Over at TPM Cafe, Nathan Newman has a piece, "Long-Range Vision of the Labor Movement", that talks about one of the ways in which labor is rebuilding itself, particularly in California. It's by maximizing bargaining power:
For many years (and sometimes now), many people treated my optimism about the long-term strength of the labor movement as somewhat delusional, but having been in and around it now for twenty years -- okay, that number makes me feel old -- what's been clear to me is that watching the overall membership numbers year to year was not representative of the long-term planning that would payoff only over time.
It helped that I spent the 1990s in California where some of that innovation was most dramatic in the labor movement-- and the results have been a massive revival of union strength in that state. 200,000 union members were added in California alone last year. And this is based on a labor vision that had ten-year horizons for organizing, a level of long-term investment that few American institutions have been willing to make. One piece of evidence-- a coming showdown in California between the health care unions and the industry that was literally ten years in the making: For the first time, nearly 200 contracts are set to expire in the same year, giving [United Healthcare Workers] extraordinary strength at the bargaining table...The plans for this campaign began 10 years ago, with union leaders lining up contract dates to maximize their power as healthcare workers. |
So 75,000 hospital and nursing home workers covered by nearly 200 separate union contracts have been moved from fighting individual battles into a united force that can demand better working conditions and better care for their patients.
This is a highly significant development, as can clearly be seen by realizing how relatively rare this practice has long been. Newman goes on to talk about another such long-term effort on behalf of the Hotel Workers, and concludes:
Not that all unions have the long-term vision needed, but there's been an almost Darwinian evolution in the union movement. Those unions without long-term vision have shrunk and those with long-term vision have grown and become more and more dominant.
So while the overall numbers of union members have not really grown in the last decade, the proportion of those numbers in unions likely to grow in the future has-- which makes the prospects for the labor movement as a whole far more promising in coming years than they looked a decade ago.
This sort of thinking was noticably absent in one of the most high-profile strikes of recent years in Southern California, the Grocery Workers strike back in 2003. This was an extremely costly strike for the supermarket chains, but it was confined to one part of the country, and so they were willing to take devasting losses in the short term for the prospects of drastically slashing labor costs in the long run, so they would no longer sustain a middle class life-style--a strategy they could not have adopted if the strikes had been nationwide.
This is a clear example of something more that fits nicely under the rubric of "Deeper Aspects of Hegemonic Struggle" which I discussed in my diary yesterday, "Three Waves And A Wall: 2008 And The American Future-Pt. 4".
These struggles are vitally important for preserving the dream of a universal middle class. But Obama's leading economic advisor appears to have a major blind spot here. More on the flip...
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Barack Obama's top economic advisor, Austin Goolsbee, is not exactly clued in to the role of unions in creating and maintaining a vibrant middle class. As presidential liar and thief George Will wrote about Goolsbee, in a somewhat laudatory column, "The Democratic Economist ":
Is Goolsbee dismayed about widening income inequality? Yes, but with a nuanced understanding. The stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes, and the anxiety that has generated, is, he says, a most pressing problem, but policymakers must be mindful about trying to address its root cause, which Goolsbee says is "radically increased returns to skill."
In 1980, people with college degrees made on average 30 percent more than those with only high school diplomas. That disparity has widened to 70 percent. In the same year, the average earnings of people with advanced degrees were 50 percent more than those with only high school diplomas; today, it is more than 100 percent.
The market is shouting "Stay in school!" and Goolsbee's conservative colleagues at Chicago say a high tax rate on high earners is "a tax on going to college."
Of course, the Chicago conservatives are hardly about to return us to the days when public colleges and universities were virtually tuition-free, so I'm going to spend much time on them. And I'm certainly all for education, for any number of reasons. But there's just one problem with education as a cure-all. It's called "Ph.D.s driving taxis," which was actually the subject of some news stories back in the 1980s, when the phenomena first became somewhat noticable. This isn't just an anecdotal concern, as I'll exlain in a moment.
As Will explains, Goolsbee has a simlistic view of things-globalization plays only minor role, compared to the changing returns to skill:
"Globalization" means free trade and various deregulations that supposedly put downward pressure on American wages because of imports from low-wage countries. Goolsbee, however, says globalization is responsible for "a small fraction" of today's income disparities. He says that "60 to 70 percent of the economy faces virtually no international competition." America's 18.5 million government employees have little to fear from free trade; so do auto mechanics, dentists and many others.
