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Two Reports from the Murphy Institute:
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The Precariat: A Class or a Condition?
By Peter Frase
The claim that work has become more precarious in recent decades has an intuitive appeal, at least among a layer of young people and activists. The concept of the "precariat," playing on the old description of the working class as a "proletariat," attempts to give empirical and sociological content to this intuition. The term has been widely disseminated by U.K. sociologist Guy Standing, whose book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class summarizes a long career of investigation into the changing nature of waged work.
As a proposed concept, the precariat raises three questions. First, has work around the world in fact become more precarious in the past few decades, in some empirically definable way? If so, do those who perform precarious labor constitute a "class," in the sense of being a group that has a distinct structural position in modern capitalism, and which could potentially be unified under a single political banner? And, finally, what implications does increasing precarity have for the demands and strategies of workers and their organizations?
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The Politics of Debt: From the "Labor Question" to the "Debt Question"
By Julia Ott and Louis Hyman
From the explosive worker uprisings of the 1870s through the dismal days of the 1930s, Americans wrestled with a dire dilemma. How could democratic principles be reconciled with the inequities of industrial corporate capitalism? This "labor question" inspired social movements like the Knights of Labor, the Farmers' Alliance, and the Populists, as well as such radical groups as socialists, communists, and Henry George's single-taxers. Their varied schemes all sought to reconstruct capitalism to sustain the "producing classes." The labor movement, meanwhile, demanded the right to organize so that workers might bargain collectively for workplace rights, often defined quite expansively. After World War II, the "labor question" seemed settled. The CIO and corporate employers agreed upon the institutionalization of collective bargaining, the recognition of workers' entitlement to an "American Standard of Living" (including retirement security), and a prominent position for labor within the Democratic Party. In a booming mid-century economy in which the benefits of growth were distributed relatively broadly, Americans welcomed consumer debt into their lives. But the "grand bargain" between labor and capital soon felt apart. Beginning in the 1970s, capital took flight and unions lost members. Income gains stalled for everyone save the wealthiest. Americans grew dependent upon borrowed money to meet many of the social needs that rising wages had previously satisfied.
The "debt question" in its manifold forms-the glut of subprime debt, state bailouts of insanely leveraged banks, underwater mortgages, crushing student loans, and, of course, the federal fiscal cliff-now presents itself as the central dilemma of economic citizenship in the United States. Assumed by individuals and households in pursuit of social mobility and economic security, consumer debt has stripped working people of their wealth and contributed to ever-widening inequality. In 2010, total consumer debt reached nearly $45,000 per person in the United States. Debt collectors now hound one in seven households. Student debt continues to rise dramatically, despite the diminishing employment prospects of young workers with bachelor's degrees.
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Immigrant Labor and the U.S. Economy: A Profile
By Hector Cordero-Guzman and Desiree Nunez
Immigration reform is now solidly back on the U.S. policy agenda, recognizing the need for greater labor mobility and offering hope to millions of undocumented workers. As the debate gets underway, it is useful to examine exactly who immigrant workers are-where do they come from, what are their main characteristics, and what role do they play in the U.S economy? Before doing so, however, we should also look briefly at the nature of the U.S. economy and its labor market, and the ongoing changes in both.
Over the last twenty years, there have been significant changes in the structure and functioning of the U.S. labor market and in the demographic composition of the labor force. In the period between May 1991 and February 2001, for example, the U.S. economy grew steadily with close to 24.3 million jobs added while the proportion of the labor force that was foreign born increased from 9 percent to around 14 percent. Employment growth stagnated in the period between February 2001 and August 2003 with close to 2.7 million jobs lost. The economy recovered anemically between August 2003 and January 2008, adding 8.1 million jobs-leading many analysts to label the first decade of the twenty-first century as one of "jobless recovery" which ended with the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Between January 2008 and February 2010, a period described as "the Great Recession," the economy has lost a staggering 8.8 million jobs and estimates suggest that, as of December 2012, there were over 12.2 million unemployed Americans.
In explaining these recent trends, scholars have pointed to changes in the structure of regional economies, changes in the demand for labor, and increasing connections to the global economy.
