"If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby and pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I've been fighting for it in the Senate and that's why I'll make it the law of the land when I'm president of the United States." --Barack Obama
Nobody is making it the law of the land. Nobody is fighting for it. The Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) has drifted down to the bottom of the AFL-CIO's website, buried beneath good economic proposals which, however, do nothing to build a labor movement. EFCA is not to be found anywhere on the front page of Change to Win's website at all. The media's not smearing EFCA with U.S. Chamber of Commerce lies anymore. Congress and the White House are silent. Any escalation of pressure on senators from union members has never materialized, the polite letter-writing campaigns having drifted away rather than ramping up into pickets or sit-ins.
Today at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other leaders joined together to call for urgent action to create jobs and rebuild the economy.
In a live webcast panel discussion, the consensus was clear: Without quick action, an entire generation could be mired in economic turmoil. The nation can, and must, put people back to work-while addressing critical needs for the future of our communities.
The scale of the jobs crisis is obvious: Since the beginning of the recession, more than 8 million jobs have been lost. The official unemployment rate is at 10.2 percent, with more than 26 million unemployed or underemployed. These figures are even more severe among African American and Latino communities. Young people are at risk of permanently stunted opportunity, and the jobs crisis is rebounding throughout the country with increased hunger and poverty, massive numbers of home foreclosures and diminished access to health care.
Trumka will be part of a noted panel in "Spotlight on the Jobs Crisis" at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
With unemployment at its highest rate in more than 20 years, Trumka says America needs bold, quick action to put people back to work, in addition to longer term, structural fixes for our economy. The AFL-CIO initiative he announces will include calls to extend help for the unemployed, rebuild the nation's infrastructure, provide aid to struggling states and communities, create federally funded community-based jobs and increase lending to small and medium-sized businesses to spur job creation.
The House released a final version of the health reform bill. It has a public option all right, but not the robust version progressives were hoping for. The public plan would only cover 2% of Americans and premiums will cost more than anticipated.
Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) continued to threaten to join a Republican filibuster of a health care bill with a public option. A lot of people still think he's bluffing. Realistically, the public option probably faces more serious threats from inside the Democratic caucus. It's been whittled down at an alarming rate.
Nick Baumann of Mother Jones asks "What now for the public option?"
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that public option premiums will actually be higher than the premiums for private plans on the health insurance exchanges. That doesn't mean it's going to cost the government more money-the public option is paid for by premiums, not taxes; it actually cuts the deficit. But it will be more expensive than some private plans. Wasn't part of the point of the public option to prove that a government-run program could compete successfully with privately-run plans? Well, yes, but here's the problem: that was all based on the idea that the public option would pay health care providers at Medicare rates.
Baumann predicts that insurers will do everything they can to drive the sick people off private insurance onto the public plan, a phenomenon known as "adverse selection." Hopefully some of the proposed insurance reforms will curb their worst excesses, like kicking people off the rolls for misspelling their preexisting conditions on their application forms.
Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent reports that the House health care bill would eliminate the popular and cost-effective Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and shift its low-income beneficiaries onto private health insurance exchanges.
This looks like a stealthy preemptive strike on the prospect of single-payer health care. CHIP is a single-payer program that progressive health policy types envisioned as a prototype for a future single-payer system for all kids, or even eventually for everyone.
As Lillis points out, abolishing CHIP is also a gimme to insurance companies. Generally speaking, kids are cheap to insure because they're healthy. Private insurers would love to stock their risk pools with kids on federal subsidies. It's like getting paid to stock your pond with delicious trout. We worry about adverse selection making the public plan more expensive. Well, CHIP is the reverse of that because this public program is keeping the good risks for itself.
