Economic Policy Institute — Labor Day Series

Economic Policy Institute

Black workers endure persistent racial disparities in employment outcomes

Part of the series Labor Day 2019: How Well Is the American Economy Working for Working People? Summary: Black workers are twice as likely to be unemployed as white workers overall (6.4% vs. 3.1%). Even black workers with a college degree are more likely to be unemployed than similarly educated white workers (3.5% vs. 2.2%). When they are employed, black workers with a college or advanced degree 3h

Working people have been thwarted in their efforts to bargain for better wages by attacks on unions

Part of the series Labor Day 2019: How Well Is the American Economy Working for Working People? Summary: The share of workers represented by unions has dropped by more than half since 1979—from 27.0% to 11.7% in 2018. Not coincidentally, the share of income going to the top 10% has escalated in this period—these high earners now capture nearly half of all income. The decline of unions is not beca3h

Low-wage workers are suffering from a decline in the real value of the federal minimum wage

Part of the series Labor Day 2019: How Well Is the American Economy Working for Working People? Summary: The real value of the federal minimum wage has dropped 17% since 2009 and 31% since 1968. Workers earning the federal minimum wage today have $6,800 less per year to spend on food, rent, and other essentials than did their counterparts 50 years ago. Some states have raised their minimum wages 3h

Wage growth is being held back by political decisions and the Trump administration is on the wrong side of key debates

Part of the series Labor Day 2019:The fact that the unemployment rate has averaged 3.8% over the past year (its lowest 12-month average since 1970) might make one think that times are flush for American workers and that there is widespread agreement that the U.S. economy is being well managed by elected officials. But while times are better for workers today than they were 10, five, or even three years ago, a crucial ingredient for workers’ well-being—faster-growing wage growth—still hasn’t appeared. This wage failure might be why the public seems unwilling to give President Trump (and his Republican supporters in Congress) credit as good economic managers despite today’s low unemployment rate. In fact, the president and his supporters in Congress are responsible for a number of policy decisions that will reliably harm workers’ future prospects for wage growth.1

Bill Mitchell — Of course governments will be fiscally stretched if they define large surpluses as the norm

Wednesday and a short blog post. I regularly work for unions as an expert analyst/witness in their struggles to achieve wage justice with employers who are intent on paying as little as possible. Often these are private employers but at the moment I am helping a union with their campaign to win a reasonable wage increase against a state government. The logic deployed by the government in relation to their fiscal affairs and their wage setting behaviour is a classic demonstration of how neoliberalism has distorted any sense of reason and created self-fulfilling problems. So today, I will just introduce this issue – given how fascinating it is....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Of course governments will be fiscally stretched if they define large surpluses as the norm
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Egregious subjugation of the working class continues. Workers get 2.6% pay raise for critically important work while Jamie Dimon sees salary double

Another example of egregious subjugation of the working class. Long Island Railroad Workers were given a 17% pay raise, spread out over 6.5 years, but they must kick in more toward their health care payments, so it works out to even less than the paltry, 2.6% annual increase.

The Long Island Railroad is the largest commuter railroad in the country. A strike would have affected hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, businesses, etc in the region. In other words these workers' jobs are absolutely essential to the economy and peoples' lives.

In contrast, Jamie Dimon gets a near DOUBLING of his pay (from $11.4 million per year to $20 million) in one year even though he guided his bank to a 0.7% return on assets. In other words if Jamie Dimon were gone no one would see the difference. Even worse, the bank could have held Treasuries and made a heck of a lot more than what Jamie Dimon delivered.

That's the state of our tragic society.

Senator Bob Corker's anti union voter manipulation scheme may have just f**d the South for good

So it looks like the joke's on Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) and the workers at the Volkswagon plant that voted down a measure to join the UAW last week.

Germany has a co-determination model that mandates workers councils, which are similar to unions in that they represent worker interests.

The head of Volkswagon's "Works Council" told a German newspaper that Volkswagon would now be hesitant to expand in the South as a result of the union vote.

