP manufactured, and Democrats lament deregulatory schemes they originally crafted. But no matter how hypocritical the response is, it is a response, and that represents change from decades of aloof government. It suggests a democratic renewal whereby populism — i.e., advocating what the public wants — isn’t merely one popular brand of politics, but is politics itself. 

David Sirota is the bestselling author of the books “Hostile Takeover” (2006) and “The Uprising” (2008). He is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future. Find his blog at OpenLeft.com or e-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com.

Michael Hiltzik

Watching people desperately trying to hang on to their little all following a disaster is an experience, as Aristotle would have appreciated, certain to excite pity and terror in the human breast.

If only we didn’t have to spend so much time these days watching bankers and corporate executives do it.

Every day seems to present yet another example of the disjunction between the financial community’s sense of entitlement and the real world occupied by everybody else.

The other day, the inspector general for the government’s financial bailout program, known as TARP, revealed that Chrysler’s lending arm requested $750 million in new money but was turned down because its top 25 executives wouldn’t all agree to the compensation limits TARP requires.

That’s after the government had already given Chrysler Financial $1.5 billion. (Chrysler says, for its part, that it decided it didn’t need the additional money after all. Nothing to do with the pay caps, it says. But of the original $1.5 billion, so far it has repaid only $3.5 million.)

Meanwhile, a passel of Wall Street professionals unburdened themselves to New York magazine about the punitive cuts in pay and bonuses they’re suffering — imposed, to their minds, by jealous people less talented and successful than they.  More

This column was first published April 23, 2009 in the Los Angeles Times.

Sherry Linkon

By Sherry Linkon
Co-Director, Center for Working-Class Studies, Youngstown State University

As the economic crisis deals another blow to American manufacturing, I’ve been wondering about something my brother-in-law asked me last fall:  the good working-class jobs seem to be disappearing, so what will become of the working class?

It’s a good question, and the answer is pretty discouraging.   Between the mid-1940s and the early 1970s, strong contracts negotiated by industrial unions, national policies such as the GI Bill and National Highway Act, and several decades of growth by American industries created what many thought would be the permanent reality: working-class jobs that could fund middle-class lives.  Three decades later, some still equate the “working class” with blue-collar industrial workers, and we still believe that working people deserve a chance to achieve the American dream.  Even as unions have accepted reduced wages and benefits and retirees have struggled to survive when the promises of earlier contracts are abandoned, we still see manufacturing jobs as good jobs.  Globalization and technology have allowed manufacturers to make more – products and money – with fewer workers, or at least with fewer workers here.  But even as reality shifts, we can’t let go of the ideal of the good manufacturing job.

All of that is coming to an end, leaving the working class with two options.  The one we hear about most is education.  That college is the path out of the working class has become received wisdom.  And yes, many of the occupations that are projected to grow over the next two decades require college degrees.   While attending college can mean piling up debt and offers no guarantees, education will help some working-class people find their way to new middle-class jobs.

But college isn’t an option for everyone, and about two-thirds of jobs do not require a college degree.  Indeed, some of the fastest-growing occupations require little training.  Manicurists, skin care specialists, fitness instructors, and preschool teachers need only a certificate or license.  Other growing fields require even less.  On-the-job training is all that’s necessary for security personnel at casinos, janitors, or home health and personal aides.

At first glance, then, it would seem that today’s displaced workers have reason to be hopeful for the future.  23 of the 30 jobs projected to produce the largest job growth over the next decade don’t require a college degree, and many don’t even require special training.  Who needs factories?  Beauty salons, medical offices, and casinos will provide the working-class jobs of the future.

But there’s a catch.  The pay is lousy.  The average annual salary for a beginning steelworker (assuming that such a position exists) is $35,590.  After five years, that steelworker would bring in over $50,000.  The starting salary for a manicurist is $21,280, and it tops out at about $32,000.  For home health and personal aides, the #2 and #3 fastest growing jobs, the salary hovers around $20,000 a year.

It’s not news that the American economy is shifting away from manufacturing and towards service.  Nor would anyone be surprised to hear that while service jobs are sometimes safer, cleaner, and less physically-taxing than working in a steel mill, they don’t pay as well.  But let’s think about what this means for the future of the working class and the future of America.

If nothing else, this will clear up all that confusion about who is working class.   As the majority of working-class jobs become low-wage jobs, we won’t have to worry about how to determine the social class of a high-school graduate working on an assembly line but earning over $50,000 a year.  Income, education, and social position will line up neatly, as they did before the 1940s.

But it also means saying goodbye to the American dream.  Home ownership and saving for a child’s college education are beyond reach if your salary hovers around the Federal poverty rate of about $22,000 for a family of four.  True, some families have multiple wage earners, and many working-class families will be able to earn about $45,000 annually – a good $15,000 below the suggested national livable wage.  And many households struggle to survive on one low income.  As the working-class moves into these low-income jobs, the ranks of the working poor will grow, and the proportion of the working class who are comfortable and financially secure will shrink.

