The Wages of Exclusion: Low-Wage Work and Inequality
By Heather Boushey and Shawn Fremstad
In the United States, low-wage work is commonly defined by referencing the federal poverty line. According to this definition, a low-wage job is one that paid less than $9.83 an hour in 2006. Yet, there is near-unanimous consensus among researchers and policy advocates that the poverty line is a deeply flawed measure. Reflecting this consensus, economist Rebecca Blank recently wrote: “It is not too strong a statement to say that, forty-three years after they were developed, the poverty thresholds are nonsensical numbers.”
Even if the miserly poverty thresholds were made more “sensical” as a measure of income deprivation, the U.S. poverty line says little about inequality or other dimensions of deprivation that matter for individual well-being. Over the past generation, wage and income inequality has grown substantially, while the poverty level has changed relatively little.
In this article, we look to establish firmer foundations than the poverty line to define low-wage work. Our thesis is that low-wage jobs have become indelible features of our economy. The decline in labor standards—which has allowed the real value of the minimum wage to fall, benefits such as pensions and health insurance coverage to erode, and job quality in growing sectors such as the service industry to go unchecked—contributes to the continued presence of low-wage work in our economy. We also assess the extent to which low-wage work provides some of the resources needed to promote “social inclusion”—that is, economic security and full participation in society—and whether public work supports manage to bridge the gaps that low-wage workers face when trying to support their families.
Why Are Low-Wage Jobs a Continuing Feature of the U.S. Economy?
At the outset, it’s reasonable to ask whether any (or at least very many) jobs in the United States should pay low wages.Over the past few decades, American workers powered the economy to new heights.Between 1973 and 2006, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increased by more than 150 percent, and productivity, the average amount that workers produce per hour, increased by 83 percent.
At the same time, education levels and use of new technologies in the workplace increased, which should have led to overall increases in wages as the workforce became more skilled. Education levels increased across the board: the share of Americans with a high school diploma increased by more than a third and the share with education beyond high school more than doubled. By 2006, 86 percent of Americans aged twenty-five or older had completed high school and more than half had attended one or more years of college. In less than a generation, computers have become ubiquitous in the workplace. Nearly 60 percent of all workers aged twenty-five or older use a computer at work.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[i]<!--[endif]--> Computer use is not limited to workers holding a college or advanced degree. In fact, a majority of the workers who use a computer at work—some 37 million—have less than a four-year college degree.
Low-Wage Women Workers: A Profile
By Stephanie Luce AND Eve Weinbaum
The labor movement’s future success depends on its ability to organize increasing numbers of workers of color and women workers who are concentrated in low-wage jobs. Scholars and activists have focused on questions of how to organize these workers, how to promote women’s activism and develop leadership, and how to diversify union staff and leaders to better represent the workers they are organizing.
If organizing low-wage women workers is essential, then we need a better understanding of who these women workers are, and what they are doing. Who makes up this low-wage workforce? Where do they work? How do we define low wages? What has worked to raise wages and improve working conditions for these women – job training, career mobility, organizing? And what are unions doing to address the needs of this group of workers?
Women in the National Economy
More than seventy million women are now in the U.S. labor force – more than at any time in history. Women’s labor force participation rate is 59.4 percent, slightly down from its peak of sixty percent in 1999, but close to an all-time high. Six of every ten women over the age of sixteen are either employed, or currently unemployed but actively looking for work.
What Is Low-Wage Work?
There are many ways to define what counts as low-wage work. The current federal minimum wage is $5.85, and will go up in steps to $7.25 by 2009. However, this hourly wage is significantly below the wage needed for a worker with a family of four to meet the federal poverty line (FPL). In 2006, the poverty line for a family of two adults and two children was $20,444. With one worker working fifty-two weeks a year, forty hours a week, this would necessitate an hourly wage of $9.83 an hour.
The FPL hourly wage is not an ideal measure of poverty. On the one hand, families with multiple earners or alternative sources of income (such as alimony) could live above the poverty line even with one wage-earner making minimum wage. On the other hand, experts agree that the FPL is far too low to adequately reflect the true cost of living in most of the United States. A well-known review edited by Citro and Michael found that most experts believed a more accurate poverty line would be approximately one and one-half times the current FPL (150 percent). That would require an hourly wage of $14.75; a full-time worker would have to make $30,680 a year, before taxes.
But for now, we will use the FPL since it most closely reflects the hourly wages demanded in living wage campaigns and in Senator Kennedy’s current call for a federal minimum wage of $9.50 an hour. Almost one of every three women in the workforce (about thirty percent) earns less than the low hourly wage of the FPL – $9.83 an hour. By contrast, only nineteen percent of men fall below this level. An additional twenty-eight percent of women workers earn an hourly wage below $14.75 an hour – which represents 150 percent of the FPL for a family of four. This means that a strong majority of women workers, 57.2 percent, do not earn an hourly wage that most economists consider adequate to keep a family out of poverty. Women comprise the majority of low-wage workers, and women are underrepresented in the higher-wage categories as well.
Labor on the Home Front: Unionizing Home-Based Care Workers
By Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein
Once known as “the invisible workforce,” the nation’s 1.4 million home health care aides and 1.8 million home child care providers are changing the face of organized labor. These frontline caregivers meet the personal needs of those requiring assistance, from children, to the elderly, to the disabled. Disproportionately African American, Latina, and immigrant women, these low-waged workers seized national attention in 1999 when 74,000 Los Angeles home health care aides voted to enter the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), pulling off the largest successful union drive since the sit-down strikes of the Great Depression. Six years later, nearly 50,000 Illinois home child care providers followed in their footsteps.
In less than a decade, hundreds of thousands of home-based care workers have entered into coalitions with parents, senior citizens, and disability activists. They poured into the SEIU, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT), but also responded to the community organizing efforts of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), local grassroots groups, such as Brooklyn’s Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), and occupational associations, such as Milwaukee’s Providers Taking Action. They asked for respect, dignity, higher wages, and improved conditions for the users of their services. They sought “a stable job for adults so we can provide consistent care for children,” explained Chicago activist Angenita Tanner.
