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If Not Now, When?
By Dan La Botz
Open Borders exists as a popular sentiment and an unspoken ideal among immigrant rights activists and segments of the labor movement. It is expressed in the widely used slogan sin fronteras (without borders), and the massive demonstrations of 2006 saw the appearance of a new motto, No person is illegal, a phrase that suggests that we should reject the inhumane laws that govern borders and migration policy. Many of us feel that borders and walls, midnight raids on homes, and roundups at workplaces are immoral and unjust.
The idea of Open Borders arose through cross-border organizations and international solidarity movements that, since the 1970s, have reached across national frontiers to join hands with unions, women’s groups, and environmental organizations abroad. Labor unionists speak of our “sisters and brothers” in other countries to indicate that workers are part of the same family of international labor—a movement without borders. We see the slogan of Open Borders begin to take shape as a strategic conception, an alternate global route to worker power and a more just world.
Not in Our Generation
By Ana Avendaño
For the past few years, the United States has been in the midst of a heated emotional and polarizing debate over immigration reform. The loudest voices in this debate have come from the extreme right, whose favorite slogan has become, “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” They have quite successfully been able to frame the immigration policy debate in “moral” terms, getting the media to focus on the “legality” of the undocumented, and opposing any legalization program as an undeserving “amnesty.”
The leaders of this side of the debate have a simple solution: close the borders. We’re being invaded, they argue. Mexicans are trying to “reconquer” the United States. Foreigners are displacing American workers, or, as Lou Dobbs likes to say, breaking into our country and stealing our jobs. According to them, any more immigration threatens not only our culture, but the entire American way of life.
Keep on Truckin’: The Supply Chain Motors Down the Low Road
By David Bensman
If you visit any of the leading ports in the United States—in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, New Jersey, or Miami—and you talk to the (mostly) men who drive trucks into and out of the port, you will hear a story of exploitation that illuminates how neoliberal globalization and America’s thirty-year-old deregulation policy have combined to create destructive competition in low-wage labor markets.
When a worker decides he wants to become a port trucker, and participate in a trucking sector that collects $623 billion, or 84.3 percent of the total revenue collected by all transport modes, he will often go to a port-trucking company to ask for work. If he has a clean driving record and a commercial driver’s license, the company manager may suggest that he visit a truck dealer, where the worker will be able to select a truck cab for his new career as an owner-operator. (If he doesn’t have legal documentation, the first step will be to buy fake IDs.) The new driver will then pick out a cab—usually an old one to minimize monthly payments—and sign a lease. If he is unlucky enough to have landed in the hands of an unscrupulous—or low-road—trucking company, his boss will then take the lease back to headquarters. If his company is one of the better ones, he will keep the lease, and the burden of paying for not only his rig, but truck maintenance and fuel costs as well.
Neutrality Agreements: Innovative, Controversial, and Labor’s Hope for the Future
By Richard W. Hurd
Over the past ten years there has been a notable shift in union organizing strategies. Once the exception, organizing conducted under the umbrella of negotiated neutrality agreements has become the preferred method in the drive to reverse decline and build union density. This approach allows unions to avoid the pitfalls of traditional organizing conducted under the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) framework, which enables employers’ aggressive resistance to unionization. Typically, management’s anti-union campaigns include: mandatory captive audience meetings where the employer condemns the union, one-on-one meetings with supervisors where workers are grilled regarding their union sentiments, firing of selected active union supporters, and legal delays. Instead, if unions are able to secure a binding commitment from the employer to remain neutral, organizing is relatively straightforward and in most cases the union is able to win majority support and bargaining rights.
Pursuit of employer neutrality and the closely associated card check route to certification, where the union is recognized with a majority of workers signing union cards, are not confined to the realm of actual organizing campaigns. Proposed changes in labor law to endorse this approach have elevated neutrality to the top of organized labor’s list of political priorities. The spread of neutrality agreements and labor’s strong push to amend the law have been spurred by notable cases of organizing success. But this success has invited scrutiny, and attacks from the right and the left. For example, legitimate questions have been raised about the top-down nature of some specific Service Employees International Union (SEIU) neutrality agreements. A careful look at the criticisms aimed at SEIU raises more general questions about the wisdom of those neutrality-based organizing campaigns that neither engage workers in struggle nor build union solidarity.
