Weekly Pulse: GOP Plays Chicken with the Debt Ceiling
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is calling for a "big showdown" over the upcoming vote to raise the nation's debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion from $13.9 trillion. The debt ceiling is simply the maximum amount the government can borrow.
On Christmas Eve Day, Paul Krugman wrote a brief diary, "Yes, There Are Prisons" in which he reproduced the following graph by Mike Konczal, from "The Conservative World View and Prison Populations, Broken Windows", which he describes as "a cross-section of countries and the strong correlation between their prison population per capita and an index of their 'economic freedoms' [per Cato Institute], with a plot of the United States since 1970 over it":
The graph is arresting in itself, because of what it tells us--(1) that libertarian "economic freedom" is correlated with putting people into prison at the international level, and (2) that the growing power of movement conservatism is even more strongly correlated with putting people into prison, at the national level. But Krugman and Konczal both have more to say. Konczai has a number of points to make in support of "why I think we can think of our current prison population dilemma as a conservative project," and why, therefore, anyone who thinks that criminal justice reform might be an agenda item for the new Republican House is sorely mistaken. But let's take Krugman first, as his remarks are briefer:
I'll have to think about exactly what's going on here. But the discussion brings to mind something I ponder on now and then: what happened to the inevitable collapse of American society?
All through the 70s and 80s, and some way into the 90s, it was almost a given that all of America - or at least all of our central cities - would turn into something like the South Bronx, or worse. It was practically a cliche of popular culture; it was also a theme propounded solemnly and at great length by writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb, who insisted that only a return to traditional moral values could arrest our decline.
And then a funny thing happened. Values continued to shift: we kept on having premarital sex and getting divorces, gay and lesbian couples went out in public, relatively few Americans went to church (although a larger number claimed that they went.) Yet crime declined sharply, big cities (New York in particular) became safer than they had been in many decades, and in general society seemed to hold together.
Actually, this is not the least bit surprising. Conservatives have been proclaiming the imminent end of civilization since at least Heroditus, in Works and Days with his five ages of man, each one more debased than the one before. Liberals, on the other hand, have been telling tales of progress--unsteady progress, to be sure, but progress, nonetheless--for almost as long, as Eric Alfred Havelock argued in The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics. We cannot tell what the future holds, and there's been a great preponderance of folly lately, but historically so far, conservatives have repeatedly vastly under-estimated human resilience and our powers of renewal, and whatever the precise details this time, the big picture seems quite familiar.
Before turning to Konczal, who has a more complicated argument, I just want to supplement Krugman's observation with a brief presentation of some international data about the rise and fall of broad categories of crime rates, which unfortunately only start in 1988, but show a sharp 1991 peak for everything, followed by an almost equally broad, if slower decline ever since, thereby showing that the US was not alone:
(I did a diary about this covering the day of action when it happened, and I've written diaries about it before. But since wage theft is an everyday occurrance, and among the populations studied it amounts to MORE than all other forms of theft combined, I don't think we can talk about it too much. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
As we enter this holiday season, Americans are reminded of the massive suffering that millions of people are experiencing right now, with unemployment, foreclosures, poverty, hunger and homelessness. But Wall Street, which is celebrating a year of record profits, never had it so good. Surely, their bonus checks overfloweth this season, with vast sums of money that no one could possibly believe they deserve. In contrast, the common folk never had it so bad, at least not since the first Great Depression, as what Americans are living through now surely must be the second.
To make things worse, as the wealthy bankers are propped up and subsidized by the government, everyday working people who have little as it is are robbed daily -- by their employers. Now is a better time than most to discuss the crisis of wage theft in the United States.
Unfortunately, the problem is common and widespread, and affects millions of workers each year. According to the organization Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), the average low wage worker loses $2,600 per year in unpaid wages. Further, three-quarters of low wage workers who work more than 40 hours a week are not paid the overtime the law requires. And millions of people are wrongly classified as independent contractors so businesses can avoid paying minimum wage, overtime and FICA tax, which amounts to stealing from workers as well as robbing the government. Wage theft forces its victims to choose between paying rent and buying food, and forces the government to cut important services. Righteous employers who play by the rules are placed at a competitive disadvantage.
