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Harold Meyerson

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

The key to understanding the Civil War, which began 150 years ago this week, is to realize that it’s still being fought. Indeed, it’s being fought now more intensely than at any time since the 1960s.

Then, African Americans and white Northern liberals and moderates battled Southern white segregationists and Goldwater conservatives to establish equal racial access to the ballot, housing and public facilities. Today’s battle more closely resembles the one that inaugurated the Civil War, which centered on the expansion of slavery to the lands west of the Mississippi. As in 1861, we are again divided over whether Southern or Northern labor systems, and Southern or Northern versions of government, shall become the national norm.

In the private-sector economy, the Southern labor system — in which workers are paid less and have fewer rights — has been winning for decades. Despite their huge growth in members during the 1930s and 1940s, unions never succeeded in penetrating the South, where white racial animosity toward blacks thwarted efforts to build working-class solidarity. The gap between Northern and Southern wages remained vast — so vast that many Northern companies began relocating facilities there, particularly after the civil rights revolution of the ’60s made the South seem less culturally foreign. (more…)

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Real men, real human beings, with feelings and families, fought and died at Gettysburg to preserve the Union, to ensure, as their president, Abraham Lincoln, would say later, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Perversely, afterwards, non-humans commandeered the constitutional amendment intended to protect the rights of former slaves. Corporations wrested from the U.S. Supreme Court a decision based on the 14^th Amendment asserting that corporations are people with rights to be upheld by the government – but with no counterbalancing human responsibilities to the republic. No duty to fight or die in war, for example.  Earlier this year, the Supreme Court expanded those rights – ruling that corporations have a First Amendment free speech right to surreptitiously spend unlimited money on political campaigns.

Today, Lincoln would have to say America’s got a government of the people by the corporations, for the corporations.

The proposed trade agreement with South Korea illustrates corporate control of government for profit. It’s the same with efforts to revive the moribund trade schemes former President George W. Bush also negotiated with Panama and Colombia, the world’s most dangerous country by far for trade unionists, with 2,700 assassinated with impunity in the past two decades, 38 slain so far this year.

Nobody likes these trade deals – except corporations. They’re all modeled on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), both of which killed American jobs while giving corporations new authority to sue governments (read: taxpayers) for regulations – like environmental standards – that corporations contend interfere with their right to make money.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the South Korea so-called Free Trade Agreement (FTA) would cost America 159,000 jobs and enlarge its trade deficit by $16.7 billion in its first seven years.

Americans, now suffering though corporate-caused 9.6 percent unemployment, know a deal when they see one – and the South Korea FTA is not one. In a September poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, 53 percent of Americans said so-called free trade agreements have injured the country. Only 17 percent said those trade schemes benefited the United States. Disgust with these deals spans party lines, including Tea Partiers, 61 percent of whom said they’re bad for America.

Many politicians, particularly Democrats, abhor the schemes as well. In July, just after President Obama announced that he would try to get the South Korea pact passed, 110 House Democrats described their disdain for the deal:

“We oppose specific provisions of the agreement in the financial services, investment, and labor chapters, because they benefit multi-national corporations at the expense of small businesses and workers.”

In addition, during this fall’s midterm election campaign, 205 candidates, Republican and Democrat, ran on platforms condemning job off-shoring and unfair trade, and house Democrats who ran on fair trade were three times as likely to survive the GOP “shellacking” as Democrats who supported so-called free trade schemes.

Significantly, the South Korean public and some South Korean politicians also oppose the trade proposal. In the week leading up to the G-20 meetings in Seoul, trade unionists, farmers, peasants and students filled the streets in marches and candle light vigils to express outrage with the proposed agreement, including its provisions giving U.S. corporations the right to challenge South Korean laws in private tribunals.

In October, 35 South Korean lawmakers joined 20 U.S. Representatives in writing President Obama and Korean President Lee Myunk-bak to protest the proposal.

Despite all that opposition, when Obama and Lee emerged from talks without an agreement, the American press, pundits and “analysts on both sides of the aisle,” described the situation as a major diplomacy failure, “a serious setback for the president.”

They were wrong. It wasn’t a setback for Obama. It was the president refusing to sign a bad deal for American workers.

It was, however, a humiliation for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which just spent at least $50 million from secret corporate donors to elect Republicans who will do its bidding. The South Korea deal is a priority for the Chamber. Here’s what Chamber senior vice president for international affairs Myron Brilliant told the New York Times after the South Korean negotiations broke down and Obama pledged to attempt to complete the deal over the following six weeks:

“This will be an early test for this president with the new Congress, particularly the House leadership.”

The “Brilliant” test is whether the president of the United States will comply with Chamber demands to complete trade deals that kill jobs and that Americans despise.

When Obama went to Seoul, Chamber President Thomas J. Donohue was there to, as he put it, help win the trade deal. He also was among 120 executives given exclusive access to international leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev in a conference before the G-20 meeting.

The international organizers didn’t invite to the trade talks or the conference the students,  farmers, environmental groups, organized labor and untold millions of individuals who oppose the so-called free trade deals. The human beings who will be hurt most by the trade deals didn’t get a seat at the table. The corporate-people who stand to gain everything did.

Brilliant’s comments express the corporate sense of entitlement. They spent tens of millions to get what they wanted from politicians to increase profits. Now they expect it to be delivered.  It’s their recompense, their corporate reward.

