How To Destroy An Entire Country & How the Defeat of Trade Unionism Gave Rise to Low-Wage Jobs & Organized labor's decline in the US is well-known. But what drove it? 14&4DEC13 & 4SEP13

“Americans are fighters. We're tough, resourceful and creative, and if we have the chance to fight on a level playing field, where everyone pays a fair share and everyone has a real shot, then no one - no one - can stop us. ”-- Elizabeth Warren
REP ALAN GRAYSON D FL is spot on with his warnings about the damage government fiscal austerity causes to the social fabric and the economy of a nation. We already have different parts of our society fighting each other over the scraps of government funding available after sequestration, and these fights will only get uglier, and potentially violent, if fiscal conservatives are able to force even more budget cuts of social safety net, "entitlement" and economic stimulus programs. With high unemployment and underemployment, stagnant wages and loss of employment benefits along with a decaying national infrastructure our nation is being set up for the collapse of middle class America, and the forces pushing this agenda will be ready to impose a plutocracy (the 1%) to control the lower classes (the 99%). What a sad state of affairs for a country that used to be the envy of the world. The fat lady isn't singing a funeral dirge for our Republic yet, but listen, you can hear her warming up. The real question is, will the American people let her take the stage and sing, or will we stop bitching and start a new revolution? From Daily Kos & TRNN The Real News Network.....
Alan Grayson

From a recent 188-page report by the World Health Organization come these ghastly and appalling factoids:

• Suicide rates rose 40% in the first six months of 2011 alone.
• Murder has doubled.
• 9,100 doctors in Greece, roughly one out of every seven, have been laid off.

Joining those doctors in joblessness are 27.6% of the entire Greek labor force.  By comparison, in the depths of the Great Depression, unemployment in the United States peaked at a lower percentage than that.  Among Greek young adults under 25 years old, unemployment reached an abominable 64.9% in May.  (Yet the unemployment rate in Greece was as low as 7% as recently as 2008.) I'm sure that my Tea Party friends will blame universal healthcare, paid sick leave and "generous" unemployment benefits for this catastrophe.  "If we simply stopped helping people, then they wouldn't need our help," they would say.  You can see where that "logic" leads.  The dead need no help whatsoever, except possibly burial. Sort of like this:  "The Republican healthcare plan: Don't Get Sick.  And if you do get sick, Die Quickly."]
Maybe you think that I'm kidding about what my Tea Party friends would do.  I'm not.  A few years ago here in Florida, we had a children's health insurance program called KidCare, with a waiting list of over 100,000.  The Tea Party Republicans didn't like that.  So they eliminated the waiting list.
But back to Greece.  A lot of people blame Greek government debt for the current suffering.  According to the Central Intelligence Agency, that most authoritative of all conceivable sources, Greek government debt stands at 160% of GDP, which seems like a lot.  But Japanese government debt stands at 215% of GDP, and the unemployment rate in Japan is only 4%.
Moreover, Spain's unemployment rate is virtually as high as Greece's, but Spain's government debt stands at only 85% of GDP.  That's less debt than Singapore's, and Singapore's unemployment rate is 1.8%.
So we cannot properly attribute the catastrophe in Greece to labor protection, nor can we attribute it to government borrowing.  What is the cause, then?  The World Health Organization has the answer: austerity.  "Austerity" is a bloodless term for gross economic mismanagement, animated by heartlessness.  That robotic cut-cut-cut mentality that deprives us of jobs, of public services, of safety, of health, of infrastructure, of help for the needy, and – ultimately -- of our economic equilibrium and the ability to survive.  The mentality that ushers in, and welcomes, a vicious war of all against all.  Austerity is destroying an entire country, right before our eyes.
Or, as the World Health Organization put it: "These adverse trends in Greece pose a warning to other countries undergoing significant fiscal austerity, including Spain, Ireland and Italy.  It also suggests that ways need to be found for cash-strapped governments to consolidate finances without undermining much-needed investments in health."
In America, we have a rich and powerful lobby that has the same prescription for every economic malady: austerity.  Cut-cut-cut.  Cut Social Security and Medicare.  Cut teacher and police and firefighter jobs.  Cut health care.  Cut pay and cut pensions.  It all boils down to that one ugly word: austerity.  And austerity always brings disarray, disaster, decay and death.
People often ask me my position on various issues.  Well, I'm for certain things, and I'm against others.  But on one issue, I'm very consistent.  I'm against pain and suffering.  Especially avoidable pain and suffering.  And therefore, I'm against austerity.  It begins with seemingly innocuous budget cuts.  It then leads inexorably to the destruction of countless lives.
Why am I telling you about Greece?  In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote a book called "It Can't Happen Here."  But it can.  And it's up to us to prevent it.
Courage,
Rep. Alan Grayson
"The horror!  The horror!"
-- The last words of Col. Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899).

