Under the Radar

By Ben Becker

Quotes

"It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid."
—Newt Gingrich, GOP presidential candidate, calling for the repeal of child labor laws

"Living wage proposals are economically unfair because they change the basis on which our economy operates."
—U.S. Chamber of Commerce, from an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court of Louisiana against the New Orleans living wage ordinance

Signs from Occupy Wall Street
"Lost My Job, Found an Occupation"
"Robin Hood Was Right"
"One Day the Poor Will Have Nothing Left to Eat But the Rich"
"Second Time I’ve Fought for My Country, First Time I’ve Known My Enemy"[held by U.S. Marines veterans]
"I’m 84 and Mad as Hell"
"Due to Recent Budget Cuts, the Light at the End of the Tunnel Has Been Turned Off"
"Arrested on Saturday, Back on Monday"
"Obama Is Not a Brown-Skinned Anti-War Socialist Who Gives Away Free Health Care…You’re Thinking of Jesus"
"I Won’t Believe Corporations Are People Until Texas Executes One"
"Get a Job? I’ve Been Trying!"

Statistics
One out of three working Americans does not have retirement savings beyond Social Security. (Source: www.alternet.org/economy/147570/the_retirement _nightmare:_half_of_americans_have_less_than_$2,000 _banked_for_their_golden_years)

Nearly half of New York City residents in poverty work full- or part-time jobs. (Source: www.alignny.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Poverty-In-NYC -September-2011.pdf)

Outrage at Troy Davis Execution Helped Jumpstart Occupy Wall Street
"The struggle for justice doesn’t end with me." These were some of the last words of Troy Davis, who was executed by the state of Georgia despite claims of severe judicial and police misconduct. His case touched off a furious international campaign to save his life. It also gave a jumpstart to the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement during its inaugural week.

The day after Davis’s execution, hundreds of angry New Yorkers marched spontaneously from Union Square through downtown Manhattan, growing in size as they went, and repeatedly maneuvering against the police for possession of the streets. After a few hours, they arrived at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, electrifying those in Zuccotti Park.

Occupy Wall Street activists said the events of that night gave them the confidence and inspiration to march toward Union Square two days later. During this march, the New York Police Department arrested dozens and maced several peaceful protesters, incidents which were captured on video and are widely credited with sparking nationwide sympathy for the budding movement.

Unemployment Is Old News­—The Real Story Is the Employment Rate
While economists dissect and debate unemployment rates—with no universally accepted gauge for "real unemployment"—the lesser-used employment-population ratio and labor-participation rates have slipped through the cracks. Throughout 2010, the overall employment-population ratio (for those over the age of sixteen) was stuck at 58 percent—down from 65 percent a decade prior. The country has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, while the population has surged by thirty million people over the same period. As a result, the economy would have to add around eighteen million jobs to get back to the same employment rate as in 2000.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 6-9, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000002

On the Contrary
Earth to Labor: Economic Growth Is No Salvation

By Sean Sweeney

The notion that economic growth is, almost by definition, a good thing has been subjected to serious and well-informed criticism in recent years. Diverse organizationally, geographically, and ideologically, those challenging growth are united by one realization: the world’s ecosystems are in a state of extreme distress and the planet will be unlivable in just a few decades. Climate change, ocean acidification, species extinction, desertification, ozone depletion, and alarming levels of water contamination and scarcity are part of a long list of crises that have their origins in one thing—economic activity that increasingly raids the world’s stores of "natural capital" and pollutes and degrades everything in its path. The message emerging from the critique of growth is loud and clear—human civilization must quickly put a check on economic expansion and allow the ecosystems to repair themselves before it is too late. Indisputably true, but what can unions do? Workers are, of course, part of the very economy that seems to be causing the environmental problems, both as producers and consumers. How can unions, even in theory, be against economic growth? And unions and workers do not feature much in the talk about an ecological post-growth society (the few eco-socialist writers being the exception). The overuse of insipid terms like "green jobs" cannot hide the fact that the ecological crisis is not on the agenda of the U.S. labor movement. And those who raise ecological issues are likely to be reminded that labor is too embroiled in a struggle for its own survival to have much time and energy to commit to planetary survival. However, labor has much to gain by addressing, rather than avoiding, the ecological crisis and its causes—many of the solutions would help, rather than harm, unions and workers.

Green Capitalism and Ecological Modernization
Thus far, unions that have been engaged in ecological issues (mostly outside the U.S.) have tried to repackage growth as part of a green economic agenda, looking at growth the way an internist would read a patient’s cholesterol levels. Just as there is good and bad cholesterol, there is good growth (the "real" economy, green investments, rebuilding infrastructure) and bad growth (financial speculation, asset bubbles, etc.).

But what is green growth, exactly? The world’s leading green growth theorist and spokesperson is probably former World Bank chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern. In 2006, Stern authored a major study on the economics of climate change, known as the Stern Review, which rejected the idea that growth must inevitably lead to more emissions and ecological stress. Human civilization does not have to learn to get by with less, he says, nor does capitalism itself need to be fundamentally restructured. Low carbon production and environmentally-friendly growth is technically possible. All we need to do now is make it a political reality. This perspective, known as "ecological modernization," rests on the premise that technological and other efficiencies can "dematerialize" economic activity. We can get more output from fewer material inputs, thus decoupling economic growth from environmental damage. Perhaps the main policy plank in the platform of ecological modernization is the pricing of externalities like carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Once priced, the markets will work their magic and the economy can keep growing indefinitely. Government is important, but only as an enabler of green economic activity and not in any direct command-in-control sense. Unions, globally, have operated on the premise that the real-world historical options are essentially twofold. Either humanity will transition to some form of green capitalism, or we will face a "suicide capitalism" scenario where fossil-fuel corporations and major industrial, agricultural, transportation, and retail interests are successful in extending "business as usual" past the point of no return. The former allows space for unions; the latter does not. Unions have therefore generally accepted Stern’s green growth perspective and are, whether truly conscious of it or not, ecological modernizers. However, unions question whether private markets can drive green growth, and they have sought to move the debate toward a global Green New Deal (GND) through which governments—supported by labor—play a leading role, particularly in setting emissions targets and timetables. In a similar vein, many U.S. unions support Obama-initiated green investments and a green industrial policy as a means to restore both U.S. competitiveness and its manufacturing base. This was the message of the Apollo Alliance and it is now the main message of its successor organization, the Blue-Green Alliance. It is also the message of the mainstream environmental "Big Green" organizations. The green growth perspective therefore dominates the trade union discourse, both domestically and internationally.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 10-14, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000003

