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National Union Holds Hearing on Takeover of DC 37 Retirees Association

by GREGORY HEIRES
written by GREGORY HEIRES

By GREGORY N. HEIRES and RAYMOND MARKEY 

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees held a hearing on March 14 to review its decision to put the Retirees Association of DC 37 under a trusteeship.

At the 4-hour virtual hearing, retirees disputed the national union’s justification of the takeover in which AFSCME cited the association’s failure to file certain tax forms.

Retirees charged that the administratorship was carried out in opposition to the association’s financial backing of lawsuits challenging the city’s plan to replace their traditional Medicare coverage with a Medicare Advantage plan. The switch, which would affect some 250,000 retired city workers, is supported by District Council 37, the national union’s flagship affiliate.

When AFSCME took over the association’s Manhattan office in February, it assumed control of organization’s records and suspended its elected leaders. The national union said it was taking that action because the retirees group failed to file 990 IRS forms.

Neal Frumpkin, the association’s vice president for interunion relations, noted that the trusteeship came shortly after the association resumed its support for the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees’ three lawsuits against the city scheme to shift municipal retirees into the Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan.

At AFSCME’s insistence, the association had earlier stopped its funding, but it decided to resume contributing after lengthy deliberations by an association committee.

Frumpkin pointed out at the hearing that while several other DC 37 locals also failed to file the forms, AFSCME had not put them under trusteeship.

In the weeks leading up to trusteeship, the national union and the association were engaged in heated discussions over the retirees group’s opposition to the plan. Then, only a few weeks after learning about the tax forms, AFSCME carried out the takeover, Frumpkin noted.

The presidents of Local 371 and Local 372, supporters of DC 37 Executive Director Henry Garrido, and the administrator of Local 1549 threatened to stop covering the first year of dues of retired members, the usual practice at the council, in an apparent attempt to force the association to stop its support of the lawsuits.

At the hearing, AFSCME Retirees Director Ann Widger, who is now the administrator of the Retirees Association, acknowledged that she didn’t have the time to keep track of the financial affairs of the association before the takeover. A retiree expressed her indignation that Widger said she lacked the time to monitor the association while now having no problem assuming the day-to-day administration of the operations of an organization serving some 25,000 retirees.

Widger also said that–without acknowledging her presence–she monitored association executive board and other  meetings. Carla Insinga, chair of the AFSCME Judicial Panel, ran the hearing.

In addition to Frumpkin, dozens of retirees signed up for the hearing. The ones who testified included former presidents Ed Hysyk and Bob Gervasi; retired New York Public Library Guild Local 1930 President Raymond Markey, who is also a member of Labor for Traditional Medicare, which is fighting the Medicare Advantage plan scheme; and retired Emergency Medical Services worker Marianne Pizzitola, president of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees, which filed the three lawsuits against Mayor Eric Adam’s plan to shift retirees into Medicare Advantage.

Meanwhile, many retirees say pursuing carrying out the trusteeship is not a good long-term policy for AFSCME. What the national union is doing, they say, is stomping on elderly people.

TheNewCrossroads blogger Gregory N. Heires is a former president of the Metro NY Labor Communications Council, former sr. associate director in the Communications Dept. of DC 37 and a member of the coordinating committee of Labor for Traditional Medicare. Raymond is a retired president of New York Public Library Guild Local 1930 and former executive board member of DC 37. He also serves on the coordinating committee of Labor for Traditional Medicare.

 

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The Conservative War on America

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Our rigged political system and economy are products of decades of bad public policies and corporate practices. These actions have produced the greatest inequality since the Great Depression, killed off unions, and dramatically increased the concentration of political power in the hands of a political elite.

“Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History” by Kurt Andersen tells the story of how corporate interests, conservative politicians, and right-wing professionals worked together to change the rules of the game to help the rich get off at the expense of the rest of us.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America:
A Recent History

By Kurt Andersen
Random House; 464 pages
August 2020
Hardcover: $26.99
ISBN 10: 1984801341 /
ISBN 13: 9781984801340

In addition to lifting government regulations and attacking government programs, these “evil geniuses” counted on the support of Republicans and Democrats alike. As they shifted the political consensus to the right, they aimed to erase the legacy of the New Deal.

The Cultural Divide

Andersen dates the country’s shift to the right to the cultural divide that emerged in the 1970s. A backlash to the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, the 1960s counterculture, the women’s movement, liberal social policies, and a mass nostalgia for the romanticized 1950s created the political climate for conservative change, he argues.

In 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis F. Powell Jr., who later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice, laid out a fight-back strategy for Corporate America in a confidential memo, “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The memo discussed how the free enterprise system was being undermined by the liberal media, colleges, the pulpit, intellectual and literary journals, socialists, communists, the arts and sciences, and politicians.

“The painfully sad truth,” the memo stated, “is that business, including the boards of directors and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels, often have responded — if at all — by appeasement, ineptitude, and ignoring the problem.”

Powell urged the Chamber of Commerce and its corporate and political supporters to respond to the assault on free enterprise by creating a nationwide network of think tanks, university beachheads, and sympathetic media devoted to creating and publicizing conservative public policy and ultimately winning political power.

One of the guiding lights of the fight-back was economist Milton Friedman. He promoted the doctrine that the pursuit of maximum profits was the central purpose of economic activity, reinforcing the conservatives’ moral argument for rapacious capitalism. This perspective was embodied by the trader portrayed by Michael Douglas in the film “Wall Street,” who proclaimed, “Greed is good.”

Beginning in the 1980s, right-wing professionals and corporate interests started in earnest to build up the infrastructure of the nationwide network proposed by Powell to create the ideological justification and blueprints for tearing apart the post-World War II political consensus that had built upon New Deal policies and supported for programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the War Against Poverty.

Eventually, the evil geniuses behind this agenda triumphed. Democrats lost the lock on the power they held in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Republicans swept to power in statehouses and county and local governments.

Democratic Complicity

Yet Democrats aren’t blameless. Politicians and college-educated professionals from both sides of the political aisle increasingly bought into the notion of being “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.”

An early convert was Gary Hart, whose 1974 stump speech for the U.S. Senate was called “The End of the New Deal.” As a New Democrat, President Bill Clinton would later declare that “the era of big government is over.” His vice president, Al Gore, spoke of “reinventing government,” which provided the rationale for contracting out and privatizing government services. Clinton dismantled the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) for poor mothers and children, a program that had existed for decades.This forced single moms to participate in work programs to receive benefits and imposed restrictions on how long assistance was available. Clinton also signed legislation to toughen criminal law, which led to a dramatic increase in incarceration, especially of African Americans.

Our Unfair and Broken Economy

The cost of all of this?

Over the past 40 years, we have witnessed a systemic economic squeeze on the middle class and the poor due to anti-worker corporate practices and the erosion of progressive public policy.

The share of wealth owned by the richest 1 percent of the population has doubled. The collective net worth of the bottom half of the country fell to nearly zero. The median weekly pay for full-time workers has increased by only 0.1 percent a year. The wages of ordinary Americans no longer rise alongside productivity. The fruits of productivity have gone to the top 10 percent, whose incomes have kept up with productivity.

Along with wages, upward mobility has stagnated. The privatization of student loans has saddled college graduates with about one-and-a-half times the debt ($11.5 trillion in 2019) of credit cardholders. Political resistance has blocked increases in the federal minimum wage, which has declined 31percent since 1968. Today, workers earning the federal minimum wage have the present equivalent of $6,800 less per year to spend on food, rent, and other essentials than did their counterparts 50 years ago. Traditional pensions have largely been replaced by risky 401(k) savings plans.