Goolsbee's rough estimate is that technology -- meaning all that the phrase "information economy" denotes -- accounts for more than 80 percent of the increase in earnings disparities, whereas trade accounts for much less than 20 percent. This is something congressional Democrats need to hear from a Democratic economist as they resist trade agreements with South Korea and such minor economic powers as Peru, Panama and Colombia.
What this "rough estimate" leaves out of the equation is the entirety of the prolonged class war against the working class that corporations and the right have been waging since the 1970s. Consider, for example, the port truckers I wrote about in the diary earlier today, "Labor/Environmentalist Alliance vs. Sellout Dem Establishment At Major US Port". They are entirely free from competition by Chinese truckers, but their $12/hour take-home pay is about 40% of the industry average, and that industry average is depressed compared to what it once was, before deregulation opened the floodgates to non-union companies-a move authored by Democrtatic President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
There are, apparently, no figures in Goolsbee's calculations for the impacts of a de-unionized economy. But that doesn't mean the impacts aren't there. Unionized jobs-especially concerntrated in the now-decimated manufacturing sector-not only help those who have them enjoy a higher standard of living, they have substantial spill-over effects, raising the wages of other workers as well, particularly when union density is high, and the ability to form a union is strong.
None of that is so today, although Nathan Newman is right-things are changing. But until they do, people face a very wage-polarized job market, and getting an education does not by itself change the make-up of that marketplace. Indeed, if anything, it increases competition for the better-paying jobs, which standard economics tells us should lower their wages. Not exactly what we're looking for.
And what does the job marketplace look like?
A typical picture of 10-year job growth projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a striking disproportion of relatively low-paying jobs, which is what the economy will demand, given the trajectories set by our economic policies of the past 30-40 years:
Here are the underlying numbers:
| Occupations with the largest projected job growth 2004-14 | | Change in employment | | Retail salespersons | 736,000 | | Registered nurses | 703,000 | | Postsecondary teachers | 524,000 | | Customer service representatives | 471,000 | | Janitors and cleaners | 440,000 | | Waiters and waitresses | 376,000 | | Combined food preparation and serving workers | 367,000 | | Home health aides | 350,000 | | Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants | 325,000 | | General and operations managers | 308,000 | | Total | 4,600,000 |
Clearly, education is good for the individual, and an educated workforce is better than an uneducated one. But education alone will not dramatically change the structructure of the job market. More high-tech jobs will inevitably bring with them increased demand for more low-tech jobs-more janitors and cleaners, more waiters and waitresses, more food preparation and serving workers, more home health aides, more nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants. There is simply no getting around this. And so it is incumbent on us to make sure that these jobs pay a middle class wage. Otherwise, we are dooming ourselves to a two-tiered pre-modern economy, with an ever-shrinking middle class. And unions are clearly a major force in the battle to prevent this from happening. They are not just a force for the benefit of their members, nor just a force for progressive politics more generally. They are a force for the preservation of the modern world, and against a return to the polarized wealth and poverty of the pre-modern past.
Indeed, the income differences between skilled and unskilled workers that Goolsbee focuses on are themselves just part of a larger picture, which is dominanted by much larger inequalities, as journalist and author David Cay Johnston wrote in the New York Times back in 2005:
June 5, 2005
Richest Are Leaving Even the Rich Far Behind
By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON
When F. Scott Fitzgerald pronounced that the very rich "are different from you and me," Ernest Hemingway's famously dismissive response was: "Yes, they have more money." Today he might well add: much, much, much more money.
The people at the top of America's money pyramid have so prospered in recent years that they have pulled far ahead of the rest of the population, an analysis of tax records and other government data by The New York Times shows. They have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Call them the hyper-rich.
They are not just a few Croesus-like rarities. Draw a line under the top 0.1 percent of income earners - the top one-thousandth. Above that line are about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.
The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast.
The share of the nation's income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.
In short, Obama's top economic advisor is virtually clueless about what's really going on in this country. Not a good sign.
The labor movement matters enormously--not just for those whe benefit directly from the contracts it wins for them, but for all of us who want a better world. Political leaders--and their advisors--who do not understand this are not really qualified to lead a modern society. For without unions, a modern society simply isn't possible. |
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