On Nov. 18, IWJ kicked off a campaign to tackle the issue, with a National Day of Action Against Wage Theft. More than 35 groups across the country held rallies and events as part of the day of action. As the participants in this movement can attest, wage theft is as old as the scriptures, and the world's religions have long ago spoken out against the unethical, illegal and immoral practice. "Unfortunately, stealing wages from workers is nothing new. The Hebrew prophet Malachi in chapter 3, verse 5 proclaimed that God will be quick to testify against those who defraud laborers of their wages," said Kim Bobo, IWJ executive director. "Stealing wages was wrong then and it is wrong today."
Yesterday was a national day of action against wage theft. Although almost entirely ignored in the media, wage theft is an enormous problem, dwarfing all other forms of theft in LA, Chicago and NYC, and heavily concentrated among the working poorIn my previous diary, "Minsky & the current crisis", one of the conclusions I reached was "(2) Fraud must be prosecuted. The rule of law must be restored." But financial fraud is not the only form of theft that's become central to our economy over the past few decades. As labor laws have increasingly been undermined and ignored, wage theft has become increasingly widespread, particularly among low-wage workers. I wrote about this twice last year, "The Return of the Dickensian Economy: Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers" and "Robbed On The Job". In fact, a report ("Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers") on wage theft in just three cities--Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City (total population about 15 million)--found that workers had roughly $2.9 billion in wages stolen from them in 2008, a rate more than double that of reported theft in California--population about 38 million--which had total property theft losses of $2.8 billion in 2007 (the most recent figures available at the time.)
Activists in more than 30 cities, organized by Interfaith Worker Justice and backed by labor groups, are staging a National Day of Action Against Wage Theft on November 18. "As the crisis for working families in the economy has deepened, so too has the crisis of wage theft," says Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ) Executive Director Kim Bobo, perhaps the country's leading reformer addressing the ongoing scandal.
As much as $19 billion is stolen from American workers annually in unpaid overtime and minimum wage violations and, in some cases, through the human trafficking of legal immigrant workers. The latest case to come to light involves alleged horrendous conditions for immigrant workers reportedly hoodwinked in Mexico by a food services contractor for the New York State Fair and kept in near-slavery conditions of $2 an hour.
Indeed, the scandal surfaced when some of these legal guest workers showed up several weeks ago at a Syracuse area clinic, severely dehydrated and malnourished after allegedly being kept in virtual imprisonment in a trailer at the fair and at other locations; they were reportedly being denied thousands of dollars in legal wages owed them while working about 100 hours a week at fairs for months, according to legal filings and Danny Postel, communications coordinator for Interfaith Worker Justice.
"It's one of the most shocking cases of wage theft," Postel says.
Here's a short video introducing the problem:
Here in Los Angeles, labor advocates gathered to call for the passage of a local wage theft ordinance as part of the National Day of Action to highlight the issue. They were joined by Councilmember Richard Alarcon, who introduced a motion calling for the crafting of such an ordinance last year. If a wage theft ordinance is passed, Los Angeles would become one of the few cities, along with Denver, Colorado and Austin, Texas, to hold employers criminally responsible for failure to pay workers. I was unable to attend the press conference, but one of the organizers, Chloe Osmer, provided me with the following statement from one of the workers who spoke there:
My name is Raul Coronel and I've worked at Marina Car Wash for 20 years. In the carwash we work hard, sometimes for hours under the sun without proper breaks. At times they've had us work for free - they clock us out when the carwash closes but we still have to keep cleaning the cars that are inside. And worst of all, after working so much the owner has paid us with bouncing checks many times. I personally have received 5 checks with insufficient funds.
I have to support my wife and my 3 children with my wages, so if the owner doesn't pay all of our hours or if we get bouncing checks, it makes it really hard to pay the rent and provide food for my family. Because of the violations in the carwash, the Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Marina Car Wash and 7 of the owner's other carwashes. This is good but we know it's a long process. We need to prevent this kind of wage theft from happening - that's why we're organizing to form a union and that's why we support the Wage Theft Ordinance. With this Ordinance we're not asking for much - just to be paid fairly for the work we do.
Now, multiply Raul's story by 1.1 million--the number of workers affected just in the three-city aarea covered by "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers"--and you just begin to understand the extent of the problem.
"As through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
-- Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd, The Outlaw".
Paul Rosenberg wrote recently about how wage theft against the bottom 15 percent of the workforce is "so widespread that workers in just three cities-Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City (total population about 15 million)-had roughly $2.9 billion in wages stolen from them in 2008." The workers surveyed had lost an average of 15 percent of their legal wages. Now that kind of theft is in outright violation of the law, not that anyone who can do something about it cares.