Some will suggest that the working class deserves its economic difficulties.  Want a decent life?  Go to college.  Too “lazy” or can’t afford to go to college?  Tough.  So much for the idea of valuing hard work, much less our moral and social obligation to ensure that anyone working full-time deserves a living wage.

Yet having a large proportion of the population living on the economic edge increases demand for governmental and charitable support, creates a cycle of poverty that’s difficult to escape, and undermines the broader social fabric of American society.

I don’t have a solution beyond the obvious: raise wages.  The only way to get there is to recognize the emerging reality: even if many more people attend college, we will still have a large and growing, hard-working, low-paid working class.  All the discussion about education as the key to stabilizing the economy ignores the real future of the working class.

This article was first printed on the Center for Working-Class Studies blog.

Robert Borosage

By Robert L. Borosage
Co-Director Campaign for America’s Future

Tax Day. Fox News is flogging Astroturf “tea parties” underwritten by corporate lobbyists, while its pundits warn that raising the top income tax rate to the level it was under Bill Clinton constitutes “socialism.” The Wall Street Journal editorializes about the evils of the estate tax. Ari Fleischer, Daddy Bush’s old flack, is trotted out to complain that “redistribution of income” through the tax code “is getting out of hand.”

Really? Here’s the grim reality. Since 1980, when the conservative era began, inequality has reached Gilded Age extremes – while top end tax rates have been cut. The wealthiest few captured ever more of the nation’s income while successfully lowering their tax rates.

And worse – this is still going on. This month, every Republican Senator – joined bizarrely by 10 Democrats – pushed for yet another tax break for the super-rich – those with fortunes over $7 million. Apparently worried that the heirs of the Paris Hilton class might not be able to keep the yacht clubs humming, Republican Senators voted in lockstep to direct the Congress to raise the full exemption of estates from $7 to $10 million per couple, and drop the top rate from 45% to 35%. Over a decade when fully in effect, this represents a bauble worth about $90 billion to the 1 in 400 estates (one-fourth of one percent) that reach that level.

Fleischer would suggest this is a small, but inadequate step to curb the confiscatory redistribution of the tax code. But he’s peddling bull.

In 1980, as “Gilded Age Taxation,” a study by the Institute for America’s Future shows, the richest 1% of Americans captured fully 7.7% of the nation’s after-tax income. The middle sixty percent captured about 50.9%. By 2006, the latest CBO figures show the opulent 1% — making an average $1.3 million — captured a staggering 16.3% of the nation’s income after all that tax code redistribution. While the middle sixty percent garnered only 44.1%. If class war is being waged, the rich are on the march.

The Institute for Policy Studies details the staggering contrast to the Eisenhower years. In 1955, the top 400 taxpayers averaged about $12.3 million in income (2006 dollars) and paid, after exploiting every loophole imaginable, 51.2% of that in federal income tax. A half century later, the richest 400 average a breath-taking $263.3 million in income each, and pay a mere 17.2% of that in federal income taxes. (A lower tax rate than paid by most of their secretaries).

If those 400 taxpayers had paid at the same rate in 2006 as a half century earlier, the federal treasury would have collected $35.9 billion more in revenue, or enough to double the energy and transportation budget combined. No wonder Ike, clearly a stealth “socialist”, could afford to build the interstate transport system.

So why do Republican Senators en mass and 10 wayward Democrats – Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Maria Cantwell, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Patty Murray, Bill Nelson, Ben Nelson and Jon Testor – think the wealthiest one-fourth of one percent of Americans need another tax break? They wax eloquent about saving family farms and small businesses. But upon sober review, the New York Times editorial board provided a tempered evaluation of the argument: “That is swill.” Opponents of the estate tax haven’t been able to dig up a family that was forced to liquidate its farm or business due to the tax because these folks simply do not exist.

The sad reality is that conservative dominance over the last decades has had profound effects. One of these is that income inequality grew to Gilded Age extremes, while top end tax rates were slashed. Fleischer is right. We did witness a lot of redistribution. But it went from the middle class to the very top, not the other way around.

(Incidentally the new tax break isn’t a done deal. A conference committee will decide its fate in the next week or two. You might want to call or write Republican Senators or the wayward Democratic 10 and tell them enough already.)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Americans are paying big time now for decades of buying into a hoax.

And it wasn’t sub-prime mortgages.

It was the conservative contention that government is evil and inept. Swallowing that absurd assertion resulted in relaxation and elimination of supposedly onerous and unnecessary government regulations – from the ones that prevented banks from growing too big to fail to those that protected union organizers from illegal corporate obstruction tactics.

Unfettered, Wall Street speculators went on a rampage of reckless wagering that ultimately knocked the wind out of the world economy’s bubble. With unrestrained corporate threats and interference, union membership declined to 12 percent, although 58 percent of non-managment workers surveyed said they’d like to join a union.

