Working In These Times
To Regain Public’s Support, Labor and Dems Must Push Harder for Jobs
The last time that banks and corporations subjected hard-working Americans to this level of misery, the people responded by flocking in droves to the vibrant industrial union movement and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to establish a measure of economic justice in America.
But more than 70 years later, working people are turning off to both the labor movement and the Democrats. It would appear that ordinary Americans are feeling that the forces they once counted upon in tough times—labor and the Dems—are not there to protect their most vital interests.
A new survey by Pew shows an astonishing drop in public support for labor since the Great Recession's start, as Akito Yoshikane pointed out on this site yesterday:
Another Pew study, released Feb. 18, reflecting the more general downturn in enthusiasm for the Democrats, is particularly disturbing because it shows a huge drop among young voters where the Democrats assumed that they held a permanent electoral ace in the hole:
The "Millennial Generation" of young voters played a big role in the rehsurgence of the Democratic Party in the 2006 and 2008 elections, but their attachment to the Democratic Party weakened markedly over the course of 2009. The Democratic advantage over the Republicans in party affiliation among young voters, including those who "lean" to a party, reached a whopping 62% to 30% margin in 2008. But by the end of 2009 this 32-point margin had shrunk to just 14 points: 54% Democrat, 40% Republican.
While other polls and coffee-shop conversations all reveal that Corporate America—especially banks and health-insurance companies—is more despised than at any time in living memory, it seems clear that working people have expected far more action in their defense from the both Democrats and labor.
Foreclosures and bankruptcies are soaring. Families are using up every possible resource to survive, as I was told by the director of a community agency in Janesville, Wis., where the community valiantly but unsuccessfully coping with the loss of its economic foundation, a big GM assembly plant.
TOP DEMS IGNORE SEVERITY OF JOBS CRISIS
Well-respected public figures like Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel created to oversee the banking, have tried to sound the alarm in Washington, D.C. about the looming prospect of an America "without a middle class." But leading Democrats seem unwilling to frankly acknowlegde the extent of deeply-rooted unemployment and long-term human wreckage, as detailed here, here and here.
That's not seen as good politics, particularly if -- like so many Obama officials and congressional Democrats--you see your job as slowly deflating people's expectations, rather than fighting all-out to help them realize their dreams. So we are witnessing a parade of top Obama officials like Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner and Democratic Party hacks working to convince the American people that the economy is on the mend.
These operators aren't asking for much from working families, ignoring the evidence in front of their own eyes. To paraphrase Democratic Party spokesman Tad Devine put it on MSNBC Tuesday, "The fundamentals of the economy are fine."
Yes, "just fine." It seems that the top Democrats are rolling out much the same message that they used so disastrously in 1994. As progressive activist Steve Cobble put it, the message amounted to, "You're actually doing better than you think you are," words that served only to inflame workers whose real wages were falling and who were watching more jobs relocated to Mexico.
The absence of urgency about jobs begins at the top with President Obama, who still declines to push for a massive public-works program to create jobs. He seems to believe that he can lead the Democrats to mid-term success in November by pointing out how the $787 stimulus staved off even worse disaster, a less-than-inspiring battle cry.
As true as that claim certainly is, the stimulus is insufficient given the level of suffering that is still persisting from long-term job loss across America. The current crisis follows a decade of virtually no job growth in the US; of course, Corporate America has been simultarneously making vast increases in its off-short subsidiaries.
President Obama's address to the Business Roundtable—the elite of the elite of Corporate America—was anything but a declaration of a national jobs emergency and a call for major corporations to end their policies of job destruction and the off-shoring of work to Mexico, China, India, and other low-wage nations. At this point, it appears that only an electoral wipeout or fierce pressure from labor will alter Obama's cautious, complacent course. Obama offered only a mild explanation of his economic policies.
STILL NOT LEARNING FROM SCOTT BROWN WIN
Even the stunning election of Republican Sen. Scott Brown to take the seat held by the late Senator Ted Kennedy's has produced only a slight change in White House rhetoric—calculatingly adopting a few populist phrases—despite the powerful message from polling in Massachusetts.
The leading Democrats seem uttlerly incapable of beaking their bond with Wall Street. As Sam Stein and Ryan Grim wrote in Huffington Post,
A Research 2000 poll concluded that Brown benefitted heavily from voters' perception that the Democrats were not on their side in the major economic issues confronting them: A majority of Obama voters who switched to Brown said that "Democratic policies were doing more to help Wall Street than Main Street."
LOSS OF LOCAL PRESENCE
The main cause of labor's decline in popularity, while complex, is its too-close embrace of the Democrats, I would argue. The union movement has increasingly shifted its resources to lobbying Congress and state legislators, and has been tainted by its association with the Obama Administration's sleazy backroom deal-making with the insurers, drug companies, and job outsourcers. At the same time, labor has not left a visible impression of relentlessly fighting plant closings, foreclosures, and evictions at the local level across America.
As a consequence, the public has been feeling cut adrift, with once-reliable allies no longer battling on their side. New AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, despite making the right moves in his short tenure, must directly combat the public's perception by turning up the heat on the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats by mobilizing working people in the communities where they live.
