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America’s Future Conference: Restore the Middle Class with Employee Free Choice
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The nation’s economy is in a tailspin, and one of the best ways to help turn it around is by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, several speakers said this morning at a national gathering of progressive leaders.
Sponsored by Campaign for America’s Future, the previously titled “Take Back America” annual conference has been renamed “America’s Future Now” to emphasize that this could be the greatest period of progressive reform since the 1960s.
Opening the three-day conference in Washington, D.C., Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, told participants the Employee Free Choice Act is
essential to insuring that the blessings of the next prosperity will be widely shared, that the American middle class will expand, not decline, and that the progressive majority will be consolidated.
(Click here to read more news and views from the America’s Future Now conference. You also can listen to the conference sessions live on BlogTalk Radio here.)
Economist Robert Kuttner and Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Vice President Biden and chief of staff of the White House Middle Class Task Force, echoed Borosage’s support for the Employee Free Choice Act during a panel on the economy.
Kuttner says the best ways to restore the economy start with passing the Employee Free Choice Act, increasing the minimum wage and creating an industrial policy “so the promise of clean energy becomes a jobs and energy policy.”
Bernstein agreed, saying unions are the key to making sure that as the economy grows, the benefits are distributed equitably. He quoted Biden, who told the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department conference recently:
We can’t achieve a strong middle class without a strong labor movement.
The election of Obama and a Democratic Congress is a big step in the right direction, Borosage said, but it’s up to progressives to make sure our leaders enact the right kinds of policies.
These next years could witness the greatest period of progressive reform since the 1960s. The choices we make are likely to set the framework for our society, our economy and even our survival for decades.
That’s why the Obama administration’s approach to the financial crisis is so important and wrong, Kuttner said. Obama’s banking and mortgage rescue plans are helping the wrong people—those who created the financial crisis, he said. Instead, those plans should be helping people who are facing foreclosure and helping to reform the entire banking system.
Progressives must define an agenda, articulate it and fight for it, Kuttner said. According to Bernstein, one of the big items on that agenda should be stronger regulation of financial markets. When no one is paying attention to unfettered free markets, the result is bad policies, he said.
The financial crisis is an example of free markets gone wild, said another panelist, Georgetown University law professor Emma Coleman Jordan. She pointed out the double standard of the government putting billions into the financial industry without demanding the same kind of accountability and business plan that the auto companies were required to have.
Jordan said the disastrous management practices of Wall Street and the automakers will not change as long as the same management that created the problem is still in charge. She called for the Obama administration to force changes in the CEOs and boards of directors at financial institutions that accept federal funds just as it has at General Motors. Otherwise, she said:
It’s like giving massive infusions of blood into a rotting corpse and expecting it to raise up.
Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, summed up the panelists’ views, saying the economic crisis demands bold action and bold ideas, not just the same old policies of rewarding the rich. Or as Kuttner put it:
This president could transform our economy and our politics. President Obama needs to demonstrate that he is getting his program into high gear and creating an economy that works for the people.
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4 Comments
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If there was ever a time for the Employee Free Choice Act, that time is now. Not only is it nearly impossible to form a union without fear and intimidation by employers, but union-busting has grown into a $4 billion a year business in the U.S. alone. Companies that previously had good relationships with their union employees have been emboldened by weak labor laws. One of those is the McGraw-Hill Companies. Read more at:
http://nabetcwa54.org
“This president could transform our economy and our politics. President Obama needs to demonstrate that he is getting his program into high gear and creating an economy that works for the people.”
This concluding paragraph above is indicative of the bankruptcy of “progressive” ideas. Obama has already “demonstrated” what his program is all about. Obama’s “program” is already in “high gear”. Obama’s program has NOTHING to do with an “an ecomy that works for the people”. An economy
that works “of, by and for” the people is called a SOCIALIST ECONOMY.
The capitalist economic system, which the hundreds of billions are supposed to “fix”, only creates vast wealth and profit for a relatively few capitalists, sometimes called “the ruling class”. Through out the 500 years of capitalism, it has never been an economic system designed to “work” for the people.
Please read the following article to understand the crisis we now face with this Obama regime.
What’s good for GM…
2 June 2009
Jerry White
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun2009/pers-j02.shtml
The bankruptcy of General Motors is a major turning point in the history of economic and political life in the United States.
The industrial giant—once the largest and most profitable enterprise in the world—defined American capitalism for much of the 20th century. Its massive presence in the US economy inspired the famous 1953 remark by GM Chief Executive Charles Wilson: “What was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”
Wilson’s statement, however self-serving, seemed to ring true when GM employed half a million American workers, whose living standards were rising and the auto industry was at the center of a vast manufacturing infrastructure that accounted for 60 percent of all corporate profits in the US.
The collapse of GM symbolizes the decline and crisis of American capitalism and the predominant role that financial speculation has come to play in the US and world economy. The forced bankruptcy of GM is the starkest demonstration of the subordination of all social interests to the financial aristocracy that rules America. ”
….
For years the American ruling class excoriated “nationalization” for its association with socialism and sang the praises of the capitalist free market. Now the federal government is essentially taking over GM.
This has nothing to do with socialism or genuine nationalization, however. The government is not intervening to uphold public interests and guarantee employment and decent living standards for workers. On the contrary, it is an intervention by the capitalist state to create the best profit-making conditions for US and international investors.
….
In the Obama administration, the American ruling class has found its most ruthless representative, led by a Democratic president who has gone even further than his Republican predecessor in the assault on the working class. While handing over trillions in public assets to cover the bad gambling debts of the financial elite, it demands unending “sacrifice” from workers. The destruction of the jobs and living standards of GM and Chrysler workers will now be used to set a precedent for sweeping attacks on every section of the working class.”
Without a union contract, all you’re left with is a race to the bottom. A friend with a landscape business used to make good money at it. He’d cut pizza parlor lots for about $30 through out the city. Unfortunately, every year the contract would be rebid with the owner always wanting it lower each year as the cost of doing business kept rising. He lost the bid to a guy who’d do it for $25, then that guy lost it to a guy for $20. The Mexicans came in and did it for $15. Finally, one of the pizza chefs about sixteen years old got conned into cutting the property before work for $10 with his own lawn mower and gas.
This is exactly what your grand children will have to look forward to without union contracts. Let’s all do what we can to pass the Employee Free Choice Act!
My adult children are in a job market where college graduates competing for part-time service jobs—they may not be bringing any grandchildren into the world.
I have a good middle class job right now, but technological advancements continue to eliminate many of the tasks in my industry. As those jobs disappear, and the remaining workers multi-task like mad to keep their good union jobs, the simple act of trying to talk about working conditions on the job is next to impossible. Every moment on the job is filled with the minute details of policies and programs designed to reduce or eliminate employee interaction on the job floor. The same employers that begged you to stay on thirty years ago would now like new employees to move on within five years—without any of the benefits and preferably without a union.
When you go to a supermarket, can you find a checker? Meat cutter or butcher? Stock clerk? Courtesy clerk? Or are you being asked to ring up your own purchases, accept only pre-packaged meat,remove your items from a pallet, and load them into the car by yourself? Do you hear honest conversation while you shop, or does everyone seem to be focusing on the same artificial attributes?
Workers are people, not machines. They have human needs. Our communities need working families who can be assets, not liabilities. If it takes a union contract to get a living wage, affordable health care, safety and dignity on the job, and a retirement after a long career, then we’d better get cracking on the Employee Free Choice Act—before the middle class disappears completely.