 http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/12/14/1262738/-How-To-Destroy-An-Entire-Country?detail=email

How the Defeat of Trade Unionism Gave Rise to Low-Wage Jobs

 http://youtu.be/h3Xa_9V9NI8

Transcript

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore. Fast food workers are preparing to strike across the country Thursday, demanding an increase of pay to $15 an hour. Thursday's major day of action--organizers say 100 cities will take part--comes just six days after more than 100 people were arrested nationwide at Black Friday protests against major retail outlets. It's also important to note that while it's commonly believed that the vast majority of low-wage workers are teenagers, their average age is actually 35. More than a quarter have children, and more than half work full-time, those numbers courtesy of the Economic Policy Institute. Now joining us to give some context to these latest strikes is Leo Panitch. He's the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a distinguished research professor of political science at York University in Toronto, author of many books, including The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. Thank you so much for joining us.LEO PANITCH, PROF. POLITICAL SCIENCE, YORK UNIVERSITY: Glad to be here.NOOR: So we wanted to give you a chance to kind of give some context to the increasing use of low-wage workers across America and other countries and the protest against that trend. And a big, a major driving force for these protests--and it's been--this has been used to kind of criticize them as well--are major unions like SEIU. But major unions weren't always interested in organizing these low-wage workers. What's brought about this change?PANITCH: Well, you know, I think people are missing, in all the attention that's being paid to the vastly growing inequality in the United States and other Western capitalist countries, that the fundamental reason for it is not some shift in taxes, but the fundamental reason for it has been the defeat of trade unionism in the United States and elsewhere, at least since the early 1980s. Insofar as there was a tendency to the equalization of incomes--and it by no means went all that far in the postwar period--it was because for a few decades after 1945, trade unions were strong vis-à-vis their employers. And that had to do with some legal rights they'd won. It also had to do with the wage militancy of those unions and their ability to coerce corporations to pay workers higher wages, better benefits, give them more secure employment. And the reason that CEOs didn't pay themselves the astronomical amounts they pay themselves today was precisely because of the bad example it set in terms of the next collective bargaining round. Now, what has happened everywhere, although especially in the United States, is that unions have been defeated. That was a concerted effort on the part of employers through the 1970s and 1980s. It was aided by the Federal Reserve's very high interest rate policy, which purposely drove up unemployment. And in driving up unemployment, it gave the unions a loss of nerve. And it was added to by such actions by the Reagan administration as the ending of the PATCO strike, the strike of the air traffic controllers, and the imprisonment of their members. And this was a union that had voted Republican in 1980. It voted for Reagan in 1980. And it had to do with a shift of a good deal of industry to the American South, to those states where there were so-called right-to-work provisions, i.e., right to not belong to a union--right of employers to prevent you joining a union is what it really means. And then it had to do with the fact that so much of the enormous growth in retail services in the United States--and elsewhere, but especially the United States--has taken place in jurisdictions where it is difficult to unionize, especially, again, in the American South. And that then has spread like wildfire around the country and capitalism more broadly. That's the fundamental reason for the growth in inequality. The tax system only tinkers with the incomes we get in the labor market. It can adjust those. It can make some slight--have some effect on them, whether taxation is more or less progressive. But the main fundamental reason has to do with the incomes that people get in the labor market. And what has happened increasingly is that even in those industries where there used to be well-paid workers, increasingly unions have been forced to engage in concession bargaining, and such new employees as are taken in are taken in at half or two-thirds of the wages of those who'd been employed there for a long time, with much worse benefits.NOOR: Now, Leo, I wanted to just interrupt briefly and talk about the issue of these millions of low-wage workers that obviously are contributing to inequality in this country.PANITCH: [inaud.] McDonald's workers. People who used to earn good wages as steel or autoworkers are now McDonald's workers or Walmart workers; or at least steelworkers and autoworkers who used to be able to get their sons or daughters or nephews or nieces into steel or auto plants are now Walmart workers, etc. So, you know, this isn't some other category. This isn't some group from Mars that suddenly has arrived with the label "low-paid workers" on their foreheads. This is the same working class. And that applies whether they're black Americans or Latinos or whatever. In fact, black Americans in the auto industry were precisely the ones who benefited most from unionization, and they're the ones and their children are the ones who have suffered most from the defeat of unionization. So, yes, there's been this growth of low-wage workers, but it is a growth that comes out of a working-class which previously had a chance of becoming a high-wage working-class.NOOR: So, traditionally unions didn't try to unionize these sectors.PANITCH: That's kind of the myth. Of course, these are very difficult industries to organize. Do you know that Walmart employs an army of 200 lawyers and public relations officials whose only job it is when there's any attempt at unionization is to send in firefighters into any store to prevent it happening? Do you know the number of times since Walmart's existence that they have conducted what in any jurisdiction would be considered unfair bargaining to prevent unionization? These are very, very committed antiunion employers.NOOR: I'm not doubting that at all. But can you talk about this recent push to unionize, or even for these workers to come together and protest and demand a higher wage and demand better working conditions?PANITCH: [inaud.] a push than it is. There's no question that the fight for 15, which is led by the SEIU, is impressive--or at least SEIU is behind it. There's no question that our Walmart or the Walmart warehouse workers campaigns are supported by some unions, such as the United Electrical Workers union. But the amount that's been put into this is miniscule, and the number of organizers who are spending most of their time on this is miniscule compared to the people who in the 1930s organized the CIO unions, the Canadian Auto Workers, the American autoworkers, or the Steelworkers, or what have you.NOOR: I wanted to kind of address some of the arguments against raising the wages for these workers. For example, the argument goes that it'll create inflation, that while wages may go up, prices will go up, too. Higher wages will make it harder for the U.S. to compete internationally with the developing world. PANITCH: [inaud.] question that the growth of globalization, the spread of global capitalism, the extent to which working classes have been created in so many developing countries at such a quick pace, whether it's China or Brazil or what have you, certainly has an effect in terms of pulling down and making less bold the unions in the advanced capitalist countries. But this has also been an explicit strategy on the part of the multinational corporations in question, not least corporations like Walmart. So this isn't just happening all of itself. Now, insofar as it would have consequences, in terms of inflation the evidence is that the Fed and the Treasury are much more worried about deflation. Interest rates are so low, as in any other circumstance, to induce inflation. And the reason that the Fed is so confident that it can keep interest rates so low--and this is true not only in the United States but elsewhere, in Canada and Europe, as well--is because precisely workers are so defeated, are so beaten down, unions are so incapable of getting wage increases for their members. Were they able to do so and it were to produce some inflationary pressures, that would be a bloody good thing. In fact, the Fed is very worried that despite its very low interest rates, inflation is not getting anywhere near its target of 2 percent a year, which is considered healthy. And the reason it isn't is because there isn't the consumer demand for capitalists to invest, despite very low interest rates. And the reason there isn't consumer demand is that people don't have enough income to buy this stuff, especially after the financial crash made credit more difficult or made people very worried about paying off their debt.NOOR: We're going to wrap up this part of our discussion, and we're going to continue this just in a moment, and we're going to post this, both parts, at TheRealNews.com. We're going to talk about what the labor movement can do, what the working class can do to address these problems in just a moment. Thank you so much for joining us for part one, Leo.PANITCH: Happy to be here.NOOR: You can follow us on Twitter @therealnews, Tweet me questions and story ideas @jaisalnoor. Thank you so much for joining us.

