Working In These Times
Another Think Tank Report Displays Elite Dems’ Distance from Suffering
When I started reading a new report called "The Polarization of Job Opportunities n the US Labor Market," I expected to encounter a wealth of valuable information documenting the destruction of America's middle class.
But it turned out to be an infuriating reminder of the upper-class blinders worn by top Democratic Party leaders and their chosen scholars at the Hamilton Project (housed at the Brookings Institution) and the Center for American Progress, which published the report in April. Their message to Americans is all too familiar: Stop whining about the good jobs lost to globalization, and go back to college.
Polarization, written by MIT economist David Autor, tells us that the American labor market—which it somehow separates from economy itself—is increasingly taking on an hour-glass shape as middle-class jobs are sharply declining. Job growth is largely confined to "low-wage, low-skill jobs" and "high-skill, high wage" professions. But it offers neither the clear, useful data nor the fierce moral urgency of the superb, fact-filled article "America Without a Middle Class" by Prof. Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Ovoversight Panel on the banking bailouts.
What's going on here?
CANYON: GLOBALIST PARTY ELITE AND VICTIMS AT PARTY BASE
Key sections of this report remind us of the enormous canyon between these two leading Democratic think tanks and the experience of working people over the past four decades.
It's hard to imagine a greater gulf between the real needs of working families hammered by corporate globalization, and the conventional wisdom in top Democratic circles like the Hamilton Institute (founded in 2006 by Robert Rubin, the key architect of economic deregulation as Treasury Secretary during the Clinton years) and the Center for American Progress, headed up by Democratic operative John Podesta.
Particularly appalling is that these two think tanks are unwilling to critically look at the key forces driving the loss of middle-class jobs and the worst polarization of income since the 1920s. The Polarization paper rotely advocates the same old futile formula of better educational credentials for everyone, as if there were not a sharply shrinking supply of good jobs at the end of the educational process.
WORKERS HAVE 'ADAPTED POORLY' TO DE-INDUSTRIALIZATION
Some of crucial downward pressures undermining the supply of middle-class jobs get such a sanitized treatment you'd almost suspect it was re-written by the Texas textbook fanatics. There is simply no mention of the ongoing demise of America's base in real production while the parasitic financial industry keeps draining resources from our industrial might--a revision of history Robert Rubin would certainly support.
The report transforms the stunning loss of a huge chunk of America's industrial base--32% of industrial jobs since 2000 alone-- into a failure of workers to adjust to a deteriorating economy rather than a failure of the economic system to provide decent jobs and incomes. The destruction of entire industries and millions of family-supporting jobs is portrayed as the result of bad choices by individual workers who chose not to attend college, rather than the greed-driven decisions of corporate CEOs.
The consistent theme of Polarization is that workers must better prepare themselves for the new crop of high-wage, high-skill jobs that we can count on Corporate America to reliably deliver here in the U.S., once the recession is over--a conclusion which ignores the past decade of zero net job growth in the US. The basic problem with a polarized job market, Polarization tells us, is that workers--especially males--have "adapted poorly to the changing labor market."
Instead of targeting corporate and government policies like support for "free-trade" agreements that are premised on the exploitation of low-wage labor in nations like Mexico, the report implicitly argues that the workers of America should simply swallow the injustice of investor rights-based globalization and get on with their educations.
Unbelievably for the product of Democratic think tanks, corporate globalization is described rather benignly as "the international integration of labor markets through trade, and more recently, offshoring."
CLASS WAR, UNIONBUSTING GOES UNMENTIONED
Polarization explicitly contends that America's plummet in private sector unionization from 21.2% in 1979 to 7.2% in 2009 was largely a matter of unionized manufacturing sectors being relocated abroad--of course, with no mention of the long-term toll on either U.S. economic capacity to innovate or on the lives of industrial workers and their communities.
The vicious, systematic and frequently illegal attack on the right to form unions passes without mention in the report. Totally missing is the incessant class war against labor rights that led to over 31.000 firings in 2005 alone, according to Philip Dine in State of the Unions.
While "Polarization" obscurely reminds Congress and other opinion leaders that America is losing its middle class, the report continually reinforces the bogus notion that America is most fundamentally divided by educational achievement rather than economic fault lines.
Again, Robert Rubin would heartily approve of this perspective.
'OLIGARCHS' VS. WORKERS--REGARDLESS OF EDUCATION
Looking at a slightly earlier period prior to the Great Recession's onset, NY Times columnist and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman utterly incinerates the thesis behind Polarization. BACK IN FEBRUARY 2006, Krugman argued that the real fault line is between blue-collar and white-collar workers on the one hand--regardless of education-- and Ameica's "oligarchs" on the other:
Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004....