Suzy Khimm argues at TAPPED that killing CHIP could be a good thing, provided the kids continue to enjoy the same legal protections that they get under the public plan. Khimm suggests that moving low-risk kids into insurance exchanges could help keep costs down for everyone by making the risk pool healthier on average:
That being said, if CHIP's dismantling ended up moving more folks into the health-insurance exchange, it wouldn't simply be a boon for "the insurance lobby and moderate Democrats." It could strengthen one of the most fundamental parts of the Democratic reform package -- a robust insurance exchange with a pool of participants that's large enough to drive down costs precisely because insurance companies have an incentive to jump in and compete for customers. Moreover, folding CHIP into the exchange would add a younger, healthier pool of participants to the exchange, offsetting its potential of becoming a dumping ground for the sick and elderly. Finally, CHIP has always suffered from under enrollment -- about 6 million children aren't insured in the program who should be -- and by bringing whole families in under the same plan, more children will be covered.
That's a nice idea, but it seems foolish to scrap one a popular and successful social program in favor of an untested insurance exchange system.
The frustrating thing about so-called health care reform is that legislators don't really want to change the system. They want to make the system work better while catering to all the established interests that made it suck in the first place.
Politicians aren't the only ones to balk at fundamental change. The Real News Network interviews Sam Gindin (video below), a former assistant to the Canadian Auto Workers Union, now a professor at York University. Gindin says that, over the years, labor conceded too much on health care and thereby failed to reestablish itself as a leading force for progressive change in the United States. Helping elect Barack Obama was a step in the right direction for labor, he maintains, but it's not nearly enough.
As John Nichols of the Nation put it, when the House finally wrote the bill, the compromise was even more compromised than expected.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
More than 5,000 people are packing the streets of downtown Chicago this morning, chanting, marching and rallying against Big Bankers and financial institutions that have taken taxpayer money and are using it to give big bonuses to CEOs and to lobby against financial reforms that would ensure they don't go back on the public dole.
The crowd is marching to the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers, site of the American Bankers Association meeting, to protest the banking industry's greed and irresponsibility that crippled our economy, leaving millions of workers behind.
After the house of cards they built collapsed, bankers and the financial industry took $700 billion in taxpayer funds for a bailout. But rather than reform their failed practices, they want to go back to business as usual-with the chance of again precipitating another financial collapse and need for taxpayer bailout in coming years.
The result? Even harder times for working people. With 9.8 percent unemployment, you'll take the pay cut and like it. You'll fork over more for the new high deductible health plan that saves the boss a bundle. You won't speak up when the employer contributions to your 401(k) come to an abrupt halt. What's more, you'll be willing to work harder. As the head of a web design firm told the Wall Street Journal this week, he's noticing more cars already in the parking lot when he arrives at work each morning. "After the cuts were made," he noted "the people that are still here...are motivated that much more. They know they can't just put their résumé out there, because this is happening across the industry."
Productivity is soaring as fewer workers get more work done. But it doesn't look like working people are seeing any of the benefits. And that's bad news for the economy as a whole. Consumers aren't likely to resume spending when wages are down, especially without the ability they once had to borrow against high home values. It's a recipe for a vicious economic cycle.
The way out should include additional public stimulus, but it must also involve shifting more power to employees - enough to push back and stop making America's working families the single easiest target for every negative economic development. The Employee Free Choice Act was a good idea before the recession, when middle-class Americans weren't sharing the benefits of economic good times, but it's absolutely essential now that working people are bearing the disproportionate brunt of the economic hard times.
Immigration enforcement, not immigration reform, has been the focus of the Obama administration. The administration expanded the 287(g) program, which empowers local police to enforce federal immigration laws, and renewed E-Verify, the Bush mandated system that federal contractors are required to use to verify the immigration status of workers. Both are flawed and ineffective enforcement policies.
Obama's enforcement approach also targets employers. Instead of massively arresting immigrant workers in the workplace like the Bush administration, the focus now is on punishing employers that hire undocumented workers. As a result of this new focus, American Apparel is in the process of firing 1,800 immigrant workers in LA. A federal investigation revealed irregularities with the employees' documentation. Most of the workers losing their jobs are women who support their families.