Labor’s New Regional Strategy: The Rebirth of Central Labor Councils
By Amy B. Dean and David A. Reynolds
The 2005 AFL-CIO/Change-to-Win debate was notable not simply for what was discussed, but also what was not. It focused on how to build one crucial elements of worker power: workplace organization and the collective bargaining strength that comes with it. Absent, however, was discussion of a second necessary dimension: regional power built in the community. Yet, historically in the United States, and around the world, geographic power has been necessary to increase workplace power.
For example, the breakthrough battle of the 1930s—the General Motors sit-down strike—would have been lost had the infant industrial labor movement not been able to mobilize community support in the company town of Flint and establish enough political strength to elect a Michigan governor who pledged not to use the National Guard against striking workers. In a similar way, in 1941 the Ford Motor Company might have succeeded in using racial divisions to break union organizing had black-white unity not been built in the community and the workplace. In both cases, regional power reached beyond the immediate needs of turning out supportive local crowds and deactivating government repression. Strategically, placed-based organizing established a forward-looking social vision of economic justice and democracy that made workplace battles not only the parochial concerns of isolated workers, but also fundamental struggles over America’s future. Can organized labor recover today without articulating a similar twenty-first century social vision?
Adding Insult to Injury: Wal-Mart’s Workers Compensation Scam
By Ellen Rosen
The heavy lifting at Wal-Mart begins at the distribution center even before the merchandise “hits” the stores. Billie Sue Masters and her husband both work at a Wal-Mart distribution center in central Michigan. The distribution center, she says is as large as six football fields, and employs about one thousand people, about three hundred women and seven hundred men. Billie and her husband travel sixty miles to work each way, working three twelve-hour shifts a week. In 2002, both earned $14.70 an hour, about $27,000 a year each. The Masters’ feel this long commute is worthwhile, because there are few other jobs that pay this much in rural Michigan.
The image that business journals suggest is that Wal-Mart’s high-tech operation creates an environment in which, when functioning properly, machinery does the heavy work. Yet, the descriptions of forklifts and conveyor belts automatically transporting huge cases of goods from one part of the store to the trucks waiting outside only tell part of the story about what goes on during a typical day at a Wal-Mart distribution center or store. The other unseen and untold lies in the interactions of employees with the technology and with each other.
Return to the Jungle: The Rise and Fall of Meatpacking Work
By Daniel Calamuci
The work of slaughtering and processing pigs and cows for the American consumer has always been dangerous, labor intensive work. Yet, from the end of World War II until the 1980’s, meatpacking work came to be one of the better low-skilled manufacturing jobs in the U.S. A strong progressive union bargained some of the best manufacturing contracts in the country while simultaneously crafting pioneering strategies to end discrimination. For a time, it seemed that Sinclair’s Jungle was a thing of the past.
Since the mid 1980’s, meatpacking is again a nightmarish workplace as past gains for workers have disappeared. Wages in 2005 in some of the nation’s largest plants dropped below the wages of worker in 1980 (in real dollars). The once strong and militant union disappeared, replaced by a union that bargained concessionary contracts, failed to organize new plants, and had no response for these extraordinary changes. The industry, emboldened by its success, has fought the union using legal challenges, violence, race baiting, and immigrant bashing.
Welfare Reform: The Untold Story
By Robert Cherry
For many on the Left, the 1996 welfare legislation completed the Reaganite agenda to dramatically cut government aid to the poor by relying on unfounded negative racial stereotypes—welfare queens driving around in Cadillacs—to destroy the social safety net won by the working class through New Deal legislation. Welfare legislation undermined the social norm that safety net programs should be entitlements not subject to administrative judgments that distinguish between the so-called “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. In addition, entitlements provided limited safeguards meant to constrain caseworkers and local agencies from implementing welfare policies in a discriminatory and mean-spirited manner. In New York City, Mayor Guiliani undertook a particularly insensitive strategy of using workfare instead of job training, and using diversionary policies that, until they were legally overturned, kept needy families from receiving immediate aid.