So who are the winners from rising inequality? ...
I]income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
Additionally, Princeton economist Alan Blinder has calculated that up to 42 million highly-technical U.S. jobs—from computer programming to medical transcription to accounting—are "highly offshorable" to low-wage sites like China, India, and the nations of Eastern Europe (Wall Street Journal, (3/28/07).
"The most important divide is not, as commonly argued, between jobs that require a lot of education and those that don't," the Wall Street Journal notes in summarizing Blinder's findings.
However, there is a very important divide between the deeply corporatist worldview of Democratic Party officials and their think tanks and the way that working people have interpreted their lives.
Polarization, indeed.
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Comments
Thank you for this article. And that is a dramatic understatement.
You and your denizens of apparently (I say apparently not sarcastically but from a habit of caution about my lack of omniscience) ethical problem solvers, if possible, may find it helpful to use this article as an executive summary
for books such as Barry C. Lynn’s Cornered, Paul Krugman’s Conscience of a Liberal, perhaps most importantly, Louis Uchitelle’s The Disposable American, and Nicholas Kayafas’s Welcome to Poverty Class: The Growing Unemployment and UNDEREMPLOYMENT.
Who should understand and apply the lessons from the executive summary and such books? The only people who could possibly have a chance of reversing the continued “Shock Doctrine” (Naomi Klein) process in the United States, a new majority of John Conyers/David Bonior-type legislators and the type of government administrative agency bureaucrats that they would place in government agencies.
Underemployment of skilled, educated, productive workers
IS interrelated to the relative-to-the-population-of-qualified-candidates dramatic shrinkage in positions in numerous fields. Example: In the 90’s and NOW, I.T. is a high profile example of the top part of the"Pola(R)ization”‘s “hour glass.” In the middle 2000’s, shortly before or after a sale of a large Chicago bank chain to a top 5 national bank, my cousin, who worked for that bank chain, eliminated multiple positions in Chicago that had been filled by people who she described as productive, competent, highly experienced I.T. professionals. Therefore, in Chicago, the pizza pie of jobs for IT professionals that was 14 inches in diameter, ceterus peribus, is now 12 inches in diameter but the number of educated, competent workers that seeks a piece of that pie has, in contrast, probably grown.
Long term underemployment of educated, competent professionals, b(R)ick cielings on upward mobility for
the sacrificial lambs and the serfdom purchasing power of wages for unskilled jobs is “unfortunate” only when
it does not happen to the beneficiaries of bipartisan Tammany Hall systems.
Great article, Roger! I have made similar arguments about this much prior to the so-called Democratic think tanks’ reports.
Back in 2006 I perceived a coming war within the Democratic Party over de-industrialization and the rise of the service sector economy, wage stagnation due to capital disinvestment and reorganization, globalization, the rise of economic nationalism and international isolationism, comparative anxiety over the then Chinese economic boom and China’s national industrial development policies, anxiety over the failure of the U.S. to develop its own industrial policy, rising energy costs and anxiety over the U.S. failure to diversify and domesticate energy resources, and undervalued commodity prices for domestic producers.
This “war” is now, in fact, ongoing in many venues such as this publication and for many progressive blogs and institutions.
This war was apparent during the Obama-Hillary primary battle and most especially the Lincoln-Halter primary battle. Who’s winning? Who knows, but Obama has shifted from progressive warrior to “centrist” since he overcame the Clinton machine.
To clarify my 6/26/10 comment, the I.T. positions were relocated to employees or contract service providers in Asia. because the costs for those positions were substantially less when the workers were located in Asia.
Well Roger I think you know where I stand in regards to the Democratic Party. I might add that my position is not just one I made up or because I had some radical delusion, but because of my years as a faithful democratic voter and a democratic party precinct chair!
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that both the DP and the RP will dance to the tune of the corporate bosses, regardless of the damage to the U.S. working class, the economy and the principles of democracy!
What concerns me most is that the leadership of the NEA, the AFL-CIO and Change To Win cannot or will not accept the obvious! Dependence on their heroes in the Depocratic Party has resulted in what workers are forced to experience on a daily basis in the factories ( what’s left of them) the nursing homes, the loading docks, the mines, the oil and chemical refineries, etc
I realize that the McCarthy period made a lot of people feel paranoid and uneasy about socialism, reds, etc, but hell that was more than half a century ago! It is clear as pure spring water that capitalism doesn’t benefit the working class, never has and never will! So what’s the problem?