"I can imagine fairly well that another VW factory in the United States, provided that one more should still be set up there, does not necessarily have to be assigned to the South again," said works council leader Bernd Osterloh.

"If co-determination isn't guaranteed in the first place, we as workers will hardly be able to vote in favor" of building another plant in the right-to-work South, Osterloh added.

The vote was influenced by Corker and others who misled workers by telling them that if they voted down the union, Volkswagon would add new production at the plant, a claim that Volkswagon vehemently has denied.

Corker's interference is against the law and gives the National Labor Relations Board every reason to void the vote. However, it's not likely that the NLRB will do that because it's afraid of incurring the wrath of Congressional Republicans as they have gone after the NLRB in the past and have attempted to defund it and shut it down.

But the vote was definitely influenced illegally despite the fact that Volkswagon, the company, was IN FAVOR of unionization.

Hopefully with Corker's help the South has just fucked itself and we start to see a backlash and a  migration of manufacturing jobs back up to the unionized North.

Tennessee autoworkers vote against their own interests and the interests of workers everywhere

Autoworkers at a Volkswagon plant in Tennessee voted down a proposal to unionize tonight. In doing so these workers just voted against their own interests and ceded even more power to the corporation they work for. What they get in return is a low paid, highly vulnerable job. 

This was another example of a brilliantly executed strategy by the elites, together with government (yes, the Tennessee GOP, led by Senator Bob Corker) to further a relentless divide and conquer strategy that pits worker against worker and 99 percenter against 99 percenter.

It's sad but true that workers today are too scared to unionize because they fear losing their jobs. Ironically this makes them even more vulnerable. Corporations have unions: they're called lobbyists. So why do workers vote to have nothing? That is the height of foolishness. 

Many of the protections and benefits that workers enjoy today, like the 40-hour work week, weekends off, child labor laws and other statutes that are on the books came out of the bloody labor struggles of the early 20th century. People sacrificed--and died--so that we could enjoy these little things. 

In contrast, workers today are afraid to even metaphorically spill blood. They've been completely beaten into submission by a level of unbridled corporate power that is unprecedented and we've sat back and allowed it to grow over the past 40 years without any challenge whatsoever. 

Now it's too late. And if you don't think it's too late then just consider the fact that after everything we've seen and experienced with respect to joblessness, income inequality, skyrocketing corporate profits, obscene executive compensation, corporate welfare and such, and workers STILL can't vote to demand a little tiny something for themselves, well, that says it all. We're done. We're slaves.

The TN autoworkers' vote tonight was a vote against workers everywhere. It was a vote against a decent society. No balls. We're all whipped.

Caroline Fairchild — Middle-Class Decline Mirrors The Fall Of Unions In One Chart

The Huffington Post
Middle-Class Decline Mirrors The Fall Of Unions In One Chart
Caroline Fairchild

Jeff Cox — Why Underemployment May Be Worse Than It Looks

But what often doesn't get as much attention [as the BLS report] is the monthly labor count that the experts at Gallup conduct.

Gallup reports that 17.2 percent of the workforce is underemployed, a startling number compounded by its divergence from the government's count. While the rate is down from the 20.3 percent peak in March 2010, it has remained maddeningly high over the past three years even as economists tout the strength of the U.S. economic recovery.

From a broader perspective, the Gallup measure actually has increased from its 15.9 percent multi-year low in October 2012.

CNBC NetNet
Why Underemployment May Be Worse Than It Looks
Jeff Cox | Senior Writer

See also Ashe Schow, Recovery woes: America's second-largest employer is a temp agency at the Washington Examiner.

Behind Wal-Mart, the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider.

Friday's disappointing jobs report showed that part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. The report also showed another disturbing fact: There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs.

Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing.

No benefits. No unions. No bargaining power. Labor at the beck and call of capital. The neoliberal dream is replacing the American dream and becoming the American nightmare.

