INDIANA LABOR MOVEMENT GETS PNEUMONIA

Harry Targ

On Thursday morning, March 10, three buses left the parking lot of a large supermarket in Lafayette, Indiana bound for the huge workers rights rally at the Indianapolis State House. The buses were sponsored by the United Steelworkers Local 115A and the NAACP. About 100 workers, teachers, and peace and justice activists were on the buses. About two miles away another three buses left for Indianapolis with 100 activists from the Building Trades Council of Tippecanoe County and the Northwest Central Labor Council (AFL-CIO).

The buses were warm, cozy, and the spirit of solidarity pervaded the atmosphere. Travelers were determined to demonstrate their outrage at the rightwing onslaught on workers and education being planned by Indiana Republicans. Arriving about one hour later, riders disembarked from the warm and fuzzy atmosphere of the trip to a bitterly cold, cloudy, and windy rally in downtown Indianapolis.

The rally consisted of speeches, chants, prayers, and exhortations. Thousands of Hoosier workers withstood the cold to express their anger and their clear realization that the quality of their lives was in jeopardy.

Local 115A passed out some literature to articulate the reasons for enduring the cold and shouting for economic justice. They said that:

1.The struggle in Indiana was inspired by the events in Wisconsin.

2.The rally was about worker rights, including so-called Right-to-Work legislation and proposals to eliminate the right of teachers to organize.

3.The right-to-work bill that was not dead as some media had reported would negatively impact workers in both the private and public sectors.

4.Public sector rights, which need to be defended, had already been weakened by Indiana’s governor, Mitch Daniels.

5.The struggle in Indiana was not a publicity stunt, copying the movement in Wisconsin. Democratic House members walked out of the legislature and traveled to Illinois to forestall the Indiana body from passing the draconian legislation.

6.Taxpayers of the state were not funding the walkout by State House Democrats.

7.The so-called Right-to-Work bill was not the only threat posed to workers in Indiana. One bill would eliminate the secret ballot in union certification elections. Another would remove the right to collective bargaining from public employees at the local level. Another bill would prohibit local communities from establishing living wage laws in excess of the state determined minimum wage.

8.The struggle in Indiana is about protecting public education. Bills would authorize private firms to be hired to evaluate teacher performance, without any teacher input. School funding could be used to provide vouchers for use in private schools. Schools that did not meet certain performance standards would be transferred to private for-profit corporations.

9.The campaign to protect public education also required resisting the cutting of funds for colleges and universities.

10.The struggle for workers rights was relevant to the economy of the entire state of Indiana, not just the 300,000 unionized workers.

Another USW Local 115 document made the motivation for action crystal clear:

“We stand at the statehouse as one people, one labor movement, one united group of citizens. We are proud to be union members and union supporters because together we have built Indiana! Whether we are construction workers, teachers or students--whether we clean buildings, deliver health care or manufacture useful products-we stand together!”

There were different assessments of the State House rally in Indianapolis. The conservative Indianapolis Star, on the one hand estimated that only 8,000 workers rallied in Indianapolis, but on the other hand pointed out how cold, windy, and rainy the weather was, suggesting that attendees were truly committed.

One trade unionist, recalling the rally of 20,000 Building Trades workers in 1995 indicated that he could not tell if this rally was bigger or smaller than that one. Another worker said that we needed at least 100,000 at the rally to make a difference.

Several speakers expressed their appreciation for those that attended the rally. AFL-CIO leaders from Kentucky and Wisconsin pointed out that the Indiana struggle was part of a larger movement involving workers from Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, and everywhere that the basic standard of living of workers was being challenged.

Perhaps the most poignant statement came from an Iraq war vet who reminded the crowd that $3 trillion had been spent on two costly, foolish wars in the 21st century that helped create today’s economic crisis.

The outcome of the ferment, anger, and rebelliousness all around the world remains unclear. But one fine folk singer, after leading the crowd in a rendition of “This Land is Your Land,” wished the movement well. He recalled Woody Guthrie’s injunction: “Take it easy, but take it.” Perhaps that is where we are at today.

WORKERS ON THE MOVE

Harry Targ

This was a week of worker militancy. Wednesday, April 28, in large cities and small towns, workers rallied in support of improved health and safety at the workplace. This was the fortieth anniversary of the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. In the minds and hearts of these workers were the recent deaths in mines in West Virginia and Kentucky and oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

On April 29 masses of workers assembled, thousands in Manhattan, to protest Wall Street’s robbery of the American people, particularly for its creation of an economic crisis that has cost workers all over the globe millions of jobs.