Only three percent of the child care workforce was unionized in 2004, but eleven states have authorized home-based child care unionization since 2005; three—Illinois, Oregon, and Washington—have signed contracts. They have gained a wide range of benefits, from health insurance and increased subsidy payments to professional training, grievance procedures, and health and safety regulations. Home-based health care attendants continue to win victories, recently in Iowa, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Discounting the underground economy of home health care aides, about thirty-five percent of the home-based health care labor force now belongs to unions.
The story of how home-based health care attendants and child care providers gained recognition as performing the care work of the welfare state illuminates the challenges of organizing a shifting service sector, especially one in which the home is the workplace and both recipients and workers move in and out of public assistance. These workers provide services for those receiving Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid, or Temporary Aid to Needy Families, but usually are not recognized as public employees. Because “public sources of revenue . . . are used to fund contracts,” explains Catherine Sullivan, the SEIU’s coordinator for long-term care, “a political organizing program is essential to win improvements.”
Lacking concentrated workforces, home-based care unions have turned to traditional community organization tactics, developing drives that more closely resemble political campaigns and neighborhood outreach movements than worksite efforts. They initially gained the right to organize through legislation and executive orders. They had to define an employer for collective bargaining purposes, pushing the government to take responsibility for this sector’s working conditions and pay, while inventing new forms of primarily public representation. They had to increase state funding for services and obtain higher reimbursement rates. Success has come, but not easily.
Will the Followers Be Led? Where Union Members Stand on Immigration
By Roger Waldinger
Immigration is roiling American politics, with ongoing controversy and no clear solution in sight. As all parties concur, the system is broken, frustrating new, would-be, and established Americans, while yielding substantial social costs and tensions from the Mexican to the Canadian borders and just about everywhere in between. Beyond this point of agreement, however, dissonance is all that can be heard. Among the voices is that of American labor. While unions have emerged as foremost advocates of immigrants’ rights, they haven’t managed to escape immigration’s divisive impact. Legalization for undocumented immigrants has widespread support across the labor movement. Far more difficult is the question of just how far to compromise in the quest for that goal, with the Change to Win coalition accepting a guest worker program as the price for legalization and the AFL-CIO unwilling to go so far.
From within the labor movement, these cleavages on how best to deal with the immigration dilemma loom large. They take on less significance in the big picture, however, where labor’s overall stance puts it at variance with the majority of the American public—which wants less, rather than more, immigration. The danger is that unions have gone too far ahead of the rank-and-file, providing the right-wing with yet another opportunity to divide the liberal base.
This paper explores this question through a detailed analysis of a 2006 survey of national opinion, conducted by the Pew Research Center, that provides the unusual opportunity to spotlight the opinions of union members. The results signal a warning light, as they show the views of union members turn out to be very different from those advanced by their leaders.
The Immigration Impasse
Immigration policy is now at an impasse, with no prospect of change until a new Congress and new President arrive in Washington in 2009. But it was not too long ago that informed observers saw a likely resolution to America’s long, contentious struggle with immigration.
George Bush entered the presidency in 2001 as a seemingly pro-immigrant Republican, precisely the type of politician whose connections to business and sensitivity to Latinos might fuse the wide-ranging coalition needed to broker an immigration deal. What looked possible, even likely, on September 10, 2001, disappeared the next day. The problem didn’t go away, of course, but the nation’s priorities changed, at least temporarily. Once attention finally returned to immigration, it became clear that the political constellation had fundamentally changed. The president, still a pro-immigrant, pro-business Republican, stood severely weakened. The Republicans’ social-conservative base, moreover, was in revolt, clamoring for draconian measures and equally dead-set against the goals of both the pro-immigrant left—legalization of undocumented workers—and pro-immigrant (business-oriented) right—importing guest workers for employment at both high- and low-skilled levels. The pro-immigrant right and left remained hopeful that comprehensive immigration reform, if supported by the president, could combine Democratic backing with sufficient Republican support to make it through Congress. For a moment, in 2006, it appeared that the social conservatives had overplayed their hand, promoting punitive legislation that triggered immigrants’ rights marches throughout the country. But the immigrants, if not voiceless, turned out to be voteless, and neither followers nor leaders could figure out what they could effectively do after marching.
The Perfect Storm of Campaign 2008
By Steve Fraser
Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate, with extreme prejudice, the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation? No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.
With Richard Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new political order first triumphed over New Deal liberalism. It was an historic victory that one-time Republican strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips memorably anointed the "emerging Republican majority." Now, that Republican "majority" finds itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no escape.
Only at moments of profound shock to the old order of things -- the Great Depression of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial war, racial confrontation, and de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s -- does this kind of upheaval become possible in a political universe renowned for its stability, banality, and extraordinary capacity to duck things that matter. The trauma must be real and it must be perceived by people as traumatic. Both conditions now apply.
War, economic collapse, and the political implosion of the Republican Party will make 2008 a year to remember.
The Politics of Fear in Reverse
Iraq is an albatross that, all by itself, could sink the ship of state. At this point, there's no need to rehearse the polling numbers that register the no-looking-back abandonment of this colossal misadventure by most Americans. No cosmetic fix, like the "surge," can, in the end, make a difference -- because large majorities decided long ago that the invasion was a fiasco, and because the geopolitical and geoeconomic objectives of the Bush administration leave no room for a genuine Iraqi nationalism which would be the only way out of this mess.
The fatal impact of the President's adventure in Iraq, however, runs far deeper than that. It has undermined the politics of fear which, above all else, had sustained the Bush administration. According to the latest polls, the Democrats who rate national security a key concern has shrunk to a percentage bordering on the statistically irrelevant. Independents display a similar "been there, done that" attitude. Republicans do express significantly greater levels of alarm, but far lower than a year or two ago.
In fact, the politics of fear may now be operating in reverse. The chronic belligerence of the Bush administration, especially in the last year with respect to Iran, and the cartoonish saber-rattling of Republican presidential candidates (whether genuine or because they believe themselves captives of the Bush legacy) is scary. Its only promise seems to be endless war for purposes few understand or are ready to salute. To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for many people now, the only thing to fear is the politics of fear itself.