Thoughts On The New Red Scare

The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The Communist Manifesto, Section 1

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

This is a central point of Marx and Engels. The bourgeoisie (ownership class) finds it to their advantage to treat the proletariat (workers) as a commodity and to arrange the economy institutionally so that workers compete for scarce jobs. This allows owners to ensure a supply of low wage workers through a competitive market in the same way as non-human resources are traded. Indeed, it has been compared with the way that slaves were traded, too. This "commoditization of labor" is an essential aspect of "the free market."

Part of the "free market" myth is the myth of Horatio Alger, that is, that anyone can raise himself or herself from the bottom to the top, although for women, this is largely presumed to be through marrying well. Thus, the potential for achieving freedom is social mobility. As a result, a great deal of attention is placed on promulgating this myth as a cultural meme. the corollary is that is one is not free, then it is one's own fault. Since social mobility is so low presently, it has been augmented with the lottery, which has been successfully incorporated into the myth.

What would act against this institutional arrangement is worker association through trade unions to increase the bargaining power of labor. Through their association to further their common goals, including increasing labor share as well as improving working conditions, individual competition for scarce jobs is reduced and the so-called free market is undermined in the estimation of owners of means of production aka capital.

In order to realize such goals through association, several things are necessary. First, workers must become aware of the potential for association and its possibilities. At the time Marx and Engels were writing, this was far some understood by workers, let alone a practical reality in the work place. This education of workers would take many decades.

Secondly, owners could not be expected to sit idly by and watch workers kill the goose that lays the golden eggs for them. They would respond with whatever it might take to prevent this from occurring, and that is just what happened historically.

It was not until the time of the Great Depression, when owners where actually afraid of socialism and even communism coming to the fore in the West as it had in Russia, that they relented their opposition to some extent. Moreover, favorable legislation was enacted under a more liberal political climate.

Since then, and especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall that signalled the end of the red threat, owners again mounted the fight against worker association. In addition, more conservative governments rescinded previous worker-friendly legislation and past new limits on organizing the workplace and restrictions on association.

That is where we are now, and given the economic situation, workers are again pushing back. The push back has been more forceful in europe than in the United States so far, but the situation is dire some countries there. However, the Arab spring in MENA was not only political but also economic, and it began for economic reasons rather than for political ones.

This is entirely consistent with the analysis of Marx and Engels, who reasoned that it is not ideas that lead history but external conditions, and the conditions that are most motivating are economic.

According to Marx & Engels, since workers so greatly outnumber owners worldwide, continued oppression of workers depends on a low level of collective consciousness of workers. Thus, it is to owners advantage to see that institutional arrangements, education in particular but also media, contribute to maintain the myth of the market.

I surmise that this may explain a lot of the otherwise "crazy talk" about the "Democrat Party" (sic) and President Obama being socialists and even communists.

David Edwards — Fiorina: ‘It is not fair’ that public workers are ‘so rich’

Fiorina: ‘It is not fair’ that public workers are ‘so rich’ (via Raw Story )

Carly Fiorina, who reportedly stood to receive more than $42 million after being ousted at HP in 2005, says that public workers should receive less benefits because “it is not fair” that unions are “so rich.” During a Sunday panel segment on NBC, MSNBC host Al Sharpton asserted that Congress…

Preparing to Fight Austerity & Adversity - With Short, Medium & Long Term Efforts

commentary by Roger Erickson

In Australia, Bill Mitchell receives more welcome by union & civic organizers than heterodox economists here in the states do. In a recent article about regional growth in Australia, Bill says to the Clarence Valley Community Unions:

"Very few can grow on their own effort when there is a hostile external environment."*

[Yet some can, and all could - if they'd had more practice at taking initiative!]

Responding to the regional Unions:

[Bill] said he will give an evidence-based approach on how the Clarence Valley will overcome this loss of jobs and while there were a number of things a region can do, state and federal governments must also have an input.