This paper does not question the sincerity of those who voiced their opposition to welfare reform in 1996. Few analysts could have anticipated the job boom and the expansion of employment supports that occurred after its adoption. But the strong economy and funding provisions of welfare legislation led almost all states to enhance child care funding, provide tax subsidies to supplement wages, and fund educational initiatives. Most important, these initiatives provided evidence for universal policies that can benefit a broad group of working mothers most of whom will never receive cash assistance in their lifetime.
Playing With Numbers: How to Make Welfare Reform Look Good
By Sanford F. Schram
Robert Cherry evidently suffers from the “Success Story syndrome.” It is a bit like the “Stockholm syndrome,” where you identify with your captors, but in the case of the Success Story syndrome, you identify with the policy makers who enacted welfare reform rather than the people who have survived it. Cherry’s article summarizes his new book, Welfare Transformed: Universalizing Family Policies that Work, which indicates that he had already succumbed to this condition some time ago. His book exhibits all the symptoms, especially given how it combines interviews with policy makers, stories about recipients, and statistics about low-income individuals and families, single mothers in particular. Cherry calls the women who left welfare for work success stories, but his main success story is about how welfare reform worked to decrease dependency and promote work and family values. It is as if the interviews with the policy makers guided which statistics and stories to emphasize. The article is a condensation of this style of argument.
Cherry is by no means alone in telling this success story by way of selective citation of statistics and stories. As a result, like others before him, Cherry ends up giving credit to welfare reform for the good work recipients have done in spite of reforms. What gets lost in such an exercise is the ability to pinpoint what welfare reform actually did, and what people did in spite of those aspects of reform that often do no more than punish them for being poor. In what follows, I review Cherry’s analysis to highlight how it makes it seem there is evidence for a success story for welfare reform, when more systematic research on the topic indicates otherwise.
Wall Street vs. the Labor Movement
By Özgür Orhangazi
In recent years, private equity funds—firms that pool funds from investors to buy companies, restructure them, and re-sell them—have acquired firms in various sectors and dominated the news headlines in the business press. In 2006, there were more than a thousand private equity buyouts worldwide, with an estimated value ranging from five hundred to seven hundred billion dollars. Business Week reports that the private equity industry’s size is over a trillion dollars and that there are about three hundred billion dollars worth of deals in the pipeline. At the same time, there are other types of financial institutions such as hedge funds, which are investment funds that invest in almost every type of financial assets with the supposed aim of hedging against downturns in the markets and reducing volatility and risk. However, these investment funds themselves also create increased risks due to their large speculative investments. Then there are real estate investment trusts (REITs), companies that engage in speculative investments in real estate properties while benefiting from certain tax advantages. These have also displayed immense growth and attracted much public attention. The rise of these new institutions has had a profound impact on economic performance in general and labor relations in particular. This article contextualizes this recent boom in private equity funds and such within the framework of financialization, and outlines their direct and potential impacts on labor.
In a process known as financialization, both the size and importance of financial markets, transactions, and institutions have grown continuously since the 1980s. Incomes derived from financial sources as opposed to nonfinancial sources have grown, while the total debt in the economy has skyrocketed. For example, the value of total global financial assets (equities, government and corporate debt securities and bank deposits) was 12 trillion dollars in 1980, rose to 64 trillion in 1995, and soared to 140 trillion dollars by the end of 2005. Total value of global financial assets was 338 percent of the global gross domestic product in 2005, up from 109 percent in 1980. And in the U.S. economy, the stock of financial assets reached 303 percent of the GDP in 1995 and 405 percent in 2005. In the same period, financial sector profitability, employment, and compensation levels increased. Profits from financial market activities as a share of gross national income, the so-called “rentier share” in the economy, more than doubled from 1960 to 1999, reaching almost 20 percent in the United States.