And finally on Saturday, May 1, the international day of workers’ solidarity, inspired by the protests in support of the eight-hour day movement in Chicago in 1886, millions of workers mobilized everywhere; from Hong Kong, Istanbul, Athens, Berlin, Hamburg, Manila, Moscow, Seoul, Tokyo Taiwan, Bangkok, to Havana. In the United States huge throngs marched in support of immigrant rights in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and many other cities.

I just finished teaching a course called “The Politics of Capital and Labor in the United States.” We read texts that analyzed the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. We discussed its various stages from competitive to monopoly capitalism to today’s era of finance capital. I highlighted the post-World War II period in U.S. and world history emphasizing the establishment of a permanent war economy, deindustrialization, financialization, and neo-liberal globalization.

We then concentrated on the changing nature of the circumstances of work and workers over the last 60 years drawing upon the collection from Dollars and Sense magazine called Real World Labor. By way of summary, I prepared a list of the impacts of systemic economic and political changes on workers derived from the various essays in the book. The list, in no particular order, suggests the ways in which the lives of workers have been transformed over the last sixty years and why the mass mobilizations of workers, such as those this week are so desperately needed.

The list only touches the surface. It includes dramatic increases in state and employer mechanisms to obstruct union organizing. Union density in the United States has declined from a peak of 33% in the early 1950s to 15% today (half in the public sector). Employers skillfully use workplace policies to destroy the potential for worker solidarity, from encouraging racism, and inter-ethnic hostilities, to creating two-tier salary schedules.

Work has been increasingly sub-contracted and outsourced shifting manufacturing and service employment from once higher paid industrial capitalist countries to poor countries whose traditional economies have been disrupted to accommodate new factories of outsourced work. Sweatshops, initiated in textile mills in Britain and the United States two hundred years ago, began to be transferred to countries of the Global South in the 1960s and now, with declining real wages in the United States, are returning to domestic venues.

Work has been casualized. Job creation is increasingly characterized by part-time, contingent, and seasonal work, with significant portions of the work force defined as “illegal.”

For those with jobs, whether in manufacturing or service, modern forms of Taylorism are imposed on work processes. Originally Taylorism inspired efforts to control all the physical movements of workers to maximize their productivity at all costs. Now such techniques are applied in the service sector as well, programming what workers say to customers and the appropriate physical space prescribed for interactions with them. Generally, techniques have been created to maximize the productivity (but not wages) with which all work is performed.

Workplace harassment has been rising in recent years, including demeaning treatment of workers, targeting workers with seniority so that they will be forced to retire, and encouraging racism and sexism on the job.

Similarly, the initiating of workplace regulations in the past has been reversed. Taking occupational health and safety as an example, systems of rules, regulations, and inspections led to a significant decline in workplace deaths and injuries during the 1970s. Those changes that benefited workers have been reversed since the 1980s. It is estimated that a shop floor or workplace can be expected to be inspected only once every 83 years. The tragedies in mines and on oil rigs this year remind workers that their jobs have become as dangerous again as they were fifty years ago.

And of course real wages, benefits, and jobs have all declined. Economists still debate what should be the “natural unemployment rate.” Everywhere, from U.S. cities, to most of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East life-sustaining remunerative activities involve creative street hustling, what economists call “the informal sector.” Good paying secure jobs as a percentage of all the work in the world is declining. In factories and service jobs “wage theft” has become common; that is employers find ways to avoid paying workers what they have earned.

State policies have enforced increasing exploitation of workers. Old fashioned repression, that is using the police and armies to crush union-organizing drives occur from time to time. In the United States, business lobbyists pressure state legislatures to pass “right to work” legislation limiting the ability of workers to form unions. Dilatory procedures for certifying union recognition, impediments to elections, prohibitions on strikes, and administrative decisions to prohibit categories of workers from unionizing have become instruments of state policy. Of course, in every country where organizing campaigns occur, leaders are targeted for dismissal and sometimes death squads.

In addition to this modest list, the transforming global economy has created millions of migrant workers who are forced out of their jobs and from their land to become a pool of reserve workers who desperately seek work in other countries. Masses of Latin Americans come to the United States to find low paying jobs while they are threatened by state repression, most immediately illustrated by the new draconian Arizona law. Mobility also occurs from and to countries of the Global South. A million Bolivians have migrated since 1999 to work in sweatshops in neighborhoods of Buenos Aries, thousands of Nicaraguans pick pineapples in neighboring Costa Rica, and Central Americans work in Mexican factories.

So this week workers everywhere were on the move. Their campaigns and rallies are about worker rights, jobs, benefits, and the capacity to be treated, wherever they live, with human dignity. The annual May Day events suggest that workers’ struggles are truly global. Capitalism in the era of neo-liberal globalization is truly global and in the end organization and resistance must be global.

