White House: Insource Jobs, Decrease Inequality
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Is it patriotic to ship America’s jobs overseas? President Obama doesn’t think so. He’s right, of course. We live in a globally connected world, but let’s face it: Home-grown corporations must first focus on their own back yards—a novel concept all to many, it seems.
Obama implicitly raised the question yesterday during his Insourcing American Jobs Forum, which featured representatives from more than a dozen large and small businesses that have made decisions to bring jobs to the United States and to increase their investments here.
Pointing to the CEOs in the room, Obama said they ”take pride in hiring people here in America, not just because it’s increasingly the right thing to do for their bottom line, but also because it’s the right thing to do for their workers and for our communities and for our country.
I don’t want America to be a nation that’s primarily known for financial speculation and racking up debt buying stuff from other nations. I want us to be known for making and selling products all over the world stamped with three proud words: “Made in America.” And we can make that happen.
Far-Sighted Policies Can Fight Growing Income Inequality
The growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is not just a problem in the United States. Over the past two decades income inequality has soared around the world. But a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) says if nations make the right policy decisions, income inequality is not inevitable and can be reversed.
At a forum today at AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., John Martin, OECD Director of Employment, Labor and Social Affairs; AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, chairman of the Trade Union Advisory Council to the OECD; and Charles Heeter, chairman of the Business Advisory Council to the OECD, discussed the report and how to close the widening income gap.
The report looked at income inequality in all 34 OECD nations and found that the United States had the second largest increase between 1985 and 2008. Mexico led in the growth of income inequality. In addition, the United States led all nations in the growth of the share of a nation’s income that went to the top 1 percent.
While Trumka praised the OCED for focusing on income inequality, he said the report ignored an important aspect of the growing gap between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, “the dramatic shift in bargaining power between workers and their employers since the 1970s.”
I think the OECD’s work on inequality would be strengthened by a more explicit treatment of power and the policies that have diminished the bargaining power of workers. Read the rest of this entry »
Report: Austerity Measures Will Lead to ‘Permanent Recession’
Here’s mandatory reading material for lawmakers returning to Capitol Hill this week. A new United Nations study “savages” U.S. and European economic policies that call for austerity measures and deficit cuts, which the report says is pushing the world economy toward disaster “in a misguided attempt to please global financial markets.” The report called for:
wage increases, stricter regulation of financial markets, including a return to a system of managed exchange rates, and a conscious break with market-led thinking.
The report’s author, Heiner Flassbeck, is head of the globalization and development strategies division at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and a former deputy finance minister in Germany. Flassbeck says:
If interests rates everywhere are zero, and if governments stick to the policy of not only keeping fiscal deficits where they are but retrenching, cutting public expenditure, then we will end up in permanent recession.
Or, as UNCTAD Secretary General Supachai Panitchpakdi put it:
The message here is very pragmatic: We need to reverse our course quickly.
Outsourced: No Laughing Matter
Sarita Gupta is the executive director of Jobs with Justice.
Last week, NBC launched a new show that tries to find comedy in the all-too-real conditions of outsourcing. While the first episode was witty—making light of age-old cultural clashes and stereotypes, there is nothing funny about the reality of outsourcing and the impact it has both on the American worker and their counterparts around the world.
For decades, big companies like the one portrayed in “Outsourced” have been engaged in a global race to the bottom, constantly seeking to maximize their profits by cutting wages, benefits and working conditions. Corporations have learned to avoid local worker bargaining power by organizing themselves globally and exerting a downward pressure on wages along the supply chain that brings goods from manufacturing to consumers.
Bush Deals Last-Minute Insults to Workers’ Rights
The Bush administration couldn’t resist taking a final slap at human rights. In Bush’s final hours in office, he implemented on Friday a trade agreement with Peru despite calls by Congress, unions, environmental and human rights groups to delay action to ensure that Peru’s laws meet its commitments before the agreement enters into force.
The new “reforms” passed by Peru’s Congress last week are inadequate to protect the environment, promote worker rights and ensure access to affordable medicines, as required by the agreement.
At the same time, the Bush Labor Department’s Office of Trade & Labor Affairs rejected a petition, the first of its kind, under the labor provisions of the Central America Free Trade Act (CAFTA) The petition, filed in April by six Guatemalan unions, with the support of the AFL-CIO, involved five cases where employers suppressed, sometimes violently, workers’ efforts to form a union, and the government failed to protect worker’s internationally recognized rights.
AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee says these two actions:
….were a parting shot of disrespect by the Bush administration.
In a last-ditch effort to avert criticism and secure implementation of the agreement before Bush left office, the Peruvian government approved a series of legislative reforms Jan. 13 that exacerbate current environmental problems, such as mass deforestation, and do not adequately address labor rights, labor and human rights groups say.
Here is Susan Ellsworth, associate representative with the Sierra Club:
The U.S. Congress voted for an FTA that members believed represented a new day for environmental protection and worker rights on trade agreements. This is not what will happen if Peru rushes through flawed laws at the eleventh hour.
Many members of Congress, including President Barack Obama, supported the U.S.-Peru agreement in 2007 because it included new and stronger provisions to promote worker rights and protect the environment. But the rush to certify the FTA now threatens to undercut these advances and lock inadequate laws into place.
Lee adds:
Peru’s labor laws still fall far short of meeting International Labor Organization standards, and we were deeply disappointed with the Bush administration’s decision to rush implementation without first securing compliance with the agreement’s provisions. This represents a wasted opportunity and shows poor faith on the part of our own government.
The Bush administration refused to even consider the Guatemalan unions’ complaint even though four union leaders and/or their family members were murdered in that country since the agreement was approved by Congress and many others have been victims of attempted murder or have received death threats. Workers who attempt to form or join a union, bargain collectively or conduct a strike still are routinely fired illegally, the unions say.