Leo Panitch is the Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and a Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University in Toronto. He is the author of many books, the most recent of which include UK Deutscher Book Prize winner The Making of Global Capitalism: the Political Economy of American Empire, and In and Out of Crisis: The Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives. In addition to his university affiliation he is also a co-editor of the Socialist Register, whose 2013 volume is entitled The Question of Strategy.

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=11136&updaterx=2013-12-04+16%3A26%3A54 

Organized labor's decline in the US is well-known. But what drove it?

Richard Wolff

Wednesday, 04 September 2013 10:42

To secure gains for working people requires a social transition that puts them in charge of producing society's services

Anonymous workers Photograph: Richard Baker/Corbis

Organized labor's decline in the US over the past half century is well-known; what drove that decline, less so. The New Deal's enemies – big business, Republicans, conservatives – had developed a coordinated strategy by the late 1940s. They would break up the coalition of organized labor, socialist and communist parties: the mass base that had forced through the 1930s New Deal. Then each coalition member could be individually destroyed.
One line of attack used anti-communist witch-hunts (McCarthyism) to frighten socialists and labor unions into dissociating themselves from former communist allies. Another attack targeted socialists by equating them with communists and applying the same demonization. Still another attack, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, directly weakened labor unions, their organizing capability and their alliance with the left.
Business and political leaders, mass media and academics cultivated a paranoid anxiety among Americans: suspect anything even vaguely leftist, see risks of "subversion" everywhere, and avoid organizations unless religious or loudly patriotic. Legal, ideological and police pressures rendered communist and socialist parties tiny and ineffective. Destroying unions took longer. The unionized portion of private sector workers fell from a third to less than 7% now. Since 2007, conservatives used crisis-driven drops in state and city tax revenues to intensify attacks on public employee benefits and unions. Both were denounced as "excessive and unaffordable for taxpayers". That plus public worker layoffs reduced public sector unionization.
Nor did labor unions or the left find or implement any successful strategy to counter the 50-year program aimed to destroy them.
To reverse organized labor's decline and to rebuild the left requires either reviving the old New Deal coalition or forming a new comparably powerful alliance. That means confronting and outwitting the long demonization of unions and the left. It requires a strategy that engages and wins struggles with employers. More importantly, it requires a strategy to reposition labor unions and their allies as champions of broad social gains for the 99%. To escape the label of "special interest" unions must work for far more than their own members.
The needed strategy is available. It proposes a new alliance among willing labor unions, community organizations and social movements. The alliance's basic goal is a social transition in which workers cooperatives become an increasing proportion of business enterprises. The increasingly used term workers self-directed enterprises (WSDEs) stresses democratic decision-making. In WSDEs, all workers democratically decide what, how and where to produce and how to use the net revenues their work generates. In WSDEs, whether or not workers are owners or self-manage, they function, collectively and democratically, as their own board of directors, "their own bosses".
This goal and strategy could solidify this alliance. Democratizing enterprises realizes inside them the same goals that inspire many community organizations and social movements. WSDEs established and nurtured by community organizations and social movements could, in turn, provide important financial and other resources for their allies.
Labor unions could regain strength from such an alliance. For example, consider employers who demand concessions (lower wages and benefits) and threaten otherwise to relocate enterprises, often abroad. Unions have mostly compromised on concessions to retain employers. The proposed new alliance offers a new bargaining tool for these situations. If an employer relocated, the alliance would assist workers to try to continue the enterprise as a WSDE. The relocated employer risks competition from a WSDE asking customers to favor it over an employer who had abandoned workers and communities for higher profits.
To establish new WSDEs in such ways, unions would draw upon their allied community organizations and social movements to mobilize local political support as well as funding. Local politicians could not easily refuse job-saving demands from that alliance (proven daily in Europe).
Another way for the proposed alliance to help form WSDEs would be a bold new federal or state program to combat unemployment. This would follow the example of Italy's 1985 Marcora Law. That law offers a new, second alternative to the usual unemployment dole. An unemployed worker can instead choose to take all unemployment benefits as an immediate lump-sum payment and pool that with lump sums similarly chosen by at least nine other unemployed workers. The total must then be used as start-up capital for a workers coop. Marcora's success is one reason why Italy has many more workers coops than the US.
These and still other actions by the proposed new alliance could build a significant WSDE sector while helping to solve major US social problems. That sector would enable many Americans to see and evaluate WSDEs. A WSDE sector gives Americans two new freedoms of choice: (1) between working in a top-down, hierarchical capitalist firm or a democratized worker coop, and (2) between buying the products of capitalist or cooperative enterprises. A significant WSDE sector would add its demands for government technical, financial, and other supports to those from other economic sectors.
As the Republican and Democratic parties increasingly cannot or will not serve average Americans' economic needs, the proposed alliance, strategy and actions would do exactly that. Here lie opportunities for resurgence in the labor movement and the left.
While reminiscent of the old New Deal coalition, the proposed new alliance would differ in one crucial dimension. The old coalition believed that it could not win more than progressive taxation, new regulations and new institutions (such as Social Security). It could not transform enterprises themselves. The old coalition left in their corporate positions the major shareholders and the boards of directors they selected. Those shareholders and boards then used corporate power and profits to systematically evade, weaken, and, when possible, dismantle the New Deal across the past 40 years.
Building a WSDE sector in the economy applies the lesson of those years. To secure gains for working people requires a social transition that puts them in charge of producing society's goods and services. A democratic society requires a democratic economy and that, the new alliance would insist, means a transition to democratically organized enterprises. When this September's AFL-CIO convention considers building an alliance with community groups and social movements, the strategic focus on WSDEs ought to be included.

http://therealnews.com/t2/component/content/article/70-more-blog-posts-from-richard-wolff/1727-organized-labors-decline-in-the-us-is-well-known-but-what-drove-it