Lean Times: The UAW Contract and the Crisis of Industrial Unionism in the Auto Industry
By Jeffrey S. Rothstein
For generations of Americans, the auto industry has been associated with stable, high-wage employment that provides blue-collar workers with a middle-class standard of living and a secure retirement. Within labor circles, the United Auto Workers (UAW) was the archetypal industrial union, bargaining for industry-wide agreements with the Big Three U.S. automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) that protected workers by taking labor out of competition. Certainly, these images have been fading since the early 1980s, as the gradual decline in the market share of the Big Three and the spread of non-union auto plants operated by so-called foreign automakers chipped away at union density and weakened the union’s bargaining position. The extent of that decline was laid bare in the most recent collective bargaining agreement, in which the UAW conceded key benefits and core workplace rights, permanently reshaping labor relations in the industry.
So, what happened during the most recent round of pattern bargaining between the UAW and the ever-shrinking Big Three? What did the companies win? What guarantees did the workers get in return? Why is the new contract controversial? And what does it mean for the future of labor relations in the U.S. auto industry?
Oddly enough, the drama unfolded when the UAW declared victory after a two-day strike toward the end of September 2007 and urged their members to ratify a new collective bargaining agreement with General Motors. Two weeks later, Chrysler’s workers walked picket lines for less than six hours before the union announced the company had met its demands—a claim undermined by a “minority report” issued by the chair of the bargaining committee that urged workers to reject the deal.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[ii]<!--[endif]--> After heavy lobbying by the UAW leadership, Chrysler workers narrowly voted to ratify the agreement. In November 2007, without any industrial action, Ford’s workers also accepted their new contract.
In lobbying for ratification of the agreements, UAW leaders emphasized “historic” commitments by the automakers to domestic factories and a freeze on outsourcing. For the first time, and purportedly as a direct result of the strikes, the automakers promised to make particular products at specific plants. However, most of the guarantees only call for the continued manufacturing of products already in production through their current product lifecycles, which generally gives the factories a few more years. Given the costs associated with setting up a production run, moving a product line mid-life cycle is unlikely anyway, and nothing prevents the companies from ending a production run early due to slow sales. So, while it may be the first time such product commitments have been included in the labor agreements, they do not provide much more than an air of increased job security. In fact, the ink on the agreements was barely dry before the automakers announced new workforce reductions.
Instead, what really distinguishes the new pattern agreement are two provisions that recast the relationships between and among hourly employees, the automakers, and the union. The first of these is the widely reported creation of a voluntary employee benefit association (VEBA) to administer retirees’ health insurance. The second, and perhaps more significant, change establishes a two-tier wage system under which new workers earn half as much as current ones. Unlike the controversial VEBA which, it may be argued, shields retirees from the automakers’ financial woes, there is no way for the UAW to positively spin the two-tier wage system.
Mapping the Future: Cross-Border Unionizing Strategies
By Jay Youngdahl
It has become axiomatic in the labor movement that global responses are necessary if unions are to rebound and prosper.
Fueled by private equity barons who “buy it, strip it, and flip it,” a system of global labor arbitrage, in which labor speculators skip from country to country seeking a workforce to work at a lower price, is intensifing pressure on those who labor. In response to corporate and governmental aversion to unions, union leaders throughout the world have embarked on a number of creative cross-border initiatives in an attempt to increase their bargaining power. These efforts can be divided into three major areas: changes in the organizational structure of unions and their federations; comprehensive global campaigns in support of organizing and bargaining objectives; and legal efforts that include cross border litigation and use of international and treaty law.
Structural Responses
Union bodies have engaged in forms of cross border relations for many years. Left-wing unions have communicated and collaborated with the political parties or groupings with which they were associated. Right wing unionists, including the previous administration of the AFL-CIO, pursued joint international initiatives financially sponsored by the American foreign policy apparatus. Such international joint work was an active tool in the capitalist fight against communism. However, when political solidarity on the left or on the right did not underlie cross-border work, international union relations seemed simply an excuse to provide perquisites for unions leaders, revolving around “hotels and resorts.” As Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) recently noted, “For a hundred years, too much has been about sending leaders to meet and dine together.”
The worldwide union movement is acutely aware of the need to change this paradigm and to create structures of organization, nationally and internationally, that are responsive to the globalized political and economic forces workers face today. Two trends can be identified. The first is increased attention to umbrella organizations of national unions, Global Union Federations (GUFs). In the past, many have seen GUFs as too big, clunky, and passive to be useful. However, some change can be discerned. In November 2006, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, historically the largest GUF, merged with a smaller Christian world federation of unions and several independent federations, such as the CGT of France, to form the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). The establishment of the ITUC was seen as crucial by some within the mainstream labor movement.
Earlier this decade, a number of smaller federations and individual unions in the service and technical sectors came together to form the Union Network International (UNI). At their formative meeting in Chicago, more than 1,000 leaders of service and technology unions, coming from over 140 countries, met under the banner of “Global companies require global organizing, global unions.” Presently, UNI is composed of 900 national unions representing over 15 million members in the service industries. While it is too early to know if GUFs can be a breakthrough for labor, some unions are finding their structure useful. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been especially active in UNI’s Property Services Division, seeing it as an outlet through which creative approaches to this globalized industry can be attempted and analyzed. The delicate relationship between global and local activity is front and center. National labor unions, which receive support from UNI to organize in this sector, are given great leeway to adapt strategies to their local conditions.
The Steelworkers Union Goes Global
By Ruth Needleman
How will global unionism be built? While its importance is undeniable, its formation is a story yet to unfold. The United Steelworkers union (USW), the largest manufacturing union in North America, has launched a series of initiatives from grassroots exchanges to an upcoming merger that will join over three million workers from unions in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom. All of these efforts carry strategic implications for labor’s future. Hopefully, each new form of global organizational solidarity can open a window on how unions around the world may come together to confront the power of transnational corporations.