On Wall Street today, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling for tough new regulations on the financial industry and a new approach to making the U.S. economy work for working people.
Trumka spoke today at the New York Stock Exchange as part of the new AFL-CIO leadership team's national tour to set out a jobs-focused, progressive vision for the economy-and to fight back against the corporate agenda that left workers behind.
We've let wealth concentrate for too long, Trumka said. The past decade has shown us the folly of building an unfair and unequal economy that only works for a few, while working people pile up debt to get by. We need to be able to protect consumers from abuses by mortgage lenders and credit card companies and hold accountable those whose greed and irresponsibility have undermined the economy, Trumka said:
Banks and other financial institutions must be held accountable for making this mess that required trillions of dollars of our money to clean up. For the pain they've inflicted on families who face financial ruin-unemployment, wiped out pensions, foreclosures and bankruptcy.
Two days ago, I wrote that I did not trust the Obama administration when it comes to applying political pressure on conservative Democrats in order to pass some of the more progressive elements of the Democratic agenda. The specific examples I used were card-check and cramdown, on which I believe the administration offered token vocal support but did not take serious (or at least effective) efforts to advance.
In response, Matthew Yglesias wrote yesterday that I wasn't using common sense, which would show that the Obama administration is passing the most progressive legislation that is possible to pass:
For a bill to pass the House of Representatives, it needs a majority. According to DW-NOMINATE score, the median member of the House of Representatives is currently Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota. The median member of the United States Senate is Kay Hagan of North Carolina. The pivotal sixtieth Senator required to break a filibuster is Ben Nelson of Nebraska. All you need to believe in order to believe that Barack Obama is generally signing the most progressive bills that it's possible to pass is that the Obama administration is more left-wing than Representative Herseth and Senator Nelson.
That is a very nice generalization about the political situation, but it breaks down when you look at the specific fights I cited as my examples: card-check and cramdown. In particular, the card-check fight is case where the administration completely failed to apply necessary pressure to pass what was a very winnable fight.
In the 110th Congress, 52 Senators supported cramdown, eight away from passage. On June 26th, 2007, 51 Senators voted in favor of invoking cloture on a version of the Employee Free Choice Act that included card-check. One Senator, Tim Johnson, was supportive but too ill to attend the vote.
With 8 votes needed to reach 60 in the Senate, and with all major Democratic challengers for Senate stating their support for the Employee Free Choice Act with card-check, the target in 2008 was to net Democrats 8 Senate pickups. Rather than lacking common sense about the need for 60 votes, as Yglesias accuses me, I mentioned this target repeatedly during my 2008 Senate forecasts, as a running whip count on card check. In the end, Democrats netted exactly 8 seats--enough for passage.
A couple of months after card-check had been defeated, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was quoted calling pressure from progressive groups against conservative Democrats, including labor, "f*cking stupid."
To recap: we had 60 votes for card-check, we lost six of those votes under the Obama administration's watch, and then the White House chief of Staff called attempts to apply political pressure on wayward Democrats "f*cking stupid."
So please, tell me again why I should believe the Obama administration is doing everything it can to pass things like card-check, and how I lack common sense about how 60 votes are needed to pass the Senate. We had the votes, the votes were lost under the Obama administration, and then the Obama administration protected the Democrats who defected.
Weren't we supposed to be talking about health care? As Rep. Joe Wilson's deeply inappropriate outburst during President Obama's health care address demonstrates, it's hard to tackle any major domestic policy issue in the U.S. without hitting on the raw nerve of the nation's broken immigration system. The good news: an immigration overhaul is on the Congressional agenda right after health care.