There's also the wink-and-a-nod theft, where the real price paid for labor (real wages adjusted for inflation) hasn't gone up in decades while productivity and profits have increased. It sounds infuriating, but abstract, in the way of most talk about increased shareholder expectations and bloated executive salaries. Blah. Yadda. But this is not abstract:
$63,385
That figure happens to be the value added per person employed in the United States for 2006 (via.) That's an average, of course; the productivity of everyone in the workforce added together and divided by the number of workers. It's not a direct correlation, but here's a figure to compare it to:
$48,200
That was the United States' median household income for 2006. That's the total number of households, perhaps with multiple wage earners, divided by half and measured against the value at the 50 percent mark; half the households in the US in 2006 made at least $15,185 (or about 24 percent) less in total, pre-tax income than the value added to the economy by one, average worker.
Last week I wrote a diary on a new report about widespread wage theft among low-income workers, ""Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers"". I said that I was working on an article for Random Lengths News. It was published on Thursday, and I'm republishing here below.
Robbed On The Job
Wage Theft Is Rampant-Estimated at Roughly $2.9 Billion Annually
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
Property crime is a serious concern in America today. In 2007, the total dollar value of all property officially reported stolen in California-population about 38 million-was just over $2.8 billion, almost half of which was motor vehicle theft. The rest came to $1.47 billion. Of that $2.8 billion close to one-third of it was recovered-$912 million.
But a new report indicates that these statistics are woefully incomplete. "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers" finds that wage theft is rampant among the bottom 15 percent of the workforce, and so widespread that workers in just three cities-Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City (total population about 15 million)-had roughly $2.9 billion in wages stolen from them in 2008, a rate more than double that of reported theft in California. As for recovering any of it, workers were more likely to get fired for asking than ever seeing a dime of what had been stolen from them.
"The reason we did this study, we were running to into this in our qualitative work," said Ruth Milkman, a professor of sociology at UCLA who was one of eleven co-authors of the report. "My collaborators had all encountered this," she said, "But nobody really knew how common it was. We thought, wow, we could really figure this out."
A couple of weeks ago, a team of researchers released a report, "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers", which found an astounding level of labor law violations among low-wage workers (rrepresenting the bottom 15%), costing workers thousands of dollars a year. It was based on a survey of thousands of low-wage workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, but the pattern of labor law violations is certainly much more widespread, though it's impossible to tell how severe it may be elsewhere. Naturally the wage theft involved impacts entire communities--including the business located there--a much broader impact than just the individual workers who are directly affected.
Topline findings-listed at the Center on Politicy Initiatives website where the report is available-include the following:
Workplace violations are severe and widespread in the low-wage labor market. In our sample, 26% of low-wage workers were paid less than the minimum wage in the week prior to the survey, and 76% of those who worked more than 40 hours were not paid the legally required overtime rate.
Job and employer characteristics are key to understanding workplace violations. For example, the industry and occupation of a worker's job was one of the strongest predictors of violations.
All workers - regardless of legal status, race, gender and nativity - are at risk of workplace violations, though some groups are more vulnerable than others.
More than two-thirds of our sample experienced at least one pay-related violation in the previous work week. Assuming a full-time, full-year work schedule, we estimate that workers lose an average of $2,634 annually due to workplace violations, out of total earnings of $17,616.
I interviewed one of the co-authors. Ruith Milkman, for a story based on the report that I'm writing for Random Lengths New. I plan to republish the story after it runs, but I didn't want to wait to share some of the information in the report, and some of what thoughts it stirred.
First and foremost, it served to reinforce what I learned as a child from my grandparents and great aunts and uncles, about the sort of world that had existed before modern labor laws were put into place as part of the New Deal. To a shocking degree, this report reveals, that lawless world has returned all around us, without being noticed. The shock of that realization is a call to do something about it-not just something immediate, but something deep and sustained.
"The danger with this is, this is a new enough phenomena that people are horrified when they hear about it," Milkman told me. "But the real danger is that it becomes a part of the economic landscape," she said. "Now the question is what are we going to do about it?"
There is a real danger that it could become something that we simply accept, she warned And here Milkman drew an analogy to the emergence of mass homelessness in the early Reagan era. "When it first started, there was a lot of distress and intense discussion and debate about it, and now we take it for granted. It's like we live in India."
STATE BLOGS
Yesterday was a national day of action against wage theft. Although almost entirely ignored in the media, wage theft is an enormous problem, dwarfing all other forms of theft in LA, Chicago and NYC, and heavily concentrated among the working poor