Building Transnational Networks
Gerdau:
Working for Brazil-based Gerdau, according to Pete Savoy, president of the Beaumont, Texas, USW Local 8586, was “more like being in a prison than a workplace.” When Brother Savoy began contract negotiations in January 2005, Gerdau hired a union-busting attorney and demanded everything from a wage freeze to the elimination of work rules and seniority in the name of “flexibility.”
Before the contract expired, however, Savoy received a phone call from Fernando Lopes, leader of the Brazilian Metalworkers Federation (CNM), pledging his full support. “I’m not a travelin’ person,” Savoy recounted, “and I never realized that someone else from a third world country would stand up and file a complaint for someone they’d never met before.” When Lopes showed up in Texas, Savoy was “astonished and tickled to death.” Today Pete Savoy is a traveling man. During his contract crisis, the U.S. Gerdau leaders joined an on-going network initiated by the Brazilians in 1994. Then in 1998, in Porto Alegre, the Brazilians hosted the first international gathering of Gerdau workers.
Founded in 1901, Gerdau is one of the world’s largest producers of steel, with 26 mills and 44 fabrication plants in Canada, U.S., Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, employing 23,177 workers. Known as Gerdau Ameristeel here in the U.S., the corporation also holds 40% of the Spanish company Sidenor, has a joint venture with Kalyani Group in India, and is purchasing (for about $1.5 billion) U.S. Quanex Corporation, whose steel division is McSteel, with 1,600 workers. Quanex operates 3 minimills (2 in Michigan and 1 in Arkansas) and 6 additional mill operations, 2 in Michigan, 2 in Indiana, 1 in Ohio and 1 in Wisconsin (Inside Indiana Business).
That Brazilian Metalworkers carved the path for international cooperation is not surprising, given their long history of forging alliances to fight oppression, from the military dictatorship to the neoliberal theft of their nation’s resources. The country’s current president, Lula, came out of this union, and the CNM played a central role in the founding of the Workers Party and in the many national mass social movements. Unions in Brazil practice an inclusive form of solidarity that engages all working people, members and non-members alike. When the CNM called the first international meeting of Gerdau workers, Canadian and Chilean unions participated. The Canadian Steelworkers followed that up with a series of exchange visits, involving local leaders from both countries. Then in 2002, the USW initiated a North American Gerdau Unity Council that includes Gerdau workers from Canada and the U.S. The Unity Council now meets regularly, coordinates on-going international work, and publishes a newsletter.
No Sweat? Corporate Social Responsibility and the Dilemma of Anti-Sweatshop Activism
By Jeff Ballinger
It’s time that labor activists come to acknowledge what some prominent business scholars have concluded: that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has proven wholly ineffective. The website of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Business introduces its video Making Globalization Work for All with the following blunt assessment: "These speakers share a bleak perspective: A decade's-worth of high-profile efforts to change sweatshop conditions in overseas apparel factories hasn't worked."
Notably, Richard Locke of Sloan is the person responsible for the website’s “bleak assessment.” Locke’s work is significant because Nike, an early-adopter of CSR strategy, accorded him unprecedented access and his research came at a time when the shoe and apparel giant was making public fairly reliable factory-by-factory audit information.
In late-2005, Locke invited Nike's top Corporate Social Responsibility official, Hannah Jones, to the Sloan School where she said, "There's no point in Nike having 96 monitors on a factory floor day in and day out monitoring overtime, if overtime is being caused way up the supply chain. So Nike is scrutinizing its own behavior as a buyer. We must incentivize suppliers to become part of business decision-making." The “forced overtime” issue was identified as a major concern in Nike contract-factories as far back as 1991 (“World Shoe Giants Rape Worker Rights” – headline in Media Indonesia newspaper). Nike’s latest CSR report posits the modest goal of diminished “forced overtime” by the year 2011.
Similarly, in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter’s Russell Mokhiber, Professor Ronnie Chatterji of Duke University says, "After years of relative futility and millions of dollars spent, progressives who are concerned about market failures and their impact on the common good need to do the responsible thing and end their fixation on corporate social responsibility. It is time to recognize that most market failures can only be solved by governments and multilateral agreements and progressives need to redirect activist pressure appropriately."
What Went Wrong
How is it that fifteen years of anti-sweatshop activism failed both consumers and workers so miserably? A great deal of the blame must be apportioned to CSR strategies that changed the media frame away from the workers who continue their struggle for dignity and fundamental rights amid still-appalling conditions. Now, the focus is on debates over vague and unenforceable corporate codes of conduct, reports by ubiquitous consultants and compromised academics, and conferences held thousands of miles away from the factories.
During the late-1970s, the big-name brands and department stores began outsourcing production to contractors in the most corrupt and repressive places in the world. At about the same time, changes in information-sharing technologies made it possible for activists to link up with nascent unions and groups of protesting workers. While business school case studies were heaping praise on corporations for shedding responsibility for manufacturing, the seeds were being sown for a tremendous upheaval that would come to fruition in the mid-1980s, when the contractors' brutal practices were exposed.
The Sound of One Hand Clapping: Labor’s Silence on Union Media Democracy
By Martin Fishgold
Labor media democracy has never been the subject of a coffee table book and it never will be. In the 1980s and 1990s, when unions were active players in liberation movements like South Africa’s, democracy of all kinds was often discussed and seemed a distinct possibility. Now, although some insiders still discuss the role of the labor media, and a few even discuss media democracy, not many seem interested. Has the subject become a luxury item as unions struggle to organize new workers and survive? Does anyone care about a democratic labor media?
Thousands of labor union newspapers, magazines, and newsletters reach into tens of thousands of homes and touch the lives of millions of workers and their families every day. Most are small and folksy, produced by volunteers working in small locals. They educate members from labor’s point of view with stories on the workplace, the economy, labor politics, and more. Most march in lockstep with the union leadership and are used as political tools by that leadership; few print controversial letters to the editor—often, the editor is also the union president—and most don’t encourage dialogue, or differences of opinion, or tolerate criticism of the union. Almost all fail to report accurately on internal union business.
But perhaps their greatest fault is that most union publications are boring and don’t engage the membership on controversial issues that affect unions and union members such as (like) abortion, corruption, homosexuality, the war in Iraq, and others, creating a void that is often filled by right-wing talk shows. If the labor media was more dynamic, more democratic, and took more risks, some say, the labor movement would follow suit, and vice versa.