The Assault from the Right
Tea Party America and the Born-Again Politics of the Populist Right

By Darren Dochuk

On August 6, 2011, thirty thousand evangelicals gathered in Houston’s Reliant Stadium for a time of prayer, preaching, fasting, and singing. The event planner’s hopes for a momentous turnout were fulfilled. Performers petitioned God for help in rebuilding society and, with each plea, intensity grew. The crescendo came when the event planner—Texas Governor Rick Perry—appeared. With the gestures of a preacher—head bowed, hands clasped, and voice reverberating—the governor beseeched divine authority. "Father," he entreated, "our hearts break for America….We have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that, we cry out for your forgiveness." Perry delivered scripted biblical injunctions, yet his listeners knew that politics were at stake. As one reporter surmised, by the close of the revival it was clear that Perry’s crusade "had turned into something bigger and more complicated: a righteous rollout for one of the latest-starting presidential campaigns in recent history."

Perry’s extravaganza and the Tea Party movement that brokered his presidential candidacy remind us that "born-again" politics are as potent as ever. They are driven by a theology of small government, free enterprise, family values, and Christian patriotism, and backed by a phalanx of politically charged churches, corporations, and action committees. Baptists and Pentecostals who share Perry’s gospel have found in the Tea Party a vehicle for mobilizing nationally. Thus far, analysts have underappreciated the ecclesiastical weight behind this mobilization. While still tending to see Perry’s Pentecostalism as a marginal force, they have been prone to write off the Tea Party as an "extremist" faction "with no adult supervision." All the while they have explained this movement’s endurance as largely a secular phenomenon driven by economic angst with only haphazard tie-ins to the church. Yet the truth is that evangelical impulses inspire the Tea Party. And that same Tea Party fundamentalism now "wags the dog" of the GOP.

This shift in the Republican Party’s center of gravity has been underway for decades. Since the 1930s, in fact, evangelicals have sparked several "tea parties." They have assembled over moral concerns certainly, but also over issues like taxation and employment practices, labor rights, and government spending. In the face of Franklin Roosevelt’s welfare programs, evangelical preachers and businessmen excoriated the New Deal as an affront to sound Christian economics. They began articulating a free enterprise doctrine, and quietly organized behind the scenes to roll back Roosevelt’s Keynesianism and pro-labor policies. Strip bare the union of laissez-faire capitalism and fundamentalist Christianity and replace it with a secular, bureaucratic state, they warned, and one was sure to see the dismantling of an entire ethic based on individual responsibility to family, church, community, commerce, and—above all—God.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 17-23, Wall 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000004

The Assault from the Right
The Right-to-Work Offensive: Tracking the Spread of the Anti-Union Virus

By Peter Rachleff

The Republican victories in the 2010 midterm elections led to a new round of challenges to the long-beleaguered U.S. labor movement. Not only did Republicans gain a substantial majority of House seats and reduce the Democrats’ majority in the Senate to a bare handful—they also took control of twenty-five state legislatures (the Democrats dominate sixteen, and another nine legislatures are split) and twenty-nine governors’ chairs. These victories set the stage for a new round of Republican-led attacks on trade unionism, with Democratic compliance more often the case than not. Some observers have warned that they could "drive a stake into the heart of what is left of organized labor." But they have also generated new activism from within the ranks of the labor movement—an activism that might provide the basis for a long-overdue resurgence.

For three-plus decades, major employers and their political representatives have strategically tried to reduce labor organizations’ economic and political clout. While 30 percent of the private sector workforce was once unionized, barely 7 percent of private sector workers hold union cards today. This decline in density has brought a decline in economic power, from the workplace to the bargaining table, and a similar decline in political influence, even among labor’s former "allies" in the Democratic Party.

Like sharks smelling blood in the water, Republicans seem incited by labor’s diminished influence. However, their seemingly decentralized, state-by-state attacks are anything but spontaneous—they are fueled by a shared perspective and agenda. Conservative think tanks and funders have produced draft bills, conducted workshops for new legislators, and poured huge sums of money into advertising, taking advantage of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Their arguments have relied on cries of a "fiscal crisis" faced by each state (states, unlike the federal government, are required to balance their budgets), an unwillingness to raise taxes, and an insistence that cuts to labor costs and services are the only way to balance budgets. Public employees’ right to collective bargaining is painted as a structural obstacle to this agenda. Another dimension to this argument has been the notion that such a course of action will generate economic growth, which has in turn fed the idea that undermining the power of unions—in both the private sector and the public sector—is the foundation of a pro-growth, jobs creation-driven public policy. And so the shibboleth of right-to-work legislation has reared its ugly head.