More than 15 years ago a very wise trade unionist by the name of Anthony Mazzochi from the old OCAW, pushed the concept of an independent labor based politcal party/movement. It started off with a flash and then for some reason sputtered out. Tony is no longer wth us, but I truly believe that this idea is needed now more than ever! For those who advocate “working within the Democratic Party is the solution, I beg to differ! Working within the DP is like trying to save a sinking ship using buckets to bail out the water! It just won’t work! The 2008 elections and what is occuring now is living proof of that!
Dear JustJeff, Gus, and Chicano Wobbly:
Thanks for writing and for the kind words on my piece.
As Obama moves in a more Clintonesque and corporatist direction where he plays off the Democratic Left against the extreme Right, we face a badly de-moralized and de-mobilized base.
In short, the top Democrats’ elitism—both in terms of a fundamental lack of respect for working people’s political judgment and in terms of economic policies that fail to rein in corporate globalization,create jobs and enact genuine healthcare reform, these Dems create the political vacuum into which the pseudo-populist Right can move. (See my commentary “Kansas, Conviction and the Future of the Dems” at http://www.zcommunications.org/kansas-conviction-and-the-future-of-the-dems-by-roger-bybee)
In November, the most likely scenario at this point appears to be much like 1994,when Clinton’s all-out campaign for NAFTA turned off the Democrats’ working-class base. While the overall Democratic vote was up 5% over the last mid-term in 1990, the Republican mobilization produced an overwhelming 12-point gain in turnout.
However, the strategic options for the Left are not totally clear. Key features of the American political system were uniquely established to maintain a rigid two-party hegemony and prevent the emergence of alternative parties—-eg., the winner-takes-all provision and the absence of any kind of proportional representation, to name just a few.
WE NEED TO BRING PEOPLE ALONG WITH US
So simply breaking away from the Democratic Party—without bringing along key constituencies like African-American and Latino leaders, labor, feminists, and environmentalist, and genuinely progressive leaders like Conyers, David Bonior,. Marcy Kaptur, Tammy Baldwin, and many others—will yield little more than the formation of the Labor Party envisioned by Tony Mazzochi. The Labor Party had a wonderful program and a promising start. But without the ability to lure people out of the Democratic Party—which would require a major polarizing battle within the party—I can’t envision the formation of a new party with a significant following.
But that doesn’t mean that we simply capitulate to the status quo. Two strategies are particularly important, in my view:
1) LOCAL MILITANCY The re-kindling of labor activism at the local level in communities where labor still has some strength and can fight every instance of jobs being exported and lead efforts to stop foreclosures. The AFL-CIO cannot confine itself to being just another lobbying group in Washington, DC and state capitols. It must instead broaden out to mobilize and provide resources to promote local activism, including disruptive protests aimed at asserting workers’ right to jobs and families’ right to their homes.
2) RE-DEFINING THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Obama’s quiet re-kindling of efforts for “free trade deals,” along with his auto “bailout” which increased job out-sourcing to Mexico and China would be enormously unpopular if better known.
We in and around labor need to highlight the issue of corporate “off-shoring” of jobs within the Democratic Party because we have the vast majority of Democratic voters on our side. A few “free-trade” Democrats should be targeted nationally for protests and resources gathered to support primary candidates against them. If we can punish and dislodge one, it will have a most salutary effect on the votes of other pro-globalization Democrats in Congress.
But if the congressional Democrats refuse to acknowledge majority sentiment against job-exporting trade deals, than we need to heighten the issue’s profile in the party and make it a cutting edge issue in party units across the nation.
Just within the past few days, the congressional Democrats and President Obama have yielded on one critical issue after another, infuriating anyone bothering to pay attention. These include providing new contracts to Xe’s (formerly Blackwater) mercenaries; passing a “Wall Street reform bill that will still leave mega-banks “too big to fail, and Obama’s failure to forcefully call out and isolate the Republican senators who blocked an extension of unemployment benefits.
Any of these alone is enough to make one gag at the thought of supporting the Democratic Party. However, in my view, the Democratic Party is a crucial arena of struggle if we are to activate millions of people for a progressive program advancing economic and social democracy at home and an end to empire abroad.
But whether or not I’ve persuaded you that we have to actively fight within the Democratic Party, we can work together to push for local labor activism against plant closings and foreclosures and to raise the profile of job relocations even higher than it was in 2008.
Best, Roger