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‘Economy That Works For All’ Equips Workers to Turn Nation Around |
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We experience it every day. The economy is not working for working families. We work longer hours than workers in any developed nation, but have less to show for it.
Working people have made the U.S. economy the strongest in the world, yet wages and family incomes are stagnant, income insecurity and inequality are rising, health care benefits are eroding and pensions are disappearing.
Consider that workers’ productivity almost quadrupled between 1947 and 2005, while wages have not even doubled in that time. Where has the money gone? In 1980, the average CEO made 42 times the salary of the average blue-collar worker. In 2006, the ratio had jumped to 364-1, the highest in the developed world by far.
After World War II, real family incomes doubled and the incomes of the poorest families increased even faster than those of the richest families. But since 1973, the incomes of the richest 20 percent of families have risen much faster than those of the other 80 percent.
Between 1979 and 2001, the incomes of the top 0.1 percent—families earning $1.7 million a year—increased by 181 percent. And incomes of the top 0.01 percent (one-tenth of one percent—those earning $6 million a year) grew by nearly 500 percent. Long-term, structural shifts have created this shift in wealth from working families to CEOs and big corporations.
Union members have a new tool to challenge the corporate-driven economic policies that benefit Big Business at the expense of working families. The AFL-CIO has launched “An Economy That Works For All,” a train-the-trainer member education program that provides facts on the reasons underlying the structural shift in our economy and explaining how we can dismantle the corporate agenda and build a working family agenda. Click here for more information.
So far, some 612 union members have been trained to present the program to their unions and community groups. One of them is Connie Goodly-LaCour, assistant to the president of the Baltimore Teachers Union/AFT, who says she has used the program to train building representatives, church groups and even teachers in the Virgin Islands.
It’s great. I like it. It talks about politics and makes people aware of what’s really happening to them. It tells how things were more equal in the 1970s and how corporate greed took over and squeezed the middle class.
The “Economy That Works For All” presentation makes it clear working families are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet because of decisions made by policymakers and their Wall Street cronies.
The training program includes key facts about the economy such as how the wealthy are becoming wealthier while U.S. workers—the most productive in the world—are losing ground. It also explains how good jobs are disappearing as companies export jobs and capital seeking the lowest labor costs and how employers are systematically cutting back on hard-won benefits such as health care and pensions.
For Dave Cormier, a professor at West Virginia University’s Institute for Labor Studies and Research, “An Economy That Works For All” is the perfect antidote to “paying the price of ignorance—and by ignorance, I mean not having information.”
It is very important for union members to get economic information directly and to make them aware of what’s going on around them.
Goodly-LaCour says she especially likes “An Economy That Works For All” because it’s not just about education. It’s about taking political action to bring change.
Every time I use it, I add another page to it. Because we’re teachers, we talk about how everything about our jobs are determined by politics—the books we teach, our salaries. And I love the fact that you can use it for more than union members. You can take it to community groups, so people understand what’s going on.
Click here to sign up for training, here to download training materials and here for more resources.
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