Recently, I judged a journalism contest for a large international union. Although the quality of the writing from the local publications was satisfactory and there was an attempt to engage the membership—more than the glossy, multi-colored magazines from the international unions do—there was very little militancy, depth, or analysis in these publications, and there was almost no input from the membership. The majority of these papers featured too many uninspired columns by the officers on bread and butter issues like grievances. Unions and their media have become too conservative and docile, and consequently the membership has become more disengaged and passive.
Playing House Organs
One can understand why labor media democracy is rarely discussed within the union movement. For one thing, union leaders don’t seem to want a strong, independent press that asks uncomfortable questions, writes stories on controversial issues, critiques itself and fosters open discussions with the membership in the form of opinion columns and letters to the editor. Years ago, the labor media was more exciting and controversial, but that has disappeared with the sound bite, and with the emergence of corporate America and corporate unionism. Union leaders now like to think of labor communicators as their house public relations staff, not as journalists.
Agencia de Empleos: Three Days in the Life of Temporary Worker
By David Van Arsdale
During the 1990s, I watched factories and the full-time industrial jobs associated with them disappear from my hometown of Syracuse, New York. As the factories left, temporary-help companies moved in, eager to dispatch the jobless and underemployed workers to temporary jobs for a fee or a percentage of their wages. My friends and family turned to these agencies for work and found themselves a part of the growing millions of temporary-help workers in the United States. In an attempt to understand this new kind of work and its effect on my hometown, I began to study it from the inside by becoming a temporary-help worker myself, which eventually led to a dissertation that I wrote for Syracuse University.
Today, temporary-help companies include three of the four largest employers in the United States: Manpower, Kelly Services, and Labor Ready.<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[iii]<!--[endif]--> Together, these companies employ nearly 3.4 million temporary workers, and they are rapidly expanding across the industrialized world. Their success is largely predicated on the shift to flexible employment methods, whereby companies call upon temporary-supply companies whenever they need workers. By taking the reader through three days in the life of a temporary-help worker (or day laborer, if you like), this essay will show how this kind of flexible employment works, particularly among Latino immigrant temporary workers in New York City.
In recent decades, temporary-help employment has grown at ten times the rate of overall employment, making it the fastest growing job-producing industry in the United States. In neighborhoods with surpluses of new and underemployed workers, it is not uncommon to find many competing temporary agencies. A walk down any major street in a Latino neighborhood of New York City displays one agencia de empleo (employment agency) after another. Furthermore, in the back rooms of many storefronts there are (often start-up) temporary agencies that can not be seen from the street. All agencies compete against each other for workers and clients looking for workers. With many agencies to choose from, these clients shop for the most affordable and dependable labor pools. Some of the agencies supply undocumented workers, albeit sometimes unknowingly. Normally, the companies do not investigate as to the legal status of their temporary workforce.
Some temp agencies also hire out workers to other temp agencies. In this instance, workers often pay fees to both agencies. For example, I worked for one agencia de empleos (let’s call it employer A) that hired me out to another temporary agency (employer B), which in turn employed me to work at a plastics factory (employer C). Employer A charged me for transportation to employer B, which charged employer C three dollars per hour of work that I completed. In addition, employer A charged employer B a flat fee of ten dollars for one eight-hour shift. That ten-dollar fee was deducted directly from my paycheck. A myriad of groups make money off of the vulnerable status of temporary-help workers. Furthermore, if those workers are recent immigrants or undocumented, their vulnerability is exacerbated, making them more profitable to agencies and the companies that use them.
Economic Prospects
By Robert Pollin
The collapse at the end of 2007 of the U.S. housing bubble and the speculative market for subprime mortgage loans demonstrates, yet again, the simple point that financial markets should never be allowed to operate without tight regulations. The only thing preventing today’s financial markets from experiencing a 1929-style collapse is government bailout operations. These include the Federal Reserve pumping cheap credit into the distressed markets and the federal government expanding the fiscal deficit to inject more spending into the economy.
Yet U.S. politicians—Democrats and Republicans alike—began deregulating the U.S. financial system in the 1970s based on the contention that the regulations devised during the 1930s Depression were not appropriate to contemporary conditions, and that financial markets could operate more effectively in a free-market setting.
The loud chorus of politicians and economists advocating financial deregulation over the past generation have had one point on their side: that the financial system has become infinitely more complex since the 1930s. This is evident from the fact that something that had been as simple as local Savings & Loans making home mortgages in their communities—recall Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life—has now been converted into a speculative global market. But it doesn’t follow that, because the old regulations had become outmoded, financial markets should be free to operate unregulated. What we really need is a new regulatory system that, given current conditions, is capable of promoting both financial market stability and widespread access to affordable credit.
How Did We Get Here?
There are new aspects of this most recent financial crisis relative to the scores of previous crises that have erupted regularly throughout the history of capitalism. The most prominent new feature resulted from something that was supposed to benefit working families—that is, creating opportunities for families with less than stellar credit records to obtain mortgages and buy their own homes. These opportunities for “subprime” borrowers emerged after Wall Street began bundling together thousands of mortgages and treating the bundles as securities that, like stocks and bonds, could trade freely on global financial markets.
The idea behind bundling mortgages into marketable securities is that the local bank or S&L that lends you money to buy a home does not hold onto your loan once you get your money. Rather, they sell the loan to a big financial institution, like the government-sponsored agencies Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, who, in turn, bundle thousands of individual mortgages into securities. Fannie or Freddie then sell these mortgage-backed securities to banks, hedge funds, and other market players.
When thousands of mortgages are packaged into one security, the dangers of lending to higher-risk subprime borrowers were supposed to decline. This is because, within a large portfolio of mortgages, the losses that lenders would incur from the small share of borrowers who are delinquent or in default would be offset by the much larger proportion of borrowers who are making payments on time.
