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Take Back America: Fighting for Shared Prosperity |
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Why is the U.S. economy failing working people? It’s a failure of public policy at the highest levels. The solution is to push hard for a new agenda that puts working people first, according to panelists at “The Economics of Shared Prosperity,” a session at Take Back America 2008.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka says the economic challenges of the past several years and the recession most of us believe we’re in have been the “predictable result” of a set of policies that define growth only in terms of what’s good for corporations, not for working families. Unfair trade policies, privatization, deregulation and the suppression of workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain have been part of a public policy agenda that enriches a few at the expense of nearly everyone else. Even as productivity has gone up, workers have seen less and less of a share of the benefits, Trumka told the session.
The economy is made up of rules. Those rules decide the winners and losers. Those rules are decided by men and women we elect, and those rules can be changed just like the men and women we elect. I want us to keep that in mind.
Turning the country around starts with beefing up progressive majorities in Congress and electing a new president, but it doesn’t end there, Trumka says. While he notes the importance of engaging in a historic mobilization around the elections, Nov. 4 won’t be the end of the work. Those mobilized workers need to hold the newly elected leaders accountable and ensure that they pass new, better policies to restore the balance between rich and poor and between employees and employers. Adds Trumka:
Turning around America is what our campaign for 2008—and 2009—is all about. We will not stop, I promise you, until we destroy the walls of greed that corporate policies have built around the workers and the middle class.
We’re not going to dismantle our mechanism on election night. We’re going to keep our mechanism in place, and we’re going to use it to jab ‘em in the backside when they slow down. Then when the next election comes around, we’ll give them their report card.
Trumka says this energized movement will be there to make sure economic policy isn’t placed only in the hands of Wall Street and corporate interests—–as it has been for years.
Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, points out a variety of areas in which a new agenda for shared prosperity is necessary, including health care, retirement, education, trade and energy. A better agenda would be one that rewarded work and allowed people to balance work and family, through good wages, benefits, medical leave and child care. Mishel agrees with Trumka that a return to the freedom to form unions is an essential part of the picture.
We need a revitalization of unionism in this country. It’s essential not only for economic fairness but for justice in the workplace. There is no democracy without a strong labor movement.
Two other scholars, Tamara Draut of Demos and William Darity Jr. of Duke University, describe the way the corporate-dominated politics and policy we now live with are putting younger people and people of color at a particular disadvantage, because of the way wealth is distributed.
Draut, author of Strapped: Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead, said a lack of investment in public education and the decline in wages are making it difficult for young people to have a middle-class life and economic security.
This is the first generation very likely to not surpass their parents’ living standards. If we are going to embark on creating more prosperity, it’s absolutely critical that we look at what’s happening to young people.
The key problem, Draut says, is that due to stagnant wages and the rising cost of education, younger people are going into debt—especially those coming from lower-income families.
Darity, who directs the University of North Carolina’s Institute of African American Research, says minority populations, historically disadvantaged, haven’t had an opportunity to build the kind of assets that help working families weather economic decline.
The central problem associated with race in America is dense inequality, and at the center of these inequalities are group-based disparities in wealth.
Trumka says that one danger to building a better deal for working families is if Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) becomes president. The AFL-CIO’s McCain Revealed is designed to get the facts out—in person, online and in the news—about McCain’s anti-working family record. Says Trumka:
Everything we work for can unravel if we underestimate McCain. He’s been a right-wing warrior in lockstep with the most anti-union, anti-middle class president in our history, George Bush.
We have too much at stake to leave this to chance. Don’t let statements about his record go unchallenged. We need to put information in their hands. We have to define him for what he is.
If we can win this fall—and Trumka is optimistic we can—the next step is to keep working families united and mobilized behind health care, fair trade, fair taxation and the freedom to form unions.
The AFL-CIO’S plan for a stronger, fairer economy is part of our campaign to Turn Around America.
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It is really a tragedy that this article, and the article linked (economy)in the last sentence are so terribly inadequate in an analysis of what is wrong with the economy. Without this understanding, no possible program to “solve” the many problems working people face today. Where to begin?
1. As far as working people are concered, we have been suffering an economic recession for the last 30 years! Look at the chart above. Real wages
have remained stagnant since the mid-1970s. With annual inflation (3%?), working people today are actually making LESS than we did 30 years ago because wages have not kept up with costs of living (inflation).
2. Why is this? The “economy” article implies that working people “deserve” to be making a good living. For example: quote:
” * Are the most productive in the world. (most exploited?most profitable? Then why have millions of jobs in manufacturing gone to China? Who benefits from all this productivity? The owners, CEOs are paying themselves multi-million dollars wages, golden parachutes,etc. at the same time pensions are cut, health care is cut, etc. There is a massive shift in wealth taking place,
With top executives making 400 X the income of best paid worker.etc.)
*Work longer hours than in any other developed country. (Working conditions are under severe attack by the same corporate pressures in the U.S.)
* Live in a country with more than $13 trillion a year in income.” (BUT THIS HUGE INCOME IS NOT EQUALLY DISTRIBUTED. THERE HAS BEEN A VAST SHIFT IN WEALTH ACCUMULATION TOWARDS THE TOP 1% . The 400 most wealthiest people are no longer multi-millionaires, they are all BILLIONAIRES. CEOs used to make 40X the average employees, now make 400X and more times than the average employee. Resulting economic and social inequalities and class division in U.S. has become a vast chasm.