From Baghdad to the Bayou: Neoliberalism and Democracy By Command
By Gordon Lafer
Generally, the task facing governments following a disaster is to rebuild what’s been lost. In rare situations, however, natural disasters hit at the exact time that the broader society is undergoing equally profound changes in its political economy, so that what is rebuilt is fundamentally different from what was destroyed. Thus, Chicago became the world’s first skyscraper city in the late nineteenth century because of the convergence of three factors: Elisha Otis developed the elevator technology necessary to make tall buildings feasible; the economic logic of industrial capitalism made it desirable to have a downtown district of large office buildings overseeing surrounding manufacturing facilities; and in 1871 the city was consumed by fire. The new Chicago became the model for what all industrial cities would come to look like over the next century.
If Chicago shows us what kind of city nineteenth century industrial capitalists would create when given the chance to build from scratch, the obvious question about Hurricane Katrina is this: what would happen if a city were completely wiped out now, under the current regime of post-industrial capitalism, neoliberal economic policy, and a triumphant business class running the government? What kind of city should we expect those forces to produce? And what does it tell us about that other project of wholesale destruction and reconstruction that this same set of interests is engaged in—the occupation of Iraq?
The Drive for Decent Work: A Big Step Towards Shared Prosperity
By Helen Lachs Ginsburg and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg
With the 2008 election likely to lead to Democratic control of the legislative and executive branches, it is time for a bold new vision of the economy that will reduce the increased inequality that has grown in tandem with our national wealth; it is time to take a big step toward shared prosperity. Some promising progressive proposals have been crafted. However, battered by three decades of conservative assaults, including well-planned attacks on government for the people, Democrats often exhibit timidity rather than temerity. The presidential aspirants do raise economic issues such as health care, taxes, wage stagnation, middle-class insecurity, income inequality, and the negative effects of trade on jobs and communities—and, in the case of John Edwards, concern about poverty and the “two Americas.” Dennis Kucinich does mention chronic unemployment and the need for substantial job creation, and Joseph Biden favors the creation of three million “green collar jobs.” But full employment—long central in Democratic Party platforms—has all but vanished from the discourse.2 Also missing, except from Kucinich’s platform, is a strong emphasis on building up and maintaining our depleted physical infrastructure and undeveloped and often nonexistent human services.
The National Jobs for All Coalition (NJFAC) is proposing a major program called the Drive for Decent Work. It simultaneously attacks economic inequality and our often unacknowledged but crippling double deficits—the chronic shortfall of decent jobs and the gaping hole in public investment.3 The Drive for Decent Work is a win-win solution that could put the nation back on the path it started to take after World War II.
Economic Prospects
By Robert Pollin
Why Militarism Hurts the U.S. Economy
There is no longer any doubt that the Iraq war is a moral and strategic disaster. But is it possible that the Iraq war—which has been the driving force for a huge expansion in the U.S. military budget under the Bush-2 administration—has also brought major benefits to the U.S. economy, including money to support millions of decent jobs and advances in important technologies?
In my fall 2007 New Labor Forum article, I argued that the U.S. economy could generate roughly one million new jobs if we took all $140 billion out of the Iraq war budget as well as rescinded $60 billion of Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, and transferred this $200 billion total into health care, education, and energy conservation. But a frequent concern that raises doubts about the realism of such military conversion proposals is the undeniable fact that, at present, the military budget is a cornerstone of the U.S. economy. The Pentagon is a major underwriter of important technical innovations as well as a major employer. It provides good jobs—jobs that are stable and at least decently paid—to millions of Americans.
Caught in the Web
By Kim Phillips-Fein
BLOOD MONEY
How do you measure the economic cost of a war? The question may at first seem straightforward: after all, there is a line in the federal budget, the appropriations that Congress has approved to pay for the war. But then there are the larger questions; for example, how to factor in the hospital bills for the wounded and maimed? The cost of bombs and tanks and airplanes is one thing, but what about the cost of the bridges that collapse and the levees that break because money that could have been spent to fix them went instead to armaments? What is the price tag of one war?