Well said.  Yet it's a bad sign that most think they need an expert from somewhere else to solve problems.  A dependent attitude slows any attempt to organize, and ultimately slows the rate of exploring options.  It seems that the bulk of the population has been COLONIZED by the 1%, into a state of dependency!

This lesson shows that there's still a very fundamental, underlying problem with how we run policy, unions and schools. Whole communities lack adequate situational awareness. Writers from Socrates to Napoleon to the present time have lamented that particular lack as the chief calamity for military generals and whole populations.  Worse yet, our communities and unions don't even set up enough ways to practice acquiring situational awareness!  Can you imagine a basketball team that never holds basketball practices, and instead only reads old books on the subject?  Changing coaches wouldn't be the only requirement for success.

It's a pity that our own educators and unions aren't exploring more options here in the USA. Even labor unions here are captured by orthodox economists more interested in maintaining their personal prestige, and incomes than in actually shaping their client's situations.  

*Every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owner, as Bill alludes to above.

If you're in a union or on a town council, please consider inviting Mosler, Wray or other members of the monetary operations community to widen your perspectives on short, medium & long term methods for accelerating economic development.

The New Improved Jim Crow — SB 469 Would Make Civil Disobedience a Felony in Georgia

SB 469, an anti-union and anti-protest bill, would turn nonviolent civil disobedience into a felony punishable by imprisonment for one year and a fine of ten thousand dollars for organizations and one thousand dollars for individuals.   It also has provisions intended to weaken unions.

Read it at Atlanta Progressive News
SB 469 Would Make Civil Disobedience a Felony in Georgia
by Gloria Tatum

Georgia, where "progress" means putting the gears in reverse.

Millions of Indian workers strike

One-day walkout hits transport, banks and post offices, as unions seek better rights and protest over rising prices.

Read it at Al Jazeera
Millions of Indian workers strike for rights
Al Jazeera and agencies

Falling real wage.

Why Aren't The 13 Million Unemployed a Political Force?

Unions are still grappling with how to organize the unemployed, including their own ex-members, into a political force.

...Department of Labor figures for December showed 13.1 million unemployed and actively looking for work, almost half of them for more than six months. Another 8.1 million were working part-time involuntarily, and 2.5 million were too discouraged to look for work....

...Jobs with Justice chapters have been experimenting with organizing the unemployed, but at a recent conference activists expressed frustration. The model of “unemployed” as an identity group (like race or sex) hasn’t worked, many said.

“How do you organize the unemployed when people don’t want to identify themselves as unemployed?” asked Susan Hurley, executive director of JwJ in Chicago.

Read it all at AlterNet
13 Million Unemployed; Why Aren't They a Political Force to be Reckoned With?
by Jenny Brown

Union Membership Sees Slight Boost

WASHINGTON -- Union membership grew slightly last year, giving labor leaders hope that a period of steep declines has finally bottomed out.The number of unionized workers increased by about 50,000 to nearly 14.8 million members in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. The increase comes after unions lost nearly 1.4 million members over the previous two years.Still, unions' share of the overall workforce fell, from 11.9 percent to 11.8 percent, as state and local governments trimmed thousands of jobs to address budget shortfalls. That's the lowest percentage of union workers since the Great Depression in the 1930s.Unions saw losses of about 61,000 workers in government employment. But they grew by 110,000 workers in the private sector, mainly in construction and health care. Despite that growth, unions still represent just 6.9 percent of all workers at private companies, unchanged from 2010.

"The devastating losses from 2009 and 2010 have stopped and that's got to be good news for the labor movement," said John Schmitt, a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

Schmitt said another positive for unions is that private sector membership grew at about the same rate as overall job growth.

Union membership has declined steadily from its peak of about a third of all workers in the 1950s, and about 20 percent in 1983. The losses have been especially steep in private industry with the loss of manufacturing jobs that traditionally are heavily unionized.