3. These statements reflect an incredible ignorance about (1) what is the nature of the “economy” (capitalist) and (2)that it has gone through profound changes in the last 30 years in the way that capitalists make their money (which in turn affects what jobs, if any, are available for working people.)
4. Capitalism in the U.S. has transformed itself. Labor intensive industry has moved to China where there is 130 million unemployed!!!
Computer technology and global communication has enable the “financialization” of capitalism. Capitalists make their big bucks not in the old time way of making and selling needed goods. Today there is talk about the “financialization” of capitalism (stock market manipulations, hedge funds, etc.) that has resulted in also vast corruption that is now bringing the entire economy on the verge of destruction. See this article:
“Shades of 1929: Bear Stearns collapse signals deepest crisis since Great Depression”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/econ-m18.shtml
5. There is really too much to talk about here as a comment! (too much said
already!) The organized labor movement, I think, must take several major steps if there is any hope of it leading working people out of the immense crisis we are now facing:
A. Organized labor must stop considering itself a “business partner” to corpoate capitalism. Especially as corporate capitalism continues to destroy organized labor. Especially as corporate capitalism transforms itself from producing goods to waging war for profit (oil, resources,etc.).
B. Organized labor must stop supporting the Democratic Party, which is corporate controlled as the Republican Party. Instead it must help organize a new party, perhaps anti-corporate People’s Peace Party, in alliance with millions of people wanting to end the war, fight global warming, protect Social security, oppose privatization, establish true universal health care, etc. THE WAR BUDGET IS NOW TAKING VAST SUMS AWAY FROM HEALTH CARE, SCHOOLS, ETC. WHICH ARE VITAL TO THE SURVIVAL OF WORKING PEOPLE.
C. The labor movement must establish a new mass media network to present the perspective and needs of working people in this situation. The capitalist economic system has become “gangster” capitalism that is destroying everyone not immediately profitable. A genocide of the unprofitable.
Instead of supporting this gangster capitalism that profits a tiny minority, we need a new economy which provides for the economic needs of the vast majority of people. We must make this transition away from capitalism to some form of democratic socialism. An economy “of, by and for”the people and not “of, by and for” corporate wealth and enrichment of billionaires.
The shift has been away from the working class and towards those who hold the power to create the jobs we rely on. How do you help those powerfully rich folks realize that it is their duty to share the wealth? Really? Even the most moneyed philanthropic employer will run hard from any attempt to bring about a unionized, united front by workers.
Do you think Bill Gates got rich by sharing wealth and knowledge? Did he do the right thing by the workforce who helped to make him a force to be reckoned with? Nope. He did the same thing that most modern entrepreneurs have done to protect their wealth—outsourcing, union avoidance,layoffs,restructuring, and other tactics that put the onus squarely on the backs of the workers.
Most of us work to enrich the stockholders of our publicly traded companies. It’s like having a third boss—only it’s a boss that pays no wages. It’s a boss that only gets paid if you work hard enough to show a profit, and then they get that profit in a dividend. That means, of course, that there’s nothing left for raises, health care,pensions, or any other worker benefits.
Workers and their families pay the taxes of this nation, while reaping little or no benefit for their labor. As long as our government continues to be disrespectful to working families, the crises we have seen in employment,housing,health care and the unjust and immoral war will only get worse. We will continue to fund our own misery. Where is the representation? Who will lead us out of this mess?
I’m voting for Barack Obama. I was a John Edwards supporter—because he gets working people—but Barack Obama does, too.
My husband has dozens of cousins in Norway and one of them is very active in the “arbiederpartiet” or workers’ party. The unions have banded together and they are a formidable force against any anti-worker actions. Norway has a cap on how much a top exec can earn (a multiple of the lowest paid persons salary), the board of directors of a company has 40% employees on the board by law and there are strict and ENFORCED laws that protect employees.
US corporations have fought tooth and nail to break up unions and prevent people from forming new unions because the same thing could happen here if the unions banded together and demanded their rights. “United we stand, divided we fall”….and we have fallen…
It all boils down to Union leadership. You can’t have a back gate for the non-union help to come through while the union men come through the front. All of the Unions have to work collectively together the way they did in the old days. When the Teamsters were once the power to be reckoned with, they didn’t ask you what you were supposed to do, they had a plan and they told you!
It may not be pretty but the carpet baggers today are no different than their low life great grand fathers were 100 years ago- (plenty greedy!) My point is, you can’t be sort of union.
Working families fought like heck to get the minimum wage raised from $5.15 an hour! Big business howled, it will lay people off! with gasoline over $3.00 a gallon and you’re working for the price of a sandwich! Who gives a damn how you’re supposed to live! Yet, when asked about the CEO of a failing company taking home $50,000,000.00, they say, no problem, we have to pay to attract talent! Does anyone see a problem in this picture?
It doesn’t seem possible but a husband and wifes salary needs to be at least $100,000.00 combined to live a middle class life style in the mid-west. A cracker box starter home is about $250,000.00 in a decent neighborhood in Chicago now. And if you happen to live in New York; forget about it!
It all reminds me of the classic Christmas movie, “It’s a wonderful life” with Jimmy Stewart. As he fights the scrooge of the town, Mr. Potter. He asks, “Is it too much to ask to have a roof over your head of your own?” The middle class is now only a stones throw away from Potterville.
Where will John McCain lead us in November? To prosperity through our union jobs or to Potterville?