The report reveals that the American middle class relies on the economic contributions of immigrants both authorized and undocumented, but also that the exploitation of undocumented immigrant workers threatens to drive labor standards down for current and aspiring middle-class workers. Our conclusion? We need a new immigration policy that will both bolster immigrants' economic contributions and strengthen their rights in the workplace. Providing a path to earned legalization for currently undocumented immigrants is the best way to achieve both goals. Done right, it would eliminate the entire category of undocumented immigrants, ending the debate over who should be excluded from the U.S. health care system among many other things.
Low-wage workers are struggling to navigate the current recession. A new study conducted by a team of academics reveals that the majority of workers at the bottom of the economic ladder have been shorted on their paychecks as recently as last week. But the compensation crisis looks very different on Wall Street, where excessive pay tied to risky activities helped set the economy on its crash course. Despite the resulting deep recession, pay for high-level U.S. financiers remains over-the-top, even as low wage workers struggle to navigate the downturn.
The U.S. has made a few gestures toward scaling back executive compensation for banks that it bailed out under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but the rules have amounted to little more than window-dressing, according to a paper published last week by the Institute for Policy Studies. The paper's authors, Sarah Anderson and Sam Pizzigati, found that ten of the 20 largest bailout banks have reported stock option compensation for 2009, and the top five executives at those companies have scored a full $90 million so far this year. That's just through stock options. The number gets even more obscene if you include bonuses, salary and other payouts.
As Anderson and Pizzigati explain in a companion piece published in AlterNet, bank executives collected huge bonuses based on the profits from subprime loans during the housing bubble. Since subprime mortgages were more expensive than traditional loans, profits were high-until borrowers stopped being able to pay back their predatory, unaffordable debt. Suddenly the banks were all busted, but the executives had already made a killing.
Katrina vanden Huevel emphasizes in The Nation that the U.S. government doesn't even try to tax this kind of income, much less regulate its connection to risk-taking. Billions of dollars in tax revenue are lost each year as financiers hide payouts in offshore tax havens, while on-the-books income from financial activities are taxed at arbitrarily low rates. Capital gains like stock price increases, for instance, are taxed at just 15%, while income from an ordinary paycheck is taxed at 35% for the wealthiest individuals.
While the U.S. dallies on executive pay, key leaders in Europe are moving to rein in risky compensation practices in the financial sector, as detailed in this video report over at The Real News. President Barack Obama will meet with U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicholas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leaders of the G-20 in Pittsburgh later this month, and financial regulatory reform will be at the top of the agenda.
For ordinary workers, there are few positive signs in the current economy. The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen dissects the latest batch of unemployment numbers from the Labor Department. The good news is that the overall pace of layoffs seems to be abating. The bad news? The U.S. still lost a whopping 216,000 jobs in August. And broader measures of workplace woe are even worse. The unemployment rate does not include discouraged workers who have stopped looking for a job, and it doesn't include those who want to work full-time but have to settle for part-time employment. That statistic actually declined slightly in July, giving some economists cause for optimism. But the metric soared again in August, reaching the highest level on record.
And unemployment is not the only problem workers face. Both Tim Fernholz of The American Prospect and Elizabeth Palmberg of Sojourners highlight a New York Times story by labor reporter Steven Greenhouse, which details how low-wage workers are routinely cheated by their employers. According to a recent study, a full 68% of these workers report having experienced an illegal workplace abuse in the past week, such as being denied overtime pay or being required to work for less than minimum wage. On average, workers lost 15% of their weekly income as a result of this exploitation.
We have good laws to protect workers, but they just aren't being enforced. Companies have successfully intimidated their employees into not reporting blatantly illegal pay practices. The best way to resolve this situation is to expand unionization and give workers a stronger voice in the workplace, making it safe to speak out against abuses. And the best way to expand unionization is to enact the Employee Free Choice Act, which lowers barriers to creating a union. But the legislative process has been delayed by a smear campaign organized by executives and managers claiming that unions, and not corporate elites, are the actual source of workplace coercion.