This is the question pursued by economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, in a series of papers on the cost of the Iraq war. Stiglitz and Bilmes argue that the true economic cost of the war is far higher even than the $456 billion that Congress has approved thus far to fund. It might, they suggest, ultimately cost more than $2 trillion. How do they arrive at this far higher estimate? First, they suggest that the true budgetary costs of the war are not reflected in immediate appropriations. These are costs like health care for wounded veterans, many of whom have suffered injuries more serious than in previous wars, and the costs of rebuilding the military after the war. Second, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue that the macroeconomic effects of the war have been negative—that oil costs more per barrel than it would have without the war, and that necessary investments in infrastructure are not being made because of war spending, which ultimately slows economic growth. The Stiglitz and Bilmes papers are from 2006, but remain highly relevant today. Check them out at http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/.
Politics and Religion
By Brian R. Corbin
Rediscovering Abundance: Interdisciplinary Essays on Wealth, Income and Their Distribution in Catholic Social Tradition
HELEN ALFORD, OP, CHARLES M.A. CLARKE, S.A. CORTRIGHT, AND MICHAEL J. NAUGHTON, EDS.
Politics as Religion
BY EMILIO GENTILE
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right
BY MICHAEL LERNER
American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century
BY KEVIN PHILIPS
God's Politics, Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It: A New Vision for Faith and Politics in America
BY JIM WALLIS
Election years are tough for those of us in the pews. I crave a frank conversation about the intersection of religion and politics without being attacked by one wing or another. I cringe when either Right or Left politicos contact me, as a leader of a faith-based organization (Catholic), demanding that I support their candidate or their "take" on the issues. Political strategists, religious movement leaders, and their constituents lack coherent and balanced analyses of religion's transformative perspectives on political economy. Few, if any, party activists seem to know the fullness of the religious teachings they selectively quote in their brochures. Religion is radical.
The Jewish-Christian tradition proclaims that a just society places the concerns of widows, orphans, and aliens—the poor, working class, and powerless—in the center of policy and structures. What religion brings to politics is a "community of conscience" centering on fundamental moral choices. Organized religion brings into sharp focus for public policy debate the practical daily life concerns of persons—health care, living wages, legal status. We need prophets, true to their tradition of confronting leaders about justice and not worried about issue polls or electoral alliances, to remind citizens and policy makers that we will be judged by how the poor are treated. But when politics attempts to use religion for its own purposes, the religious imagination becomes anemic and plastic.
Working Hard to Entertain You: The Discovery Channel Looks at Labor
By Pepi Leistyna
Dirtiest Jobs, Miami Ink, American Chopper, Deadliest Catch
DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS
Entertainment television has a sordid past when it comes to offering images of labor in the United States. Research clearly shows that TV’s representations have worked to perpetuate the myth of a classless society where upward mobility is simply a question of individual virtue.
Since its commercial availability in the late 1930s, the tube has been used by elite private powers to reinforce stereotypes about workers’ failure to realize the ‘American Dream’ due to their inferior qualities such as bad taste, lack of intelligence, poor work ethic, and dysfunctional family values. Class clowns such as Ralph Cramden on The Honeymooners, or his contemporary Doug Heffernan on The King of Queens, are fine examples of this corporate “You get what you deserve” interpretation and justification of the class hierarchy in this country.
Hitting All the Wrong Notes
By Rachel Rubin
Work Songs
By Ted Gioia
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2006
What high hopes Ted Gioia raises with his simple and expansive title Work Songs! How workers use music on and off the job, how work-related themes imbue American musical history, how workplaces should be understood in various historical periods through their “home-grown” musical expressions, how musicians can be understood in the context of labor history—readers might expect this book to offer at least a glance at some of these fascinating historical issues. Gioia, operating from a jazz studies context, employs a taxonomic method that aims to summarize the centrality and functionality of work songs in human existence. But Gioia dearly wants his readers to consider the songs he writes about to be “timeless” (xiii). Indeed, early on, he declares an opposition to what he calls “chronological bias” (6) in the scholarship of music. While his subject matter is important, there are many deeply troubling aspects of Work Songs, all stemming from an approach that is, at turns, naïve, careless, or hostile about history and context. The result is a book that is shot through with internal contradictions, inadvertently condescending toward workers, blind and/or scornful about the important ways people use music in the present time, and dubious in its racial assumptions.
Out of the Mainstream: Books and Films You May Have Missed
By Matt Witt
Poetry
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