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Building Global Worker Power in a Time of Crisis
By Cathy Feingold
After almost five years of a continuous global economic and jobs crisis, workers face an urgent challenge to develop global strategies that build their collective power and create greater economic and social justice. Governments and International Financial Institutions (IFIs) have used the crisis to implement an anti-worker policy agenda that includes labor market flexibilization and efforts to destroy what remains of unions' power to protect their workers.
The ILO estimates that the number of people out of work increased by 5.1 million in 2012 and will reach 202 million in 2013, adding that the true extent of the jobs crisis is marked by the growing number of people dropping out of the job market entirely. Close to 73.8 million young workers are unemployed globally and the ongoing slowdown may result in a half million more unemployed youth in 2014. Yet most governments, particularly in Europe and North America, are continuing to prioritize deficit reduction and fiscal austerity over the jobs crisis. Between 2008 and March 2012, forty countries introduced "reform" programs that eliminated or reduced employment protection for formally employed workers, and globally only 7 percent of workers in the formal economy are in an independent union. The decline in unionization, deregulation, and the deterioration of bargaining power has resulted not only in increased wage inequality but also in increased informal employment worldwide. More than 1.5 billion workers now work in the informal economy, the majority not in a union or worker association.
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Teachers Unions at the Crossroads: Can the Assault on Teachers Be Rebuffed?
By Lee Sustar
It's the teachers turn to be targeted. Forty years into an unceasing employers' offensive against organized labor, the largest group of unionized workers in the U.S.-members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA)-is confronting its greatest challenge since the organizations made their breakthrough collective bargaining agreements half a century ago.
Teachers union officials are facing the same choice that earlier confronted the other leaders of what used to be called Big Labor: Should the unions continue with established forms of labor-management partnership at the cost of making concessions on pay and benefits, a decline in membership, and the evisceration of workplace power? Or should they following the recent example of Chicago teachers and return to the risky strategy of struggle and strikes that made their unions a force to be reckoned with in the 1960s and 1970s?
Teachers unions are in the crosshairs for four key reasons. First, they represent the largest group of organized workers in the U.S., and are thus on the hit list of anti-union forces. Second, the teachers unions have the closest connection to the wider working class of any labor organization, which positions them to lead the resistance to the public sector austerity drive. Third, teachers are pressured to be a reliable transmissions belt for dominant ideologies. "Finally, there's the money-lots of it. The U.S. spends $500 billion each year on public education, a bonanza for purveyors of standardized tests, charter school operators, and consultants while governments save money by axing formerly protected tenured teachers.
Leading the assault on teachers is what education historian turned reform critic Diane Ravitch calls the "billionaire boys club." Figures like Microsoft Chair Bill Gates, real estate magnate Eli Broad, and the Walton family of Walmart fame dispatch their foundations to underwrite charter schools, lobby for punitive teacher evaluation schemes and train school executives to run schools like businesses.
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Reformers Resurgent? A Survey of Recent Rank-and-File Uprisings
By Mark Brenner
The sight of tens of thousands of striking teachers and their allies marching through the streets of Chicago was one of the few highlights from an otherwise tough 2012. This high-stakes showdown with Mayor Rahm Emanuel provided a much-needed shot in the arm to a labor movement that feels like it's on life support. Chicago's teachers demonstrated that the strike is still among labor's most powerful weapons, upending conventional wisdom that public employees are inevitably at odds with taxpayers. They also highlighted a little-discussed trend in organized labor-rank-and-file movements.
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) leaders took office in 2010, swept into power as part of a vibrant internal reform movement-the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE)-which for years had been organizing classroom teachers to fight school closings, pushing back on punitive Department of Education policies, and building grassroots connections with parents and community organizations. In the last several years there have been dozens of reform groups like CORE sprouting up across the country.
These reform currents are the latest manifestation of a long tradition of rank-and-file members challenging corrupt or unresponsive union leaders, resisting employer concessions, building stronger ties with other unions and the broader community, and promoting internal democracy and greater member control. Continuing in this tradition, today's reformers aim to do even more.
A Growing Trend
Although it's impossible to provide an exhaustive count, a conservative estimate suggests that, in the past five years, rank-and-file reformers have taken office in local unions representing upwards of half a million members. From UPS Teamsters in New York City to University of California graduate student employees, reform caucuses and reform-minded electoral coalitions are sprouting up across the country and in unions of all sizes.
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