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Sam Pizzigati

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, Too Much

The American middle class, concludes a new study from the ad industry’s top trade journal, has essentially become irrelevant. In a deeply unequal America, if you’re over 35 and your income hasn’t yet topped $200,000 a year, you don’t matter.

The chain-smoking ad agency account execs of Mad Men, the hit cable TV series set in the early 1960s, all want to be rich some day. But these execs, professionally, couldn’t care less about the rich. They spend their nine-to-fives marketing to average Americans, not rich ones. (more…)

By James Gilbert
Director of the AFL-CIO Union Veterans Council

Memorial Day, which falls on the last Monday of May, honors the men and women who died while serving in the American military. It is a day for Americans to offer tribute and honor to the heroes who laid down their lives to preserve freedom.

Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day because it was a time set aside to honor the nation’s Civil War dead by decorating their graves. Officially proclaimed Decoration Day on May 5, 1868, by Gen. John Logan, Memorial Day was first observed on May 30, 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery. (more...)

Former governors Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty dismissed the federal stimulus package and aid for the failing Detroit auto companies. Now when they’re both running for president, they’ve flip flopped.

By Karen Hickey
AFL-CIO Field Communications

Scott Walker continued his attack on the people of Wisconsin today as he signed Act 22 into law.

With one stroke of his pen at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 25, 2011, Gov. Walker stripped hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites of their constitutional right to vote. Despite no systematic evidence of voter fraud, Gov. Walker and his GOP allies decided to make voter suppression a top priority for the state, fast tracking the bill before recall elections could occur against GOP senators this summer and further illustrating that many in the Wisconsin Legislature are working for themselves instead of the people of Wisconsin. (more…)

James Parks

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Clad in vibrant pink, clerical workers at ExxonMobil’s Baytown, Texas, facility, confronted the company’s CEO Rex Tillerson and members of the board of directors at the company’s shareholder meeting in Dallas yesterday. The workers, members of the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 13-2001, demanded to know why ExxonMobil, which recorded $30.5 billion in profits in 2010, is lavishing big rewards on top executives while refusing to give them raises and other benefits despite their increase in productivity.

They also wanted to know why the company agreed to raises and bonuses for other Baytown mostly-male workers last year, but is offering their all-female unit nothing in bargaining.

Local 13-2001 and the company began negotiations March 1 for a new three-year agreement. The contract expired March 15 but will continue in effect unless either party gives notice of a lockout or a strike. (more…)

Robert Reich

By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

Forty Senate Republicans have now joined their colleagues in the House to support Paul Ryan’s plan that would turn Medicare into vouchers that funnel money to private health insurers. They thumbed their nose at the special election in upstate New York earlier this week that delivered a victory to Democrat Kathy Hochul, who made the plan the focus of her upset victory.

So now it’s official. The 2012 campaign will be about the future of Medicare. (Yes, it will also be about jobs, but the Republicans haven’t come up with any credible ideas on that front, and the Democrats seem incapable of doing what needs to be done.)

This spells trouble for the GOP. Polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans — even a majority of Republican voters — want to preserve Medicare. They don’t want to turn it over to private insurers. (more…)

Harold Meyerson

By Harold Meyerson
Editor-at-Large of The American Prospect

This is a maddening time for anyone concerned about the lives of working-class Americans. The frustration and anger that suffused AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s declaration last week that labor would distance itself from the Democratic Party was both clear and widely noted. Not so widely noted has been a shift in the organizing strategy of two of labor’s leading institutions — Trumka’s AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union — that reflects a belief that the American labor movement may be on the verge of extinction and must radically change its game.

It took a multitude of Democratic sins and failures to push Trumka to denounce, if not exactly renounce,the political party that has been labor’s home at least since the New Deal. In a speech at the National Press Club last Friday, Trumka said that Republicans were wielding a “wrecking ball” against the rights and interests of working Americans. But Democrats, he added, were “simply standing aside” as the Republicans moved in for the kill.