But the logic here is deeply flawed. Citigroup and Merrill Lynch were two of the biggest global players in this market, holding huge pools of subprime mortgages. But it never followed that the riskiness of their holdings should diminish as a result. In fact, the opposite turns out to have been the case—that the fortunes of most subprime borrowers rose and fell together with the housing market’s boom and bust cycle. The difficulties that borrowers faced of meeting monthly payments were pervasive, not a matter of isolated individual cases. Citigroup and Merrill both experienced unprecedented losses in 2007 as a result.
Caught in the Web
By Kim Phillips-Fein
Rotten Tomatoes
Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation focused the attention of activists on the conditions under which meat for the fast food industry is produced. But although hamburger patties and chicken breasts are usually the featured items in TV ads for McDonald’s and Wendy’s, there’s more than just meat to fast food. The thin slices of tomato and shreds of lettuce that accompany the hamburgers at McDonald’s or Burger King are grown and harvested by workers laboring in conditions nearly as awful as those in the Midwestern meatpacking plants chronicled by Schlosser.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is an organization of low-wage workers in the Immokalee region of Florida, most of who are employed in the state’s agricultural industries (especially citrus and tomatoes—many of the nation’s fast food companies are major purchasers of Florida tomatoes). Most CIW members are immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala and Haiti. The Southern Florida group began in 1993, with small groups of workers meeting to talk about how to better their working conditions and their lives. Since then, the CIW has led major campaigns to improve wages for workers in the tomato fields, where wages average $10,000 a year, and to prevent involuntary servitude and debt peonage.
The group has also helped to lead investigations of employers that have broken the 13th Amendment by threatening farm workers with death if they tried to leave their plantations, violently assaulting bus drivers who offered rides to workers seeking to leave, and keeping workers under armed guard while paying them as little as $20 a week for 6-day weeks at 10-12 hours a day. The Department of Justice has worked with CIW to build its cases against employers involved in such examples of “modern-day slavery,” and has won a number of its prosecutions. But despite its successes challenging the farmers in court, the CIW believes that the real problem lies in the economic conditions that create a market for such labor practices—the predominance of fast food companies that “profit from the artificially low cost of produce picked by workers in sweatshop, and, in the worst cases, slavery conditions.” To bring an end to involuntary servitude in the tomato and citrus fields, the CIW believes that an active and engaged community of workers must bring pressure to bear on the companies (like Burger King) that are the largest purchasers of agricultural goods, and which can leverage their power to demand changes in how growers treat their workers.
The CIW website contains a wealth of information not only about the organization and its campaigns, but about working conditions for low-wage agricultural workers more generally. Updated frequently with news reports of interest to workers’ advocates, the site also features a “virtual tour” consisting of photographs of Immokalee workers’ homes and the plantations where they labor. There’s also a terrific description of CIW’s success in pressuring Taco Bell to pay higher rates for its tomatoes, and Burger King’s attempts to avoid paying higher prices by hiding behind an employer-controlled monitoring program that claims to improve conditions for workers but really doesn’t do much at all. The site is a great resource for anyone interested in conditions for agricultural workers and other low-wage workers in America. Check it out at http://www.ciw-online.org/.
Mis(Understanding) the White Working Class
Reviewed by Jack Metzgar
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War
Crown Publishers, 2007
By Joe Bageant
I don’t believe Joe Bageant’s portrait of white working-class life in Winchester, Virginia, for the same reason I do believe Tolstoy’s portraits of 19th century Russian aristocrats. I have no experience with people anything like those in the great Russian novels, but Tolstoy’s characters have the feel and frustrating complexity of real people who resist quick judgments.
Conversely, even though I have direct experience of white working-class life over the same decades as Bageant’s, some of it just up the road in South Central Pennsylvania, the people he describes don’t feel real to me. Nobody is as one-dimensional, as devoid of what Bageant calls “interior lives,” as the people who are occasions for the clever one-liners in Deer Hunting with Jesus.
Though I wasn’t hoping for Tolstoy as I began reading Deer Hunting, I was bitterly disappointed because Bageant’s stated mission in this book is important, and he is well-positioned to carry it out. The mission: “How in the hell can it be that one part of a nation [what he calls the middle-class “liberal elite”] knows so little about the lives of the other [the Republican-voting white working class]? What great illusion in the theater of American life holds us so captive that we cannot even see those around us, much less persuade them not to vote against their own best interests?” (16-17). So I was hoping for something more humanly nuanced than Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? and maybe something half as good as the contemporary poetry of working-class life by writers like Jim Daniels and Diane Gilliam Fisher.
Bageant is a snappy, engaging writer in the smart-ass-with-vulnerability mode I enjoy. He grew up in Winchester as “white trash, redneck, and cracker,” fully educated in the blood of both deer and Christ. After high school, he did a stint in the Navy and then the Ken Kesey thing in Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon, eventually developing a journalism career that included writing magazine articles about Allen Ginsburg and Timothy Leary and editing Military History Review. His father, now dead, was an auto mechanic at local gas stations, and his 30-something son works at what’s left of the Rubbermaid factory in Winchester, where Joe also worked briefly during better times 30 years ago. His brother, Mike, is pastor of the Shenandoah Bible Baptist Church at 25401 Dale Earnhardt Lane in Winchester. His mother is in a nursing home there – not one for the poorest of the poor, but the joyless “middling sort” that most of us hope never to use for ourselves or our mothers. He moved back home in 2001, and though he doesn’t say why, he turned the experience into a research project to explain the cracker white working-class to the liberal elite.
The problem is that he is overly conscious of his liberal elite audience, and not very curious about working-class values and ways of thinking. He knows what his audience will laugh at, like the address of his brother’s church, and what they’ll be shocked by, so that’s what he pays attention to.
The Reel Watts
Reviewed by Peter Rachleff
Killer of Sheep
Directed by Charles Burnett
Milestone Film and Video, 2007 release [orig. 1977]), black and white, 80 minutes
According to film buffs, Killer of Sheep is either the most outstanding obscure film ever made in the U.S., or the most obscure outstanding film. Either way, you should not only see it, but you should purchase it for classroom and other educational uses as soon as possible. Labor historians, working-class studies scholars, and labor activists will get as much from this stunning film as the aficionados.