This Republican offensive has unfolded on a state-by-state basis. Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, led the way in January 2011, when he introduced his "budget repair" bill, stripping public employee unions of the right to collectively bargain over wages and benefits, requiring them to collect dues member by member, and ordering them to hold an annual election to renew their diminished legal status. In Indiana, Governor Mitch Daniels—who, in 2005, used his executive power to take collective bargaining rights away from public employees—called for bills that would cut teachers’ wages and benefits and reduce public employees’ rights even further. In Ohio, John Kasich—whose resume includes stints in the House of Representatives and as a Fox News broadcaster—promised to "break the back of labor unions in the public schools" and introduced Senate Bill 5 (SB5), which took collective bargaining rights away from teachers, firefighters, and other public employees, proscribed strikes, and gave state bureaucrats the right to mandate terms of employment. The Michigan legislature handed its new governor, Rick Snyder, the power to declare any municipality in default and appoint a fiscal receiver, who could nullify union contracts, cut wages and benefits, and contract out work.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 22-29, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000005

The Assault from the Right
The Feminization of Austerity

By Mimi Abramovitz

The current attack on public sector unions is the latest step in a long-term effort to “end big government” through a three–pronged strategy that falls heavily on women. The strategy targets three public sector groups: service users, workers, andunions. Yet most of the prevailing analysis focuses on one group or another and thus misses the whole story and the strategy’s wider impact, particularly on white women and women of color—the people who comprise the majority of public sector program users, workers, and union members. This is largely a result of the gender division of labor that still assigns most “care work” to women, including the type of care work that remains embedded in many public sector jobs.

The Wider Context: Thirty Years of Neoliberalism
The strategy to dismantle the public sector is not new or accidental. It emerged as part of the wider neoliberal response to the economic crisis of the 1970s, and relies on the calculated use of what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine” to win support for otherwise unpopular ideas.

Over the course of the last thirty years, U.S. leaders have pursued a policy agenda variously referred to as Reaganomics, supply-side economics, or neoliberalism. Designed to redistribute income upwards and shrink the state, the now familiar tactics include: reducing taxes paid by corporations and wealthy individuals, and otherwise eviscerating the progressivity of the tax code; slashing the budgets of public programs that served—and, at times, emboldened—the poor and the working class; shifting government services to the private sector; deregulating businesses, banks, and labor markets. At the same time, the “reformers” worked to end consumer, workplace, and environmental protections; devolve federal responsibility for public programs to the states; and weaken the power of social movementsby reversing their gains. Meanwhile, the right called for the restoration of family values and a color-blind social order.

More recently, conservatives have drawn on the shock doctrine to invigorate their anti-public sector campaign, buoyed by the 2008 economic collapse, conservative electoral victories, and the Democrats’ failure to present an alternative narrative. Having created a budget crisis by refusing to raise taxes for more than a decade, elected officials knowingly exploited deficit fears to win support for more tax and budget cuts and for highlighting deficit reduction rather than job creation. They sealed the deal by using the race, welfare-queen, gay marriage, and/or immigration cards to convince people to vote for measures that undermined their economic security and the common good. The politics of fear and hate have kept people divided, blinded to their shared interests, and—until recently—demobilized.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 30-39, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000006

Europe’s Political Nightmare: Why the Christian and Social Democratic Parties Have Surrendered to the Bond Market

By Jordan Stancil

As Europe’s debt crisis deepened throughout 2011, it became clear that the Old World had become the bastion of the most hidebound financial orthodoxy, willing to force millions of its citizens to suffer years of reduced living standards in the name of debt repayment. In order to please financial markets, international public lenders engineered a deep recession in Greece as other countries enacted contractionary budget cuts. The rush to austerity—as well as the stubborn persistence in it, even as growth slowed to a crawl in 2011—presented a puzzle for Americans who had believed Europe’s political spectrum to be several notches to the left of their own. Now it seemed Europe was insisting on the suffering of the many in order to save the profits of the few, and even effective popular resistance was lacking. How could this be explained?

Both the choice of austerity and the lack of effective resistance to it had roots in the political and intellectual universe of pre-recession Europe. The issue was not how Europe responded to the recession and financial crisis, but why it lacked the means to respond in any other way. There were four main factors. First, a new type of conservative party, which disavowed postwar Christian Democracy’s concerns about markets, had been in the ascendant for several years and was in power in the main countries. Second, the Socialist and Social Democratic parties had long ago ceased to pay more than lip service to the notions of social justice and the public interest, and had suffered a commensurate loss of credibility and intellectual vigor. Third, national identity and immigration displaced class and social equality as the main political issues. Fourth, regardless of the first three factors, the institutions of the European Union (EU) made progressive change virtually impossible by moving economic governance far outside the reach of popular politics and requiring, by treaty, that member states reduce public deficits and debt. Indeed, Europe’s main institutional response to the crisis was to strengthen enforcement of these rules, making them even more rigid than they had been before.

The Conservative Parties in Charge
The welfare states of postwar Europe were built and sustained by a bargain between conservative Christian Democratic parties on the right and Socialist or Social Democratic parties on the left. Conservative parties in the postwar period were attuned to what they saw as the dangers of exploitation, disruption of family life, and other forms of immorality inherent in capitalism. Far from promoting the commercial ethos as the organizing principle of society, these parties did not deny that there was a tension between that ethos and the parties’ own Christian values. Thus, even if these parties were socially anchored in the business class, they were not "free-market" parties in the contemporary sense. In addition to their programmatic skepticism toward markets, they concerned themselves with preventing a return to the socioeconomic disorders of the interwar period—and the political extremism that followed. As the historian Tony Judt put it, "The very term ‘social security’ . . . became a universal shorthand for prophylactic institutions designed to avert any return to the interwar catastrophe."