Thanks to the success of the Right, a majority of states have anti-union right-to-work laws. In 2019, the share of U.S. workers represented by unions was —10.3 percent — below its level four decades ago. According to the Economic Policy Institute, research shows that this de-unionization accounts for a sizable share of the growth in inequality over those years — around 13–20 percent for women and 33–37 percent for men. Working people are now losing on the order of $200 billion per year due to the erosion of union coverage over the last four decades — with that money being redistributed upward to the rich, EPI says.

But the Right’s triumph has not only been an economic one. Virtually all of President Donald Trump’s judicial appointees came from the Federalist Society, a group of conservatives and libertarian lawyers founded in 1982. Conservative media feed the public with conservative dogma. Over decades, corporations have steadily shifted the burden of health costs to their employees. The changing political climate culminated with Trump’s election, which helped create the political climate favorable to the neo-fascist and white supremacist coup attempt we witnessed on Jan. 6.

A New Progressive Era?

So, what is to be done?

Andersen recounts how, in many respects, he embraced the move to the right but has now grown disenchanted, morally outraged, and more progressive as he witnessed the social, political, cultural, and economic wreckage caused by the conservative cabal he describes. Yet, he appears cautiously hopeful that the right-wing agenda has run its course.

Indeed, “Evil Geniuses” raises the question of whether the United States has reached a transition point that will result in a paradigm shift in which the country will enter a more progressive, more inclusive era. Will, the current division within the Republican Party enable the Democrats to expand upon the gains they made in the 2020 elections? Or do we face a deepening threat of white supremacy and fascism along with conservative public policies that benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us?

“For Americans now,” Andersen asks, “will surviving a year (or more) of radical uncertainty help persuade a majority to make radical changes in our political economy to reduce their chronic economic uncertainty and insecurity? Or will Americans remain hunkered forever, as confused and anxious and paralyzed as we were before 2020, descend into digital feudalism, forgo a renaissance, and retreat into cocoons of comfortable cultural stasis providing the illusion that nothing much is changing or ever can change?”

Meanwhile, now that the Democratic Party has won control of the U.S. Congress and the White House, many of us are asking whether the political will is there to ensure that needed major changes–health care, police, labor law reform; a federal jobs guarantee; paid family leave; addressing structural racism; child care; fairer taxes; affordable housing; the elimination of college debt, among others–are carried out. How deep is the legacy of the neoliberal New Democrats within the party? How effective will Republicans be at blocking reform? Can we eliminate the neo-fascist threat?

This isn’t a moment for the country’s movement for economic, political, and social justice to let down its guard.

The New Crossroads blogger Gregory N. Heires is a former president of the NY Metro Labor Communications Council. This review originally was published in the April edition of the Jobs for All Newsletter, which is available at https://njfac.org.

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Gender Inequality and Covid-19

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

Men are more likely than women to die from Covid-19.

But in many ways, women are being disproportionately hit by the coronavirus pandemic, which is exacerbating gender inequality.

“The resurgence of extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic has revealed women’s precarious economic security,” said Antra Bhatt, co-author of a United Nations report “From Insights to Action.”

“Women typically earn less and hold less secure jobs than men,” Bhatt said. “With plummeting economic activity, women are particularly vulnerable to layoffs and loss of livelihoods.”

The UN report estimates that the pandemic will push 47 million women and girls into poverty worldwide. This will bring the total number of women and girls living on $1.90 or less a day to 435 million in the global economy.

“For the first time since 1964—the advent of modern U.S. employment statistics for women—this economic downturn, which began in February, has seen women lose jobs at a higher rate than men,” Michael Madowitiz and Diana Boesch write in a report released in October by the Center for American Progress. “Women’s employment and labor force participation rates have both fallen to levels not seen since 1986.”

In the United States, about 865,000 women left the workforce in September as the coronavirus recession took its toll. That’s four times as many women as men—216,000—who dropped out of the economy that month. Overall, women lost more jobs than men (5.8 million compared to 5.0 million) from February to September.