"It ought to make your blood boil-especially as people decry union thugs 'intimidating' people into joining unions when that doesn't happen and most workers want to join a union," Fernholz writes.
The U.S. needs to get its economic priorities in order. We should be protecting low-wage workers from executive excess, not the other way around. President Obama will have an opportunity to coordinate that effort globally at the G-20 summit later this month. Let's hope he doesn't squander it.
Today is our celebration of the Labor Movement and the value of the workers who built and continue to maintain America. As a holiday, it has an interesting political history and looking at the 127 years it has been celebrated we see stark changes that have been made in the relationship between the government and labor.
Unemployment was up .3%, and underemployment a whopping .5% of a percent.
The number of job losses actually declined (216K) to its lowest level since the recession began, so the increase is partially the result of more people trying to enter the labor force (which is a reversal from July).
I still don't know where the new jobs are going to come from to get people back to work.
Political notes:
It is important that we don't sell a lower level of job losses as good news. That sounds like the Bush administration, the McCain campaign, and other Republicans trying to convince the country that the economy really was oh so great, even though we were entering a collapse. Economic conditions cannot be improved through better spin. Rather, they are objective concerns people deal with every day. If it isn't getting any better, and is in fact getting a lot worse, a governing party only compounds its culpability by trying to deny reality to the country.
If this keeps getting worse, we really are screwed in 2010. We were voted in to fix this problem. While the country may not believe that Republicans could have done any better, they might very well believe that all the spending which took place under Democratic governance caused a new and unnecessary problem on top of the terrible economic conditions. Even if the Democratic programs prevented economic conditions from becoming much worse, many voters will simply weigh "a crappy economy and large deficits versus a crappy economy plus even larger deficits." That is a tough election formula for us to face.
A second stimulus, even if needed, isn't going to happen. You don't get a second chance at the same idea if you became unpopular as a result of the first time you tried it. Majorities are already opposed to a second stimulus program, and those numbers will only get worse if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.
The Wall Street bailout was actually the first stimulus anyway, and the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was already the second one. The stimulus opportunity costs that we lost with the bailout are staggering.
The political upside is that Democratic programs like the stimulus will get credit for a turnaround when, and if, one takes place. Forecasts seem to average at around 2 to 2.5 million jobs created by the end of 2010, and for those increases to start happening fairly soon since the economy is expected to expand in the third quarter. Whether that will be enough growth to prevent a big backlash against Democrats is impossible to say at this time, but the forecasts of an 8.0% unemployment rate as late as 2012 are not encouraging.
Yikes. No fun to be the captain of a sinking ship, either
Something bad happened in the past 10 years to young workers in this country: Since 1999, more of them now have lower-paying jobs, if they can get a job at all; health care is a rare luxury and retirement security is something for their parents, not them. In fact, many-younger than 35-still live at home with their parents because they can't afford to be on their own.
These are the findings of a new report, "Young Workers: A Lost Decade." Conducted in July 2009 by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and our community affiliate Working America, the nationwide survey of 1,156 people follows up on a similar survey the AFL-CIO conducted in 1999. The deterioration of young workers' economic situation in those 10 years is alarming.
AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka appeared on CNBC this morning for a frank talk about health care, politics and the future of the country.
As described this week in Huffington Post, Trumka is laying out a fundamental proposition: When it comes time for millions of union members to mobilize, educate other union members and get out the vote, they'll work on behalf of candidates who support real health care reform that provides quality, affordable health care to all and gives people the opportunity to choose a public health coverage plan alongside private options:
We finally said, look, this is the minimum. If you're going to do something, do something that works. If you're going to have health insurance reform, you must have a public option in it. if you don't, don't expect us to support you.
There's a fundamental lesson in collective bargaining that seems to have been lost on the White House, and those in Congress who devised their failing strategy on healthcare reform:
Don't make all your compromises before you walk in the room.