  This ideology no longer applies to the conservative parties that govern the largest European countries today. Center-right parties like Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy’s Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) in France have left their hang-ups about the market behind them. In the rhetoric and the programs of these parties, competition and individualism are no longer seen as posing problems for Christian values and social peace. The accumulation and investment of wealth are no longer activities about which one should be, at best, morally ambivalent. Instead, they are celebrated by center-right parties.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 41-46, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000007

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Jobs: The Continuing Scandal of African-American Joblessness

By Andy Kroll

*This article first appeared at TomDispatch.com.

Like the country it governs, Washington is a city of extremes. In a car, you can zip in bare moments from northwest District of Columbia, its streets lined with million-dollar homes and palatial embassies, its inhabitants sporting one of the nation’s lowest jobless rates, to Anacostia, a mostly forgotten neighborhood in southeastern D.C. with one of the highest unemployment rates anywhere in America. Or, if you happen to be jobless, upset about it, and living in that neighborhood, on a crisp morning last March you could have joined an angry band of protesters marching on the nearby 11th Street Bridge.

They weren’t looking for trouble. They were looking for work.

Those protesters, most of them black, chanted and hoisted signs that read "D.C. JOBS FOR D.C. RESIDENTS" and "JOBS OR ELSE." The target of their outrage: contractors hired to replace the very bridge under their feet, a $300 million project that will be one of the largest in District history. The problem: few D.C. citizens, which means few African-Americans, had so far been hired. "It’s deplorable," insisted civil rights attorney Donald Temple, "that . . . you can find men from West Virginia to work in D.C. You can find men from Maryland to work in D.C. And you can find men from Virginia to work in D.C. But you can’t find men and women in D.C. to work in D.C."

The 11th Street Bridge arches over the slow-flowing Anacostia River, connecting the poverty stricken, largely black Anacostia neighborhood with the rest of the District. By foot the distance is small; in opportunity and wealth, it couldn’t be larger. At one end of the bridge the economy is booming even amid a halting recovery and jobs crisis. At the other end, hard times, always present, are worse than ever.

Live in Washington long enough and you’ll hear someone mention "east of the river." That’s D.C.’s version of "the other side of the tracks," the place friends warn against visiting late at night or on your own. It’s home to District Wards 7 and 8, neighborhoods with a long, rich history. Once known as Uniontown, Anacostia was one of the District’s first suburbs; Frederick Douglass, nicknamed the "Sage of Anacostia," once lived there, as did the poet Ezra Pound and singer Marvin Gaye. Today the area’s unemployment rate is 20 percent and, in some pockets, even higher. District-wide, it’s 10.8 percent, a figure that drops as low as 3.6 percent in the whiter, more affluent northwestern suburbs.

D.C.’s divide is America’s writ large. Nationwide, the unemployment rate for black workers at 16.7 percent is almost double the 9.1 percent rate for the rest of the population. And it’s twice the 8 percent white jobless rate.

The size of those numbers can, in part, be chalked up to the current jobs crisis in which black workers are being decimated. According to Duke University public policy expert William Darity, that means blacks are "the last to be hired in a good economy, and when there’s a downturn, they’re the first to be released."

That may account for the soaring numbers of unemployed African-Americans, but not the yawning chasm between the black and white employment rates, which is no artifact of the present moment. It’s a problem that spans generations, goes remarkably unnoticed, and condemns millions of black Americans to a life of scraping by. That unerring, unchanging gap between white and black employment figures goes back at least sixty years. It should be a scandal, but whether on Capitol Hill or in the media it gets remarkably little attention. Ever.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 49-55, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000008

Let’s Talk About the Jobs Gap: A Response to Andy Kroll

By Arlene Holt Baker

Andy Kroll has sounded the alarm on the severity of today’s jobs crisis for African-Americans. But more importantly, he has reminded us of the historical persistence of a black unemployment rate that’s double that of white unemployment, and that continues to undermine economic advancement for millions of people in our country.

Mr. Kroll points out that, as we look for ways to address the economic crisis facing our nation, the debate virtually ignores the particularly destructive impact that prolonged unemployment and growing inequality are having on entire communities, affecting the stability of future generations. He is absolutely right. More must be done to acknowledge and respond to the stark disparities that still exist in the richest nation on the planet.

Much has been said about the causes of the current global economic crisis. And although the economic collapse was not caused by working people, the unemployed, retirees, or the poor, they are the ones most impacted by the loss of jobs, foreclosures, and lost wealth. This is especially true for African-American workers. According to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, in 2009 "the median wealth of white households is twenty times that of black households and eighteen times that of Hispanic households." This represents the largest wealth gap on record, and it is completely unacceptable.

There is an analogy that is often used to describe the economic situation for black America that basically says "if the economy is the engine of the train, it doesn’t matter how fast or slow it’s moving, African-Americans are always in the caboose, never catching up." Now it feels like the caboose is becoming detached from the train.

It used to be that African-Americans employed in industries like auto, steel, and manufacturing were considered to have good jobs that paid decent wages and provided benefits, thanks to collective bargaining. And because of their unions, workers could be confident that they had a voice on the job and that their rights would be protected. These types of jobs helped many African-Americans improve their standard of living and simultaneously created stronger communities. Despite this progress, it wasn’t enough to bridge the jobs gap.

Over time, as our manufacturing sector declined—the result of a globalized economy based on offshoring, attacks on collective bargaining, and employers’ pursuit of a low-wage workforce—African-Americans lost a lot of good jobs. And while there has been some rebound in manufacturing, significant damage has already been done.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 56-58, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000009

Mobilizing the Unorganized: Is "Working America" the Way Forward?

By Amy Dean

Given the dramatic decline of union membership, the U.S. labor movement needs to reach out to a broader base of working- and middle-class Americans. Now more than ever, nonunion workers need an advocate, within both the economic and political realms.