The primary source of labor’s frustration has been the consistent inability of the Democrats to strengthen the legislation that once allowed workers to join unions without fear of employer reprisals. American business has poked so many holes in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that it now affords workers no protections at all. Beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, every time the Democrats have held the White House and strong majorities in both houses of Congress, bills that strengthened workers’ rights to unionize have commanded substantial Democratic support — but never quite enough to win a Senate supermajority. And during that time, the unionized share of the private-sector workforce has dwindled from roughly 30 percent to less than 7 percent. (more…)

Lawrence Mishel

By Lawrence Mishel
President, Economic Policy Institute

Many policymakers and pundits claim “we’re broke”¹ and “can’t afford”² public investments and policies that support workers. These claims are meant to justify efforts to scale back government programs and public sector workers’ wages and benefits. The “we’re broke” theme also implies that America’s working families should be satisfied with the status quo in terms of wages that have been stagnant for 30 years.

Despite the rhetoric, it is clear that “we” as a nation are not broke. While the recession has led to job loss and shrinking incomes in recent years, the economy has produced substantial gains in average incomes and wealth over the last three decades, and economists agree that we can expect comparable growth over the next three decades as well. Between 1980 and 2010, income per capita grew 66.4%, and wealth per capita grew 73.2%. Over the next 30 years, per capita income is projected to grow by a comparable 60.6%. In other words, “we” are much richer as a nation than we used to be and can expect those riches
to rise substantially in the future.

So who is the we in the “we’re broke” mantra? The recession has certainly been a rough patch of road for many families, but the output produced by corporations in the private sector has already recovered to pre-recession levels, and these firms’ profits were 21.7% higher overall, driven largely by the 60% jump in pre-tax profits enjoyed by firms in the financial sector.

Read Briefing Paper

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Lawrence Mishel has co-authored numerous books, including The State of Working America, Emerging Labor Market Institutions for the Twenty-First Century, The Charter School Dust-up: Examining the Evidence On Enrollment And Achievement, and The Teaching Penalty: Teacher Pay Losing Ground

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This article was re-posted from EPI.org

Ian Fletcher

By Ian Fletcher
Author, ‘Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why’

Many Americans are already concerned about China’s growing economic challenge to the United States. Indeed, the challenge itself is hardly news anymore. But a new book, Red Alert by Stephen Leeb, argues that Americans have radically misunderstood just what this challenge consists of.

Everyone who has “woken up” to the problem (i.e. not the administration, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, or the Republican leadership) understands the threat posed by China’s cheap labor and low standards for everything from child labor to environmental protection. Most people who aren’t hopeless laissez-faire ideologues are twigging to the fact that China’s state-directed capitalism is running rings around America’s private-sector capitalism right now. But what few people realize is that China has an even more radical economic strategy up its sleeve, a strategy that aims not just to equal the United States but to surpass it and quite possibly shut America out of the economic future.

The basis of China’s strategy is the fact that the world is heading rapidly into the era of fundamental resource constraints.

Up until the present time in human history, although various natural resources have been scarce enough to fight over, no important natural resource have ever been scarce enough that humanity simply ran out of it.

This, the author argues, is going to change.

The interesting thing is that the resource in question isn’t the usual suspect: oil–though oil is certainly going to become prohibitively expensive as we hunt down the last few drops in harder-and-harder-to-reach places that require more-expensive drilling and extraction techniques for less return. It isn’t gas or coal, either, though these have similar futures.

(Any reader who believes these resources will last indefinitely can stop reading right here; those who are unsure should consult the persuasive analysis in the book itself.)

The resource, paradoxically, is every environmentalist’s dream: green energy.

Huh? How can the world run out of green energy? Isn’t that the whole point?

Oops. In our rush to green energy, we’ve forgotten something. Those pretty blue photovoltaic cells glinting in the sunlight don’t grow on trees. Neither do those magnificent 300-foot windmills or their smaller cousins.

They have to be made, and they are made out of some very scarce materials. (more…)