U.S. employers cut 247,000 jobs in July, far less than expected and the least in any month since last August, according to data on Friday that provided the clearest evidence yet that the economy was turning around.
With fewer workers being laid off, the unemployment rate eased to 9.4 percent in July from 9.5 percent the prior month, Labor Department data showed, the first time the jobless rate had fallen since April 2008.
The government revised job losses for May and June to show 43,000 fewer jobs lost than previously reported.
I have been trying to find an explanation for how the broad U6 can drop even though there was a net loss of jobs. This is the best explanation I can find so far:
Both numbers are estimates based on surveys. The job loss number is from surveying companies. The unemployment number is from surveying people. There's both systematic bias and significant sampling error in both numbers.
So, I guess this is good news. It could turn out to be very good news for Democrats.
Still, like most people, I will feel a lot better when more jobs are actually being created then lost.
If you've been following my occasional blogs arguing for a more robust vision for health care reform, often titled "When Insurance Isn't Enough," you know that I start from a values-based framework, the idea that the opportunity to reach our highest attainable standard of health is a right inherent to our dignity as human beings. And then I usually go on to highlight an aspect of health care that isn't getting the sort of coverage or discussion that it should be, given the almost myopic focus on cost-cutting and insurance coverage; in the past, I've highlighted preventative care, healthy infrastructure like walkable communities, care coordination, and enabling services. Today, I'd like to take a step back and think about one of the keystones of the current push for reform: the idea of "universal" health care.
Literally, "universal" means "applicable everywhere or in all cases." The question is, what do the various actors in the health care reform debate mean when they use the word "universal"? President Obama has said that "universal" health care is one of his primary goals for any reform, as have many Congressional leaders and public interest advocates. Do they actually mean "universal," or is this an appropriate time to reference that oft-quoted scene from the Princess Bride, where after having dealt with Vizzini calling every occurence "inconceivable" all night long, Inigo Montoya remarks, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
The answer, of course, is that we get what's known as "work-life balance" or "family-friendly" benefits - like paid sick days, paid family and medical leave, and child care benefits - when we oblige employers to give them to us. Employees with in-demand skills do that now, and the good news is, employers are generally not scaling back workplace flexibility policies during this recession. (See this new study from the Families and Work Institute for the first piece of good employment news I've read in a while.)
Last week, the Treasury Department recommended legislation enacting modest "Say on Pay" reforms of executive compensation. In a nutshell, the bill would provide shareholders of any publicly-traded company in the U.S. with an annual non-binding vote on the pay packages of all senior executives at a company.
DMI explored the idea last year at an event with Blockbuster CEO James Keyes and leading investor advocates. (Look here for a liveblog of the discussion). The conclusion? Even though investor votes are non-binding, Say on Pay provides a meaningful voice for shareholders who depend on their investments to retire securely or help their children attend college. What's more, the track record for the policy as it has been applied in Britain suggests it can help to realign executive pay packages with the long-term interests of the company. At a time of plunging portfolios and faltering businesses, this is no small matter. To the extent that ill-advised corporate compensation structures provided perverse incentives that rewarded the type of excessive risk-taking that led to the economic crisis, Say on Pay may be more important still.
But Say on Pay - advisable as it is - can't truly address the nation's deeper concerns about executive compensation.
At its root, the latest outrage over soaring bonuses at Goldman Sachs and its ilk isn't about whether these companies are delivering shareholder value. Americans are incensed that the titans of finance - assisted by taxpayer handouts far more generous than anything millions of foreclosed and unemployed Americans could hope to see - are experiencing a grand revival of fortunes while the rest of us are still mired in the economic doldrums. This caps off a larger 30-year trend in which CEO compensation soared while the wages of the typical worker stagnated. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, in 2007 a CEO earned more in one workday than the typical worker earned all year. Yet Say on Pay has not been an effective tool to diminish this gaping disparity. Savings from lavish executive pay packages are unlikely to be redistributed to ordinary employees.
