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Trumka Takes on the ‘Neoliberalism’ that Broke U.S. Economy |
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In Tuesday’s live Web chat, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka talked about what we need to do to fix our economy in both the short term and the long term—and touched on a vital, too-infrequently discussed issue: the need to end the stranglehold neoliberal economic thinking has on our politics.
Spurred by Milton Friedman and other economists, the neoliberal agenda is based on the radical principle that it’s markets, not people, that matter most. By nature, the neoliberal principle is hostile to collective bargaining, public regulation and all manner of ways to leverage community power to balance out the power of wealth. Trumka sums up Friedman’s poisonous political philosophy:
He believed that anything that got in the way of the free market was something that was bad and should be eliminated. Any regulation on business is bad, so get rid of it; any tax on business is bad and distorts the marketplace, get rid of it. A union is bad and distorts the marketplace, so you have to get rid of it.
For the last 30 years, that’s the system that we’ve had here. It brought us to this crisis.
Trumka says the labor movement needs to get back at the forefront of economic policy, including monetary, fiscal and industrial policy. Unions need to lay out a clear new economic agenda that will work better and stand as an alternative to the markets-first, people-later neoliberal agenda.
That means building an economy in which the financial sector works on behalf of the real economy—not the other way around. It means listening to the needs of working families, not pundits and corporate shills who claim that good jobs with living wages and benefits are “bad for the economy.” It means we don’t let big bankers reap profits from destructive speculation and pass the risks and the consequences on to us. It means that wages, not debt, drives the economy.
One of the top priorities for the AFL-CIO, Trumka says, is to educate union members—and candidates for office—about economic policy. Working people must be players in economic policy, so that we can create an economy that benefits everybody, not just those at the very top.
You can watch more of Trumka’s conversation with union members and working family activists here. Our five-point jobs plan is here.
This is a cross-post from the Firedoglake blog.
5 Comments
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I fully agree with your analysis, Richard. We have to be proactive in the economic playing field. We (Democrats) have been too long reactive when it comes to economic policies. We cannot let that GOP Party call the shots anymore.
Paul Mason ,economic editor for the BBC’s program “Newsnight” has written an excellent book about the whole culture of neoliberalism entitled “Meltdown;the end of the age of greed”He mainly focuses on the US, UK,and Europe
This is exactly where much more effort is needed. Educating workers about the alternatives to the economic status quo is the number one way to turn the tide back towards unionism. Too many working people today support politicians and policies which only hurt them. I believe they do this primarily because the sources of information available to most people only parrot the needs and desires of the ruling elite. The reason that unionism was so popular in the early part of the 20th century was that workers then recognized that the economic status quo was hurting them. This recognition has been lost over the 2nd half of the 20th century and replaced by individual self-blame and self-criticism. People have to regain the realization that the economic system itself is the source of a large portion of our problems and that those problems are best overcome by collective action.
During the civil rights movement of the 60’s there was a debate among Afro-Americans regarding the tactics of the older civil right’s movement of reliance upon the liberal white leadership of the Democratic party. Eventually the movement moved towards Black Power, Black Nationalism, etc. The union movement is in much the same position. We depend upon the Democratic party to pass legislation helpful to the union movement. Does anyone remember the S-1 bill? The Democratic Party has not delivered a major piece of labor legislation since FDR. As they said in the 60’s, power to the people. When the rank and file are motivated things happen. Some how, some way, unions must find a way to reach deeper into their membership base, so they move to write letters, join marches, and run for office.
Business executives are the worst enemies of the free market there are, wanting no-bid contracts and monopolistic advantages. Government should enforce competition by breaking up large corporations and enforcing anti-trust law.