This idea is at the heart of Working America, a national initiative established in 2003 as the "community affiliate of the AFL-CIO." Working America now claims more than three million members. Eight years after its creation, the organization has demonstrated some impressive capabilities; but, at the same time, it raises questions about the limitations of labor’s vision in using community outreach and organizing to build an inclusive base of power.

Working America has been successful as an independent political operation in battleground states. But unless unions address the challenge of forming a common agenda in realms that go beyond narrow electoral campaigning or political issue advocacy, and unless they are willing to invest in reviving labor’s local infrastructure, efforts to reach out to a constituency wider than the movement’s dues-paying members will continue to be constrained.

Creating a Battleground Canvass
Ideas that laid the groundwork for Working America initially developed in the1980s out of a discussion about how federations like the AFL-CIO could reestablish themselves as bodies representing the interests of all working people in the country. Economists—including Harvard’s Richard Freeman—recommended developing an "associate membership" program, and the AFL-CIO’s Committee on the Evolution of Work propelled the idea with its 1985 report, "The Changing Situation of Workers and Their Unions." Subsequently, through the 1990s and 2000s, labor leaders recognized that reversing a declining rate of overall unionization needed to be a priority; but they also recognized that labor needed to be able to establish a base of support that went beyond dues-paying members covered under collective bargaining agreements.

By 2003, electoral politics emerged as an arena in which labor should reach beyond its membership base to represent working-class communities. The electoral operations of affiliate unions had grown more sophisticated than ever before. Labor field campaigns demonstrated that they could create very high turnouts among their members, and that—when organized—approximately 70 percent of members would vote for candidates endorsed by their organization. This represented an historic high—but it also appeared as something of a limitation, given the declining rate of unionization. Thus, both the ability as well as the need to reach out to a broader base was clear.

To take the success of labor’s existing voter outreach and replicate it among nonunion members, Working America established a door-to-door canvass in electoral battleground states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, Florida, and New Mexico. The organization targeted moderates and swing voters, especially members of the white working-class who, starting with the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s, had been the first to flee the Democratic Party. Dues would be voluntary, as the organization sought to reach out to the largest possible base. The question, says Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, was whether this constituency could "be part of a sphere of influence" the same way that union members were?

New Labor Forum 21(1): 61-69, Winter 2012
Copyright @ Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/12 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000010

Florence Kelley: Pioneer of Labor Reform

By Peter Dreier

*The following biographical sketch is an excerpt from the author’s The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, to be published by Nation Books in the spring of 2012.

In 1871, William Kelley took his twelve-year-old daughter Florence on a tour so she’d appreciate the wonders of America’s new industrial age. The father was mesmerized by a Western Pennsylvania steel mill’s new Bessemer converter (a huge fiery cauldron which turned molten pig iron into steel) and a glass factory’s assembly-line operation for making bottles.

But Florence was more shocked than impressed. Touring the steel mill at two in the morning, she recalled, she witnessed the "terrifying sight" of "boys smaller than myself" carrying heavy pails of drinking water for men. These little boys, Kelley thought, "were not more important than so many grains of sand in the molds." At the glass factory, she observed that "[t]he only light was the glare from the furnaces." A glass blower stood in front of each furnace. Near each blower were the "dogs," as the boys were called, whose jobs were to clean and scrape bottle molds, a tedious and dangerous task in the dark and hot factory.

Kelley never forgot these images, or her impression "of the utter unimportance of children compared with products, in the minds of the people whom I am among."

As an adult, Kelley did more than any other twentieth-century American to rectify the awful conditions of child labor. She was also a leading organizer against sweatshops and a pioneering advocate for working women. She helped lead the battle for groundbreaking local, state, and federal labor laws, including the ones that established the minimum wage and the eight-hour day. Kelley was a pathbreaker in conducting social and statistical research to expose workplace abuses and in developing strategies—such as factory inspections and consumer organizing—to pressure state legislatures and Congress to improve working conditions. As a radical and a socialist, she viewed the struggle for workplace reform as part of the broader battle for social justice and played important roles in the feminist, civil rights, peace, and labor movements of her time.

Kelley believed that women with her class privilege had a moral duty to advocate for laws to protect workers, women, and children from the often brutal conditions of unregulated capitalism. "We that are strong," she wrote as a young woman, "let us bear the infirmities of the weak."

Kelley was brought up in an activist family. Her father, William—an abolitionist and a founder of the Republican Party in 1854—served fifteen terms as a U.S. Congressman from Philadelphia and was a champion of high wages for working men. Her great-aunt, Sarah Pugh, was a Quaker and an opponent of slavery. Her refusal to use cotton and sugar because they were made with slave labor made an early impression on Florence.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 71-76, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000011

Working-Class Voices of Contemporary America

Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty: The Voices of Navajo Railroad Workers

By Jay Youngdahl

*This essay is adapted from the author’s recently published book, Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty (Utah State University Press, 2011). Since 1993, the author has worked with and interviewed Navajo railroad workers in Arizona and New Mexico.

Those who drive along Interstate 40 from Albuquerque, New Mexico through northern Arizona and into the Southern California desert are treated to a rainbow of colors in the mesas and through the mountains. They encounter the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, a stunning descent into the canyon of the Colorado River, and the subtle variations of a cactused landscape. While the beauty delights travelers, this natural view is often interrupted by the consistent stream of trains—owned by Warren Buffett’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad—rolling over the double-tracked rails that parallel much of the highway. If you drive past these rails, you’ll often see large gangs of men—some working with hand tools, others operating machinery—maintaining the rails so the tracks can absorb the constant pounding that the trains dish out. Travelers in the Southwest often don’t know that many, if not most, of these men are Navajos. The Navajo Nation, occupying a landmass north of these tracks that’s nearly the size of the state of West Virginia, has been their home for roughly seven hundred years. Nearly a quarter million Navajos live here.