"It is telling that as our country begins to recover the jobs lost during the Great Recession, good union jobs are beginning to come back," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

As private sector union membership eroded, labor leaders turned increasingly toward workers in state and local governments, where there was often less resistance to organizing. About 7.6 million employees in the public sector belonged to a union last year, compared with 7.2 million union workers in the private sector. And public-sector workers had a union membership rate of 37 percent, more than five times that of private-sector workers.

Read it at The Huffington Post
Union Membership Sees Slight Boost In 2011 After Years Of Decline

By Sam Hananel

Same figures as the previous post, but a different spin.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

Union membership slips further

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The percentage of workers represented by a union dipped slightly in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on Friday, as organized labor came under attack in states once considered union strongholds, including Wisconsin and Ohio.

In 2011, 11.8 percent of U.S. workers were represented by a union, the BLS said, down from 11.9 percent in 2010 and compared to a peak of 28.3 percent of the workforce in 1954.Strip out government workers, where 37 percent of the work force nationally is unionized, and union penetration of private industry was just 6.9 percent in 2011, unchanged from 2010.

The total number of union members actually grew slightly last year, to 14,764,000 from 14,715,000 in 2010. But the number of workers represented by organized labor remained steady while the overall number of workers employed in the economy grew, the BLS said.

Read it at Raw Story

Union membership slipped further as attacks came in 2011
by Reuters

On one hand, the left sees this as cruel owners and managers, who are very well compensated, cramming down workers to increase profit share and management compensation. 

On the other hand, the right cites the view of neoclassical economics that the primary reason for a "free market" economy not stabilizing at full employment is wage "rigidity." If wages were completely flexible and fluctuated with supply and demand, then prices would immediately adjust also, maintaining full employment as a steady state of the economy.

The contention is that unions and collective bargaining introduce wage rigidity. Therefore, weakening the bargaining power of labor through legislation that restricts collective bargaining is economically efficient.

In addition, the use of union funds for political purpose, creates a bias toward enshrining wage rigidity in law.

The response of the left to this argument: "What you smoking?"

As MMT shows wage-price rigidity is not the underlying cause of unemployment, nor would more flexibility result in a fix. Rather, the issue is shifts in the saving desire of the private sector and the external sector and the adjustment of the government fiscal balance to offset an increased saving desire of non-government.

So even if the argument of employers is sincere, it is erroneous.

The neoclassical argument is also a reason that conservatives oppose the MMT job guarantee. An ELR program essentially frees workers from the prospect of being forced to accept any job offer at the offered price without the ability to negotiate, since they need income for survival. This creates a buffer of unemployed essentially in bondage to the whims of the market.

Depriving workers of freedom of choice, expression, and association is antithetical to democracy. Restricting freedom for self-actualization is antithetical to the aspirations of the human spirit.

Defenders of free market capitalism counter, "TINA — there is no other way. Other ways have been tried and failed."

The rejoinder to that is, "Really? We are still in the age of imperialism and colonialism, and the imperial powers have done everything in their power for centuries now to ensure that no other way is tried and if one is tried, everything is done to undermine it."

So the dialectic goes on and is displayed in the gyrations of history.

99% (rank and file) confront Big Labor

“The Occupy movement struck a chord,” explained Stan Woods, a member of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, a multi-union rank-and-file organization made up of ILWU members, teamsters, city train drivers and other similar blue-collars workers. “The union leadership doesn’t want to be left out, but they are hamstrung by their relationship with the Democrats, mayors and other politicians. They’re caught in a quandary.”

Barucha says the democratization paradigm of the leaderless occupation movement is proving to be a model for workers unhappy with the status quo.

“This is the first time there has been an exemplary movement that is encouraging and teaching people to self-organize.” The occupation, she said, allows union members to act as individual community participants and create community pickets, alongside the unemployed, the non-unionized working class, the homeless and any other supportive neighbors that share the same material needs.

Read it all at Salon

Occupy vs. Big Labor

by Emily Loftis

(h/t Keven Fathi)