If fatter profits mean fewer American jobs and wider trade deficits, that’s simply not a problem for corporations. That’s among the perks corporations got when the Supreme Court awarded them the privileges of personhood in America but none of the pesky personal and patriotic responsibilities of actual people in American society.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

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.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Symbols of the 16th president of the United States surround the soon-to-be 44th. And they did so from the beginning.

Barack Obama, formerly a Senator from Illinois, announced his plan to run for president on Abraham Lincoln’s birthday from the steps of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, the site of Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, which launched Lincoln’s own campaign for the Senate.

Once elected, Obama assembled a “team of rivals” cabinet, as Lincoln did, including as his secretary of state, his chief challenger for the Democratic nomination, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, just as Lincoln selected for state his foremost contender for the Republican nomination, New York Senator William Seward.

Before the inauguration, Obama will pause for reflection and a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, where a somber statue sits beside the inscribed words of the Gettysburg Address. He’ll attend a luncheon featuring Lincoln’s favorite foods.  Finally, Obama will place his right hand on the same Bible that Lincoln did when he took the oath of office on March 4, 1861.

Symbols cannot, however, convey the depth of connection between their presidencies. It is crucial for working Americans that the 44th President appreciate that mere imagery such as Lincoln luncheons and concerts is insufficient. What the union needs now is for Obama to follow the philosophical footsteps of Abraham.

When Lincoln took office, most of the country was in the midst of a deep recession caused by the Panic of 1857. “It struck after a period of prosperity accompanied by higher prices, speculation and increasing powers accruing to the nation’s banks,” New York Times reporter Steven R. Weisman, wrote in his book, “The Great Tax Wars.”  It resulted, he wrote, in a run on the banks, selling on Wall Street, falling prices, declining trade and the federal government saddled with deficits and debts. The U.S. economic slump, uncontrolled by Lincoln’s predecessor in the White House, spread internationally.

Then, four weeks after Lincoln took the oath of office, the Civil War began with shots fired on April 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter, S.C.

Similarly, Obama has the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to manage. His predecessor has bequeathed him the most serious recession since the Great Depression and the largest federal debt ever created in a presidency.  Risky speculation and deregulation caused last year’s financial bank failures that, in turn, pulled down the rest of the economy, as in 1857.

Lincoln is celebrated for preserving the union and freeing the slaves.  But that would not have been possible without his economic accomplishments. It is the philosophy at the base of those achievements that must be the prototype for change in America now.

While waging war, Lincoln also passed the Homestead Act giving land to those who would build houses on their plots and become family farmers; the Land Grant Colleges Act, promoting advanced farming methods, scientific research and access to higher education for the working classes; the Pacific Railway Act for construction of the first transcontinental railroad, and higher charges on imports to protect American industry and American workers.

The connection among these diverse laws is a respect for American workers and a belief that government should grant each American the opportunity to improve his lot by dint of hard work. Lincoln expressed this in a message to a Special Session of Congress in 1861: “This is essentially a people’s contest . . . It is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men – to lift artificial weights from all shoulders – to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all – to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”

Lincoln saw himself as a person who had benefited from America’s ability to give her citizens opportunity. The son of uneducated farmers, he had only a year of formal education. He’d worked as a riverboat pilot, country store clerk, blacksmith, surveyor and postmaster. But he’d also read and studied and worked himself to the position of a reasonably wealthy small town lawyer and got elected as a lawmaker, and ultimately, president.

He also wrote, very early on, in a letter to the editor of the Sangamon Journal in New Salem, Ill., in 1836, “I go for all sharing the privileges of government who assist in bearing its burdens.”

In recent times, soldiers and workers have borne the burdens of government while the privileges accrued to the wealthy. The rich got Bush’s big tax breaks. Banks got deregulated. And big corporations escaped enforcement of federal environmental and safety regulations.

Last year financial banks and a major insurance company failed and got rescued by the federal government after Wall Street wise-guys risked untold hundreds of billions in crazy schemes. Those salvages are all on the taxpayers’ dime. The failures led to the stock market diving, which shriveled worker’s 401K retirement accounts and pension funds. They also froze credit, which ultimately contributed to 2.6 million layoffs, the highest level in six decades, as companies couldn’t get money they needed to operate. Of those, 791,000 were manufacturing jobs. As workers lost their jobs, or feared it, they stopped spending. So even less money circulated in the economy. The recession was on.

This is Obama’s crisis. And this is where he should look to Lincoln. The 16th President saw the value in “Buy American.” Many historians believe Lincoln’s higher fees on imports enriched the federal treasury, which was crucial to pay for the war, and promoted American industry, particularly the steel industry, which forged the rails for his transcontinental railroad. Those industries Lincoln promoted made America strong and employed Americans and new immigrants.

Lincoln’s railroads accomplished two goals. They created jobs during their construction and connected the country afterward. Those connections made commerce cheaper and American industry more competitive internationally.

Lincoln’s new colleges and homesteads provided opportunity to Americans while making the country agriculturally self-sufficient and scientifically advanced.

Obama has spoken of similar goals – to improve schools and lower college costs, for example.

That’s good as far as it goes. But this country was not built on sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps. And it cannot sustain itself with an economy based on risky trading of Wall Street paper or consuming on credit. It must be productive. It must make things.

Obama’s administration, like Lincoln’s, must support industry and manufacturing and the jobs they create.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the Lincoln biography, “Team of Rivals,” said after speaking to Obama about it, “There’s no better mentor for a president to look to than Lincoln’s leadership . . . Somehow, Lincoln has gotten into his heart and mind, and that can only be for the good.”

Working people across America have hope it will be good for them.