Now, that reviled institution – government – is the only one big and strong enough to rescue the economy that perpetration of the hoax devastated. How ironic. The  government must also restore the ability of the American people to organize unions at their workplaces, if they so choose, by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

President Barack Obama has said he wants to make government cool again. He stood on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Ill.  on the bicentennial of  Abraham Lincoln’s birth and talked about why the 16^th President supported the union and why concerted action is so effective. Speaking of the hoax, he said, “Such knee-jerk disdain for government – this constant rejection of any common endeavor – cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges.”

Common endeavor is the power of unions, whether they be unions of states or labor unions. That is why corporations across America so fear the Employee Free Choice Act. It would ease forming a labor union. It would allow workers – rather than CEOs – to decide whether to create a labor union by collecting signatures from a majority of workers or by a secret ballot election.

Big business is attempting to perpetrate a second hoax on America – that the Employee Free Choice Act is no good. They’ve been flying a bunch of anti-union lobbyists to Washington to pressure politicians to vote against it. Sounds a lot like CEOs jetting to D.C. in private planes for bailout money. 

The bailout money will, of course, come from the pockets of working Americans who those very CEOs don’t want to unionize. And after decades when the policies of the government-is-evil-hoax meant wealth accrued to the very richest, it turns out that the economy would have been better served if wealth had been more evenly distributed.

More workers with more money to spend means more cars and houses and All-Clad pots and pans bought. Those purchases keep other workers employed, who spend more money.

When those workers are unionized, studies reveal two important statistics.  One is that they earn 30 percent more than non-union workers. The other is that they are 59 percent more likely to be covered by employer-provided health insurance. So, in the end, unionization is good for the economy.

That effect was acknowledged in 1935 when the National Labor Relations Act was passed to encourage unionization and collective bargaining. It occurred in the midst of the Great Depression and followed decades rocked by lesser economic “panics” causing runs on banks.

The NLRA “Declaration of Policy” says this about this law: “The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract, and employers who are organized in corporate or other forms of ownership association, substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners.”

Simply put, employers wield considerable strength, and workers must be able to unionize so wage and benefit negotiations occur on a more even playing field. There’s power in common endeavor.

In 1935, in the depth of the Great Depression, the government encouraged workers to use their power to obtain better wages. It did that because better wages to many would help end the depression for all.

Since then, corporations and CEOs – the perpetrators of the great government-is-evil hoax — have also chipped away at the NLRA. They’ve seized from workers the ability to determine how unions are formed.

And they increasingly harass workers trying to form unions. In 2007, employers illegally harassed or coerced 29,000 workers. In the 1950s, companies illegally punished fewer that 1,000 workers a year for union activity. Thirty-six percent of workers who voted against a union said they did so because of pressure from the employer, according to an NLRB survey of 400 election campaigns in 1998 and 1999.

Just like in 1935, workers now need unions to help them secure better wages, which will, in the end, be good for the country because it will improve the economy.

For that to happen, though, the Employee Free Choice Act must pass. Workers must have the right, once again, to choose how they want to form their own organizations.

In Obama’s speech in Springfield, in which he discussed the union of states, he quoted Lincoln on the purpose of government, saying, “The legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves.”

In this quote, labor unions could be substituted for government: “The legitimate object of unions is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, by themselves.”

That is why workers must vanquish the new hoax being perpetrated by conservatives, greedy CEOs and other labor union-haters. Workers must win the freedom that they had in 1935 to choose how to form their unions. Labor unions give workers the ability to do what needs to be done but which cannot be accomplished by individuals. And that includes bargaining for the better wages that, when spent throughout the economy, will help end the current great recession.

Robyn E. Blumner

By Robyn E. Blumner
St. Petersburg Times Columnist 

“Am a Man” was the slogan of 1,300 striking black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968. Their grievances were many, but chief among them was that their wages were so meager they lived below the poverty line.

On April 4, 41 years ago last evening, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. He was in town to help the strikers gain recognition of their union, and his epic “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech was a labor rally.

Dr. King is remembered as America’s greatest civil rights leader, but the man was a towering labor leader as well. He clearly connected the dots between the immorality of racial inequality and the economic injustices inflicted on working men and women of all colors. It was the same struggle: to demand through collective action one’s individual worth and dignity.

One of the great labor speeches in American history is King’s 1961 address to the AFL-CIO. In it, King reflected on the grand work of the labor movement. He said that in response to the “organized misery” of sweatshops and the notion that capital may “act without restraints and without conscience,” the worker unionized and by doing so had “constructed the means by which a fairer sharing of the fruits of his toil had to be given to him.”

How sad that in the intervening years King’s message to workers has been lost. Worker solidarity has given way to an every-man-for-himself ethic that has helped to strip labor of the influence it once had.

No surprise then that America’s prosperity over the past 30 years has not been shared MORE

The column was first published in the on 04/02/2009.