Killer of Sheep was never intended for commercial distribution or public viewing. Charles Burnett, a young African American filmmaker pursuing a Master of Fine Arts degree at UCLA in the 1970s, wrote, directed, shot, scored, and edited this film on a year’s worth of weekends, largely with an amateur cast (including members of his extended family), borrowed 16 millimeter equipment, and black and white film scavenged from local studios. He set it in his own community (Watts, part of South Central Los Angeles, site of the 1964 riot/uprising), and he centered it on the kinds of people he knew. “I come from a working-class environment,” Burnett explained to an interviewer, “and I wanted to express what the realities were.”
Burnett was part of a cohort of black filmmakers at UCLA, women and men, who were reacting against Hollywood’s “gangster” representation of African Americans in the “blaxploitation” films which gained commercial success in the early 1970s. These new young filmmakers not only sought to make films with political themes and/or realistic characters and content, but they also challenged the hyped-up aesthetics of “blockbuster” films. They wanted to feature different kinds of characters, in different kinds of stories, told in different ways. Killer of Sheep, according to film scholars Sojin Kim and Mark Livengood, is built on “characters negotiating the ebb and flow of daily life – the struggle to relate to lovers and children, the joy and frustration of payday and the fading satisfaction of money in the pocket, and the varying abilities of people to create and maintain lives within social networks.”
This film seemed destined to remain an underground classic, almost an urban legend. Burnett completed it in 1973 and earned his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree that year. But he did not screen the film publicly until 1977 and, even then, only in a dozen or so African American community centers and churches, a few college campuses, and a couple of times on PBS. The complications and costs of securing permission to use his creative musical score, which drew on blues classics by Dinah Washington, Little Walter, Paul Robeson, and others, scared off commercial distributors and consigned the film to a netherworld of grainy prints screened in non-theater settings. Nevertheless, the film’s reputation spread, and it was on this basis that Burnett was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1988. In 1990, the Library of Congress placed Killer of Sheep among the first 50 films entered in the National Film Registry for its historical significance, and, in 2002, the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the 100 essential films of all time. Despite the acclaim, the film not only remained unreleased, but its archival prints were reported to be beginning to decay (to “go to vinegar,” as the film experts say).
Leave the Driving to Us
Reviewed By Steve Early
Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City
By Biju Mathew
Cornell University Press, 2008
Outside The Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike
By Deepa Kumar
University Of Illinois Press, 2007
In the late 1990s, it looked, for a while, like organized labor was making a comeback, particularly as a voice for contingent workers. As Deepa Kumar recounts in Outside the Box, 185,000 Teamsters went into battle against United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1997, under recently re-elected reform leadership. The result was a successful ten-day strike that protested mistreatment of part-timers not only at UPS but throughout the U.S. Still basking in the glow of his own election two years before, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney applauded the walk-out because it demonstrated the much broader appeal of unions when they defend the interests of all workers. As Sweeney noted, “you could make a million house calls, run a thousand television commercials, stage a hundred strawberry rallies [for the United Farm Workers], and still not come close to doing what the UPS strike did for organizing.” In 1998, as Biju Mathew reminds us in Taxi, another group of drivers—24,000 cabbies—staged an equally inspiring work stoppage in New York City. Theirs lasted only a day but showed that a group of “independent contractors”—the Taxi Workers Alliance--could make gains though lobbying, publicity, and direct action even when deprived of formal collective bargaining rights.
Last September, nearly a decade after the Alliance successfully challenged then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, TWA members again stopped work, producing what the N.Y. Times called “frustrating waits on corners, long lines at airports, and angry exchanges” over whether cabs should have GPS devices and credit card machines. Drivers contended that the latter device would penalize them financially, but were unable to stop the introduction of either form of “new technology.” Other unions rallied behind the TWA, which has become the first “workers’ center” in the country to affiliate with a big city central labor council. In nearly twenty other cities, cabbies similarly lacking in coverage under the National Labor Relations Act are now organizing TWAs modeled on New York‘s. Meanwhile, the much bigger and stronger Teamsters union—now under different leadership—celebrated the tenth anniversary of its UPS strike by bargaining away much of what it won on pensions and part-timing in 1997. The rank-and-file involvement, internal communication, and creative PR tactics described by Kumar were all jettisoned in favor of what Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) calls “the most secretive negotiations in Teamster history.”
Notwithstanding the different post-scripts to their books, Kumar and Mathew have both produced case studies of lasting value. The workers involved represent two ends of the spectrum of working-class life and organization in the U.S.
Out of the Mainstream: Books and Films You May Have Missed
By Matt Witt
Army of None
By Aimee Allison and David Solnit
Seven Stories Press, 2007
This practical guide shows how the U.S. military uses access to public school classrooms to make false promises to working-class children in order to get them to enlist – from college tuition benefits a majority of recruits will never receive to empty assurances that they aren’t likely to be sent to Iraq. As part of its $4 billion annual recruiting effort, the military has created a database of 30 million targeted 16 to 25 year olds that includes information about their family, ethnic background, work and school history, and much more. The book describes a variety of successful local tactics that have been used to challenge and counteract the increasingly desperate military effort to draw young people in.
Bread and Roses, Too
By Katherine Paterson
Clarion, 2007
A well crafted, 270-page historical novel for junior high and high school readers focuses on two children in their early teens who are caught up in the great textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912. The author makes the characters real by giving them faults and dilemmas instead of turning them into one-dimensional heroes.
Death at the Old Hotel
By Con Lehane
St. Martin’s/Minotaur, 2007
The heroes of this contemporary murder mystery are Irish reformers fighting union and Mob corruption in New York hotels. The author draws on his experience both as a union staffer and as a bartender in New York.
Disability and Business
By Charles A. Riley II
University Press of New England, 2007
Setting aside issues of ethics and morality, a professor of business journalism argues that corporations should employ and market to people with disabilities as a way to increase profits.
Global Unions
Edited by Kate Bronfenbrenner
Cornell University Press, 2007
Ten scholars present frank research on the opportunities and obstacles illustrated by recent efforts at transnational union collaboration in various parts of the world, with examples drawn from agriculture, longshoring, manufacturing, food processing, and the SEIU’s global partnerships in service sectors.