Railroad work has been one of the only forms of continuous wage labor available to Navajo men since their return to this reservation after the infamous U.S. government-enforced "Long Walk" of the 1860s. While Navajos and the Western railroads have a constant connection, an upsurge in Navajo railroad employment began after World War II, when companies were forced to send Mexican "bracero" workers home. In order to supply labor to the railroads a paternalistic triangle was formed. It was comprised of the U.S. government, mainly represented by the Railroad Retirement Board, an obscure federal agency based in Chicago; the Western railroad companies; and the owners of the trading posts that dotted the reservation. The Navajos had no say in the arrangement. Leroy Yazzie Sr., a pleasant sixty-year-old man with a sparkling Navajo sense of humor, found work on the railroads through his trading post. He got his job on the Rock Island Railroad after talking to a trader at the local trading post who told him to "round up some Navajos." Leroy found some men willing to go work at the railroad. All of the Navajo men got in the back of a pick-up truck and the trader drove them to the embarkation site.

Railroad work is generally dangerous and, with few exceptions, Navajos are offered only the most difficult work on the major Western railways—track maintenance. Injuries are commonplace, as track work is still performed much as it was well over one hundred years ago. So, to this day, after the snow begins to melt in the spring, Navajo men leave their reservation and travel between the Pacific Ocean and the Mississippi River, in gangs of up to one hundred, maintaining and replacing aging railroad tracks.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 77-81, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000012

Economic Prospects
By Robert Pollin
Fighting Seriously for Jobs and Social Security

As the severe unemployment crisis drags into its third year, proposals for solving the crisis are proliferating. Even more ideas will be tossed into the mix as the 2012 election season intensifies.

Some of these proposals are good, some are less good, and some are truly awful. The plan offered by President Obama last September included a mix of some good ideas, such as more spending on infrastructure and education, along with some bad ones, like cutting Social Security taxes (otherwise known as payroll taxes). The single worst idea in the mix, supported by deficit hawks in both the Democratic and Republican parties, is that we are facing a fiscal train wreck and we therefore, above all, need to cut government spending. At the same time, there are actually some major avenues still open for stimulating job creation—both because they could create lots of jobs relatively quickly and because they could do so cheaply—that most policymakers and politicians have thus far ignored.

There Is No Federal Debt Crisis
The official debate over the economy shifted decisively last summer, away from proposals for job creation to obsessing over the size of the federal government’s deficit (how much we are borrowing each year) and debt (how much we owe overall). The federal deficit has, indeed, been historically large since the recession began, running at about 10 percent of GDP for the past three years, as opposed to the historic average of 2 percent of GDP. But that is only because the jobs crisis itself is of historic magnitude. Solving the unemployment crisis would accomplish far more than any other measure toward bringing the federal deficit down. This is simply because when more people have jobs, they also pay more taxes and rely less on government support, such as unemployment insurance and Medicaid. There is another point to emphasize here. Despite the historically large fiscal deficits, the federal government is now paying interest on the total outstanding debt at a rate that is historically low, not high. This is for the simple reason that the interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds are themselves at historic lows, at around 2 percent. As such, while it is true that the government will need to reduce its borrowing once the recession is behind us, there is no immediate crisis whatsoever in terms of the government paying off the debt obligations it faces now or over the next few years.

Cutting Social Security Taxes As a Jobs Program Is Perilous
Since its inception in 1939, the political right in the U.S. has been trying to kill Social Security. These efforts have failed up until now because the program has maintained overwhelming political support. The enduring popularity of Social Security follows from the fact that, over seventy-two years, it has succeeded in reducing poverty for retired people and those with disabilities, and has done so at minimal administrative expense. The 2011 cut in the payroll tax, from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent, that applied to workers is costing the system $112 billion, or 15 percent of total expected revenues for this year. Obama’s proposal for 2012 would reduce the rate further, which could bring the overall loss of funds for Social Security to more than 25 percent of committed outlays for 2012. The Obama administration says that the lost Social Security revenues resulting from the payroll tax cuts will be replenished from general revenues. It is no doubt sincere in this intention. But cutting the traditional source of Social Security revenues, even temporarily, entails compromising the principle that Social Security is a self-financed, stand-alone program, whose funding is inviolate. If funding for Social Security starts being treated regularly in the same manner as all other government programs, it then becomes vulnerable to the types of attacks that have already occurred over the past year with public education, public safety, and pension programs for state-level workers.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 82-85, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000013

Roots of Rebellion
Traitors to Their Class

By Peter Dreier and Chuck Collins

The Occupy Wall Street movement has challenged the privilege of the richest Americans, but a handful of people within the top 1 percent support the movement’s goals of redistributing wealth and power. They are part of a proud tradition of wealthy people who found common cause with the poor, the working class, and progressive movements for social justice.

For more than a century, most philanthropy—made possible by federal laws that provide tax breaks in exchange for charitable giving—has ignored progressive movements. Instead, it has focused on giving to elite institutions, such as museums, symphonies, private universities that primarily serve affluent students, and land conservancies around private estates. When philanthropists and foundations donate to the poor, it is primarily to institutions that provide services and handouts—such as homeless shelters and soup kitchens—not organizations that mobilize people to challenge the status quo. Understandably, most philanthropy by the rich has not been concerned with challenging the economic and political system.

Throughout American history, however, a small number of rich radicals and prosperous progressives has donated money to keep the Left and its organizations going. Motivated by religious and secular views about slavery, women’s rights, racial bigotry, peace, poverty, and labor—and impressed by the courage and commitment of activists—they invested their hearts and their money in movements for change.