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Comments
Yes Roger, the working class in this country have been abandoned. Politicians have become comfortable with spouting meaningless rhetoric while cozying up to the robber barons. There is so much “window dressing” today that it has become almost impossible to determine what reality is.
Unfortunately, organized labor which was born with noble intentions has lost it’s way. Not to say the cause is any less noble, but the labor leaders within the international unions have poisoned the well with nepotism, cronyism and ambivalence. It appears to me from my first hand experience that many of our labor leaders have become numb to the constant attacks on our memberships. They have grown weary of the fight while those of us that continue the cause for justice become more disillusioned.
What has been most disheartening is the fact that we are squandering perhaps our best opportunity to repeal much of the anti-union legislation. We need a true grass roots revolution where all 17 million unionized workers take to the streets without fear of being replaced by scabs. Many unionized jobs are critical to keeping our economy moving so Washington would have to take notice of a two day work stoppage. We need a show of force liken to that of the early 70’s when the Teamsters descended on Washington in their semis which effectively shut down the nation’s capital.
we’ve got a works incentive….any time you lose industry and throw people onto welfare, you create an increase in the service economy surrounding that situation.
I hope the next stimulus package will include government loans for small businesses and for home ownership. I also hope that more emphasis is placed on economic education in public school, so that people will understand why it makes more sense to pay a little more for something made and sold locally than for imported food and goods in the long run, and how it is really important not to indenture yourself to a credit industry. Maybe then people would understand how their economic well being is tied to their economic relationships to one another rather than their economic relationships to large corporations and their consequent unions as well as a credit industry that borders on the criminal
I guess I can’t edit that last comment under this format, but the up shoot is that unions don’t make jobs, they just wrangle relationships between worker and bosses, and they’ve done a piss poor job of it the last 30 years, as has government. What unions should have been doing is negotiating more entitlements into the flight of industry to the third world, and government could have been a little more demanding rather than giving it all away like drunk chicks on prom night. Now government is losing tax payers and gaining dependents and the unions are wondering how they can weasel their way into the next slave labor pool. Again, if the government wants to stimulate the economy they should develop their loan programs to entrepreneurs,create a home finance program, and bend the learning curve towards responsible purchasing since mindless credit use has propped up a failing economy for over 30 years
While you make some very important points, likening unions to the credit industry is like comparing a 12 year old shoplifter to Osama bin Laden. The banking and insurance industry have, by design become the proverbial “company store” where most of us “owe our soul”. Because most of our politicians are owned by the banking lobby, the finance industry have been given unparalleled freedom to enslave the working poor and middle class. Even with the so called credit reform bill recently passed, credit card companies are permitted to charge unlimited interest. This amounts to legalized shy-locking, which under our government’s watch, has stolen the American dream from the working class.
Unions, with all their faults are the only voice for the working class in this country. When in 2005 the Bush administration put debt relief out of reach for most working Americans by restricting the bankruptcy laws the Unions vigorously opposed the bill. Needless to say the anti worker legislation passed while the corporations continued with their abusive practice of claiming bankruptcy to default on pension and contractual obligations. While corporations continue to enjoy tax preferences for off-shoring good paying American jobs our Unions continue the struggle to keep America working.
It is criminal to allow hedge funds and holding companies buyout businesses just to cut workers pay and benefits than resell it for a profit. The unions have fought hard against these unscrupulous practices, but unfortunately the American public would rather attack a union worker making $25.00 an hour than go after these hedge fund executives making millions.
Until America’s cattle mentality breaks from the herd and identifies and deals with the real villains, Unions are the only hope for our working class.
Dear friends:
Thanskf for writing. Let me make a couple quick comments:
1) RE: Justice 22: I did not mean in any way to compare unions with the credit industry. Unions are essentially motivated by empowering working people; the credit industry thrives on exploiting workers and the poor.
To the extent I have been addressing the labor movement, it has always been to rely more on its rank and file members, build a wide circle of public support, remain independent of the Democratic Party while achieving what can be obtained through participation, and perhaps most controversially, to stop playing by the rules set down by the White House and Corporate America. We need to fight in every town across the nation against plant closings and foreclosures.
RE: Minerva: I would summarize your message as this: that Corporate America and the federal government—-Reagan through Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama—have refused to take a firm stance against the off-shoring of US jobs regardless of the devastation of workers, their families, their neighborhoods, and their cities, all in the name of “free trade.”
But loan porgrams to business will not re-start an economy where banks are still refusing to loan to small borrowers and where businesses still have unsold goods on their shelves. Businesses won’t buy new equipment or hire new workers until workers have more economic security and spending power.
But undermining economic security and wages has been the chief aim of corporate and government policy for at least the past three decades. Only by reversing gears—creating public employment on a massive scale, restoring the right to organize unions that has been effectively snuffed out, and stopping the off-shoring of jobs to repress=sive low-wage nations like China and Mexico—can we address the present crisis.
Without movement in this direction by the Obama administration, we will be doomed to more years of high joblessness, destroyed dreams for millions of families, and nightmarish conditions on our streets.
I love hearing from you, Stay in touch! Best, Roger.