Going Down Jericho Road
By Michael K. Honey
W.W. Norton, 2007
This thoroughly researched story of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike that was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last campaign recalls a time when unions like AFSCME were closely tied to the civil rights movement’s moral crusade.
Highway 99
Edited by Stan Yogi, Gayle Mak, and Patricia Wakida
Heyday, 2007
An outstanding 500-page, multicultural collection of poems, stories, and excerpts from longer works focuses on life in California’s Central Valley.
Monongah
By Davitt McAteer
West Virginia University Press, 2007
One of the nation’s leading experts on coal mine health and safety spent decades researching the 1907 mine disaster in West Virginia that killed nearly 500 men and boys. Like most mine deaths that occur today, these were preventable if the company had put safety first.
More Unequal
By Michael D. Yates
NYU Press, 2007
Fourteen useful essays challenge ways of thinking about class in America that most of us learn in school and from the news media.
Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States
Edited by Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto
Duke University Press, 2007
A comprehensive reader with 26 essays examines in more than 670 pages, the issue of reparations to African Americans for slavery and segregation, from the reasoning behind it, to possible ways to implement it, to ideas for building a movement to achieve it.
Selling Anxiety
By Caryl Rivers
University Press of New England, 2007
The news media bounce from one scare story for women to the next, many centered on the horrible things that may happen to their children while they are out working. A journalism professor persuasively describes the sexism and pseudo-science behind most media coverage of women and asks why the real economic and social issues women face are ignored.
Strange as This Weather Has Been
By Ann Pancake
Shoemaker Hoard, 2007
An engrossing novel that tells the story of a family whose lives, like the West Virginia mountains they love, are torn up by strip mining. It’s a book that could only be written so vividly by someone who grew up in Appalachia and spent many hours interviewing local people before writing.
Surviving Iraq
By Elise Forbes Tripp
Interlink, 2007
The fact that the 30 men and women who are interviewed in this book after serving in Iraq have the full range of political views gives this oral history particular credibility as a powerful statement about the brutal effect of the invasion on all concerned.
The Argument
By Matt Bai
Penguin Press, 2007
A New York Times Magazine writer contends that it’s not enough for progressives to remind working Americans of economic pressures they feel in their daily lives. Activists must also put forward a credible argument or analysis about why working people have to work so much harder to keep their heads above water. Republicans have advanced a coherent argument ever since the days of Barry Goldwater, while Democrats have not done so since the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. Bai got inside access to liberal billionaires, bloggers, MoveOn staff, SEIU President Andy Stern, and others who aspire to remake progressive politics, but he didn’t find a more developed argument there than among traditional Democratic politicians.
The Cost of Privilege
By Chip Smith
Camino, 2007
A left-wing working group has produced a textbook on white supremacy and racism that begins with a historical review and ends with a discussion of what readers can do.
The Real All Americans
By Sally Jenkins
Doubleday, 2007
In the early 1900s, shortly after the U.S. military finished taking over Native American land, a former Army officer set up a boarding school in Carlisle, PA, for the sons and daughters of tribal leaders. The school eventually developed one of America’s top teams in the newly emerging sport of football, introducing the passing game and innovative offensive plays that went beyond the rugby-like, straight-ahead running that dominated until that time. After defeating top teams such as Harvard and Yale, Carlisle reached its sports pinnacle by beating Army’s team from West Point.
The Secret History of the War on Cancer
By Dr. Devra Davis
Basic Books, 2007
Pointing out that one in two men and one in three women living today will have cancer of some type, this masterpiece by the head of environmental oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute provides a readable account of the facts about how environmental, consumer product, and work-related causes of cancer have been deliberately covered up for decades while the public is distracted by P.R. campaigns posing as a “War on Cancer.” Davis asks whether emerging potential hazards such as cell phones or Ritalin will be the next examples of exposures that are reassuringly pronounced safe until it is too late. Woven into the book is the story of Davis’s own parents who died of cancer after years of exposure to chemicals in a steel town in Pennsylvania.
Unmarketable
By Anne Elizabeth Moore
The New Press, 2007
The former co-editor of the magazine Punk Planet explores efforts by big corporations to exploit independent and underground youth culture for marketing purposes.
U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition
By Kim Moody
Verso, 2007
One of the founders of Labor Notes argues that the decline in living standards and rights for working people will be reversed not by projects such as Change to Win that are led by national organizations but instead by local rank-and-file union reform movements and worker centers that support immigrant organizing.
FILMS
No End in Sight
http://www.noendinsightmovie.com/, 2007
U.S. military and State Department officials who were in charge in Iraq during the first phases of the occupation detail what they say were a series of disastrous strategic decisions by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush – decisions they claim they advised against at the time.
Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
http://www.jimbrownfilms.com/, 2007
This feature film profiles the singer who lent his talents to nearly every major social movement of the 20th century. It shows how he tapped into the desire of audiences of all ages and types to sing along, often in harmony, rather than sitting in silence while one person performed. The popularity of karaoke among many young people today suggests that the interest in participation is still alive and well, yet virtually none of Seeger’s successors as socially conscious musicians have followed in his footsteps by leading their audiences in song.
Supreme Injustices
http://www.allianceforjustice.org/, 2007
This free 14-minute film focuses on two of the many backward steps taken by the Bush Supreme Court. One involves a woman from Alabama who was paid less than her male counterparts but denied a remedy by a convoluted Bush Court decision. The second was the overturning of a voluntary school integration plan in Louisville.
The Motherhood Manifesto
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/, 2007
This hour-long film, financed by contributions from the SEIU and AFSCME, shows the need for public policies that support working parents, including paid family leave, flexible hours, benefits for part-timers, quality after-school programs, and improvements for both the providers and users of child care services.
The Trials of Darryl Hunt
http://www.breakthrufilms.org/, 2006
In 1984, a 19-year-old African American man in North Carolina was convicted by a white jury in the rape and murder of a white woman. Ten years later, DNA evidence showed he was not the right man. It took ten more years for him to be released.