For example, a group that called itself the "Secret Six" funded much of the movement to end slavery. These wealthy abolitionists helped elect Charles Sumner to Congress, funded William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper (the Liberator), supported the work of Frederick Douglass, and secretly financed John Brown’s anti-slavery organizing, including his attempted insurrection at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many wealthy benefactors—mostly women like Jane Addams, who founded the settlement house movement—contributed their time, talent, and money to the Progressive Era battle against slums and sweatshops.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 86-91, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000014

In the Rearview Mirror
By Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman

Uncle Sam Does(n’t) Want You

Ventura, California not long ago passed an ordinance making it okay for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars. At the height of the Great Recession, a third of the capital equipment of the U.S. economy lay idle. Of the women and men idled along with that equipment, only 37 percent got any unemployment checks from the government and that money averaged a mere 35 percent of their weekly wages. Meanwhile, "ninety-niners," those who have maxed out their supplemental unemployment benefits because they’ve been out of work for more than ninety-nine weeks, now number two million. They comprise a division in "the reserve army of labor." That "army" which accounts for 17 percent of the labor force (if one includes part-time workers who want full-time work and those millions who’ve given up looking for jobs) is doing its historic duty, driving down wages, lengthening hours, eroding conditions, and adding an element of raw fear to the lives of those still lucky enough to be working.

The co-existence of idling workplaces and cast-off workers always has been the most severe indictment of capitalism as a system for the reproduction of human society. The coming into existence of a new social category—the "ninety-niners"—punctuates that grim observation. As recently as the 1930s, the numbing, demoralizing experience of year after year after year without work caused people to wonder if capitalism had outlived its usefulness. Nowadays, however, the "ninety-niners" notwithstanding, unemployment has been normalized; not a good thing, of course, but not something that all by itself causes us to question the way the economy is organized.

There was a time when unemployment was so shocking and traumatic that it led people to do just that. We don’t use the phrase "reserve army of labor" anymore. It strikes many as faintly embarrassing, too "Marxist" or perhaps anachronistic in the age of post-industrial flexible capitalism when we’ve supposedly grown accustomed to the casualness and transience of work. But long before leftists began throwing it around, that redolent metaphor, the "reserve army of labor," was regularly referred to, studied, and worried about by nineteenth-century journalists, government bureaucrats, town fathers, state governors, churchmen, and other citizens. Something new was happening and they weren’t entirely sure what to make of it.

Unemployment, as a recurring feature on the social landscape, only emerged with the advent of capitalism in antebellum America. Before that, the rhythms of agricultural and village life naturally included oscillations between periods of intense labor and down time. But the wherewithal to sustain families remained within the possession of farmers and handicraftsmen. Hard times were common enough, but except in extremis most people retained enough of their own land and tools, as well as common rights to woodlands, grazing areas, hunting, and fishing resources to keep themselves what today we might call "self-employed." Once these means of subsistence and production became concentrated in the hands of merchant-capitalists, manufacturers, and large landowners, the situation changed fundamentally. A proletariat—those without property of any kind except their own labor power—appeared in increasing numbers, dependent on the propertied to employ them. If, for whatever reason, the market for their labor power dried up, they were set adrift.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 92-97, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000015

Caught in the Web

By Liza Featherstone

Economics of Immigration

Debate over immigration is a thicket of misinformation and irrational, uninformed opinions. Fear and racism are constantly masquerading as political and economic analysis. One of the best places on the web to turn to for solid facts on the subject is the Immigration Policy Center (IPC)—www.immigrationpolicy.org—based in Washington, D.C. There is a "Just the Facts" section (www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts) that provides statistics on migration, analyzes the relationship between immigration and job growth, and explains the impact of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) on immigrants. The IPC also has a fine map of the United States (www.immigrationpolicy.org/just-facts/immigration-by-state) that will tell you—with a touch of the browser—how many immigrants are in each state and how many of them are naturalized citizens. The IPC site also provides links to the group’s useful research reports, such as a study (www.immigrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/docs/ca_immigration.pdf) co-authored with the Center for American Progress (CAP)—a center-left Washington, D.C. think tank—analyzing the economic consequences, for the state of California, of legalizing immigrants who are presently undocumented instead of deporting them. The IPC and CAP found that while legalizing immigrants had considerable economic benefits for California, mass deportation would be economically disastrous for the state, with devastating effects on employment, productivity, and tax revenues. The same two groups did a similar study showing how Arizona’s anti-immigrant legislation has hurt that state’s economy (www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/03/pdf/rising_tide_exec_summ.pdf), as well as another showing how immigration reform could raise wages for all American workers (www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/01/raising_the_floor.html).

For the business world’s pro-immigration take, it’s also worth tracking the work of Immigration Works USA (www.immigrationworksusa.org), which advances progressive immigration policies supported by business elites who want to benefit from immigrant labor. The organization is a coalition of business groups in twenty-five states. One of the best resources on the site is a page devoted to the "Economics of Immigration" (www.immigrationworksusa.org/index.php?p=90), which compiles myth-busting on immigration from groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (immigrants do not take jobs from Americans, they create new jobs) and the Brookings Institution (immigration raises the overall standards of living for all Americans). The page is rich with links to studies showing patterns of immigration; that migration to the United States is on a sharp decline, for instance, and how many Mexican migrants come versus how many leave. Other links show the economic impact of immigrant workers in twenty-five U.S. metropolitan areas, and states as varied as Minnesota, Oregon, North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, and Washington. The page also links to useful studies from the University of California, the Congressional Budget Office, and the Migration Policy Institute, all exploring the more controversial area of the labor market effects of immigrant workers—do they affect the wages and employment levels of native-born workers, and if so how? Sure, these business groups want to ensure a steady stream of workers, who—in some cases—they may wish to egregiously exploit. But the data, and the arguments, are still useful to immigrant workers and their advocates.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 98-101, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000016

Books and the Arts
The Future Doesn’t Work
Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression

By Dale Maharidge (photographs by Michael S. Williamson)
University of California Press, 2011
Reviewed by Connie Schultz

In September 1995, journalist Dale Maharidge wrote an epitaph for his own career. He and photographer Michael S. Williamson had produced three books in the 1980s about American poverty and the working class: Journey to Nowhere, And Their Children After Them, and The Last Great American Hobo. When an editor at Gale Research Inc. asked him to describe their work covering the destitute lives of so many Americans, Maharidge confessed that the reporting had taken a lot out of them:

Perhaps one can never understand [poverty]. All I know is that each book took a chunk out of our lives. One sets out to educate Americans about poverty in the hope that in some small way conditions will be changed. Then comes the realization that Americans don’t seem to care. This, along with the horror of the lives one documents, takes a toll. I can’t speak for Michael, but I plan to never again write a non-fiction book about poverty (p. 74).

Maharidge broke his own vow, and his latest collaboration with Williamson, Someplace Like America: Tales from the New Great Depression, asks a difficult but essential question for Americans today: "what do we want to become as we move forward?" (p. 10).

Someplace Like America expands on some of Maharidge and Williamson’s earlier stories and updates some of the tales of desperate Americans they had met in the 1980s. They got a creative jumpstart from Bruce Springsteen, who reached out to them after reading one of their books and then wrote two songs based on it. In the process, it connects the economic struggles of the ‘70s and ‘80s, when poverty and homelessness were clearly tied to factory closings, with the current economic crisis that levels white-collar workers who never imagined themselves unemployable, standing in line at a food pantry, or jumping trains to find work.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 102-111, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000017

Books and the Arts
Inside the Black Box
A Shameful Business: The Case for Human Rights in the American Workplace

By James A. Gross
Cornell University Press, 2010
Reviewed by Ellen Dannin

These days, much of politics and values in the United States gets filtered through the views of the right-to-life movement. But when it comes to the right to have a decent life, too many of our leaders are deaf and blind to taking action on the desperate conditions of so many in this country. Among those pressing for change, Cornell University’s James A. Gross has been a strong and consistent voice for the "ought to be" of work.

Starting roughly a decade ago, Gross began exhorting us to bring worker rights under the umbrella of human rights. His newest book, A Shameful Business: The Case for Human Rights in the American Workplace, is the fruit of this vision. There is no question which side he is on. The author’s voice is passionately present in every line of every page. The book covers issues of race and human rights, the ascension of market economic values over worker rights, the clash of property and labor rights, and safety and health issues in the workplace. This book is a no-holds-barred indictment of economic laissez-faire theory, its underpinnings, and its effects. The title of Gross’s concluding chapter ("Crimes against Humanity: Concluding Thoughts about Choosing Human Rights") best captures his position.

Gross covers intellectual and legal developments that most of us have forgotten or never learned. For example, in his chapter on the triumph of the market economy, Gross describes how law and power evolved during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to support the structure of employment in the U.S. That evolution, under the influence of capitalism, created a system in which the master-and-servant doctrine enforced inequality, while claiming that employers and employees had reciprocal rights and obligations. Here, and throughout the book, Gross shows how law has been used to enforce the subordination of workers. Partnership law gives employers the power to become a collective entity, and corporation law gives employers eternal life, simply by filing legal documents. While employees can also become a collective entity, that process is far riskier and more difficult than simply filing legal documents, and its existence is under constant assault.

Gross puts this into an historical perspective, noting that "entrepreneurs, characterized later by muckrakers as robber barons, needed to reconcile the values they preached of the free individual competing in the atomistic free market with the reality of concentrated corporate economic and political power" (p. 68). He describes this condition as Darwinian power that has used Christian principles to justify itself, as in Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 "The Gospel of Wealth." "That was accomplished by combining Darwinian survival of the fittest theories and Christian principles into a justification of wealth and power. Darwin and Jesus were woven together and, in turn, interpreted through a combination of laws: the Scientific Law of Competition and the divinely ordained Law of the accumulation of Wealth" (p. 68). Gross questions why employers are allowed to have inherent rights, while workers have none. Thus, although we talk about bargaining agreements, the result, he says, can never be a bargain between equals.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 102-111, Winterl 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/12 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000018

Books and the Arts
What Happens When Care Workers Enter the Marketplace?
Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care

Edited by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
Stanford University Press, 2010
Reviewed by Geraldine Gorman

An anthology devoted to the "cultures, technologies, and politics of care" might not be a popular leisure reading choice, but Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, edited by Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, is an interesting and timely read. The idea for the anthology was conceived of during a 2007 conference funded by a consortium of University of California departments, institutes, and centers. All the contributors are women, which is befitting of a collection described by its editors as situating the discussion "of intimate labor in a feminist discussion of women’s work" (p. 5).

The opening line of the introduction establishes the anthology’s thesis: a striking feature of contemporary capitalism "is the heightened commodification of intimacy that pervades social life." Boris and Parreñas consider a continuum that includes the categories of "care, sex, and domestic work" (p. 93).They argue that the "process of intimate labor is not uniform" (p. 6). Some forms entail face-to-face contact. Intimate labor often includes emotional involvement, but not always. What remains consistent, however, is that intimate labor is a primary source of livelihood for women, and its recognition and compensation in the marketplace are growing. No longer is it confined within the boundaries of heterosexual matrimony or parent-child relationships.

According to the editors, the essays "seek to understand what happens when intimate labor enters the marketplace and becomes paid both in terms of working conditions and the value of the worker herself" (p. 11). The extent to which these essays reach this end remains, like intimate labor itself, inconsistent and variable, dependent upon accessibility and experience.

New Labor Forum 21(1): 102-111, Winter 2012
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/11 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.211.0000019