In one of the essays in the Real World Labor reader Bill Fletcher suggests what is necessary for the U.S. labor movement to participate in the struggle for global justice. The labor movement must “…understand the problem of empire, or if one prefers, imperial ambitions.…the American working class resides in a world where corporate/government connections are strengthening, and with them increased repression of progressive and democratic forces in the face of unfolding globalization.”

Those who proclaimed May Day as the workers’ day over a hundred years ago understood the need for global solidarity to achieve justice. Workers need to build off this week’s dynamism to create a movement of global solidarity.

LABOR DAY JOBS STORY GRIM: RIGHT-WING POLITICAL ASSAULT SILENCES ALTERNATIVE PROPOSALS

Harry Targ

Every Labor Day, major media provide a synopsis of the state of the American working class. Spokespersons from the progressive Economic Policy Institute usually are asked to comment about the status of jobs, income, wages, and health care and retirement benefits. EPI is contacted because of their diligence in assembling data on these and other economic issues over long periods of time. Their data is compiled and issued on a biannual basis in well-researched volumes such as the latest called The State of Working America 2008-2009.

The “EPI FACT SHEET: Labor Day by the Numbers” provides a compelling and tragic portrait of the U.S. economy as it pertains to the working class:

-The jobs lost during this latest recession beginning in 2007 total 6.9 million, 2 million of which were from manufacturing.

-The number of workers who are currently unemployed constitute 14.9 million and an additional 16.8% of workers are underemployed. Together 1 in 6 workers are unemployed or underemployed, about 26.4 million workers. Black and Hispanic unemployment is almost double that of white workers.

-Worker productivity from 2000-2007 has increased by 19.2%, but worker wages have remained stagnant or declined during this period.

-Forty-five million Americans have no health insurance

-Only half of workers near retirement age have a 401K balance greater than $40,000.

EPI does note that rates of deterioration of some labor market indicators have declined due to the recent economic stimulus package. However, EPI asserts that government programs, such as extending unemployment benefits, need to be continued and expanded to address the serious problems that endure.

In an EPI press release Heidi Shierholz writes that “unemployment will likely pass 10% by the end of the year and remain elevated for years to come, and unemployment spells for those who have lost their jobs will continue to lengthen from their already record-breaking levels.”

Reflecting on the deeper meaning of data like these suggest a number of disturbing long-term trends. For example:

The United States economy over the last thirty years has shifted dramatically from profit and growth derived from manufacturing to financial speculation. Significant portions of manufacturing jobs that have remained have been exported to low wage poor countries. Currently less than 15 percent of the American work force is employed in manufacturing. And manufacturing jobs have traditionally provided livable wages for most workers.

In addition, worker productivity has dramatically increased over the years (without additional compensation). Fewer workers produce more goods and services.

Major job growth in the twenty-first century has occurred in selected low wage sectors of the service economy; such as in tourism, health care, day care, and fast food.

Putting all this together we see a dramatic transformation of the U.S. economy from one based on manufacturing, which employed relatively high paid workers, to one based on financial speculation, job exports, rising low wage service employment, and significant increases in worker productivity due to technological advances and declining union protection for worker rights in factories and other work sites. The new economy, born in the era of Reaganomics , and culminating in repeated economic crises, is a high profit/low jobs economy.

The number one question for our times is “how to get out of this historic trajectory?” Although thinking about a transformation of the global capitalist economy is justified, the United States government, needs to act now.

One approach to overcoming a high profit/low jobs economy is to develop a long- term public commitment to investment in renewing the basic infrastructure of the United States in conformance with twenty-first century needs for jobs, income and environmental change.

An articulate spokesperson, with a hopeful, realistic plan for overcoming the jobs/income/wages/survival crisis we face is Van Jones, the author of The Green Collar Economy. He and a variety of civil society organizations such as the United Steel Workers of America and the Apollo Alliance believe that the Obama administration, to really address the deep economic crisis we face, must propose, educate about, and lobby for a massive green jobs agenda. We can, Van Jones has argued, develop a New Deal style agenda to put people to work reconstructing the U.S. economy in the twenty-first century to save the environment, construct new forms of energy, reduce global warming, and create a national community that protects the future while providing livable wages for people today.

So while we read the statistical summaries over Labor Day, reflected on the fundamental contradictions of the U.S. economy-high profits, financial speculation, low wages, lost jobs, increased productivity-we may have noticed on the back pages of our newspapers that Van Jones, advocate for a green jobs agenda-which just might save the U.S. economy from the apocalypse-was forced to resign from the Obama administration. Right-wing media spokespersons mobilized a public campaign to smear the man. They resurrected harmless political statements he articulated or endorsed in the past that have no bearing on his current work. The real explanation for the campaign against Van Jones has more to do with his advocacy for the creation of a new economy, an economy based on jobs, livable wages, and environmental sustainability rather than the economy that created this Labor Day economic crisis.