“The numbers are astounding,” said Noreen Connell, an executive board member of the full-employment advocacy group National Jobs for All Network and former president of the National Organization for Women in New York.

“The coronavirus recession has shown that despite gains, our economy continues to be plagued by gender segregation and segmentation that assigns women to more precarious and lower-paid jobs than men,” Connell said. “Minority women and single mothers have been especially harmed.”

A Service Sector-Led Recession

This is the first recession led by job losses in the service sector, where women are disproportionately unemployed. For instance, the losses have been particularly devastating in education, tourism, retail, day care, tipped work in restaurants, and personal services.

The economic crisis caused by the pandemic has hit the child-care sector especially hard—and this has had a profound impact on women’s employment.

Many mothers have dropped out of the workforce to care for their children at home because of day-care closings, as well as to help their children in learning as schools adopt virtual education.

A third of working women 25 to 44 years old attributed their unemployment to child-care demands, according to a U.S. Census Bureau survey. Only 12 percent of unemployed men cited child-care demands as the reason for their unemployment.

More than 70 percent of parents of children under the age of 5 report their child care provider is closed or operating with limited hours or space, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center and Morning Consultant.

A U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation study found that 75 percent of parents had a parent or guardian staying home with a child, either working remotely or not working, and 28 percent were relying on family and friends.

25 Years of Economic Gains at Risk

“The collapse of the child-care sector and drastic reductions in school supervision hours as a result of COVID-19 could drive millions of mothers out of the paid workforce,” a joint report by The Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress warned in October. “Inaction could cost billions, undermine family economic security and set gender equity back a generation.”

The Century Foundation and Center for American Progress report estimates that if conditions for families do not improve, lost wages could total $64.5 billion per year. A 5 percent reduction of mothers in the workforce could wipe out 25 years of economic gains by women, according to the joint report.

The Persistence of Gender-Based Inequality

As Connell notes, the pandemic-induced recession has pointed to the persistence of gender-based economic inequality. Besides the school and day-care closings, a number of other factors explain why women are especially vulnerable in the economic downturn.

Despite some progress in recent decades, women continue to earn less than men. They tend to have less savings than men and are more likely to be employed in the informal sector as, for example, domestic workers. And the pandemic has exposed the inadequacy of government assistance for workers facing economic hardship.

“Decades of government failure to lead on equitable social policy have forced the vast majority of Americans to go it alone during tough times, followed by only incremental, Band-Aid-style policy solutions,” The Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress report says. “This system, which leaves working parents scrambling to cobble together individual solutions, was always destined to fail. The pandemic-related school, camp, and child care closures have merely exposed the vulnerabilities the United States has created by not investing in and maintaining family-friendly workplace standards and a robust child care system—and it has shown why we cannot go back to the way things were.”

The report recommends that a future government comprehensive coronavirus relief package for working families include at least $50 billion for child care. Long-term policy solutions include flexible work hours, paid personal and family medical leave, and pay parity for part-time workers.

The National Jobs for All Network backs policy initiatives like those recommended by the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress report.

In addition,the NJFAN believes the government should play a stronger role in promoting high paid and union jobs. The network is calling for a New Deal-inspired Federal Jobs Guarantee, which would give workers protection during economic downturns and promote infrastructure development, including funding for child-care centers. The NJFAN supports state legislation for jobs programs.

Blogger Gregory N. Heires is a former president of the Metro NY Labor Communications Council. He is a moderator with Labor Portside and editor of the Jobs for All Newsletter. A version of this article appears in the January 2021 edition of the newsletter.

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The Danger of Voter Apathy and Third Parties for Biden

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES and RAYMOND MARKEY
Whether to vote in the 2020 presidential election is not an academic question.

Yet many progressives and other apathetic and cynical voters intend cast their vote for a third-party candidate or to sit out the election.

This isn’t an election in which you should throw away your vote. The stakes are too high.

“We do not have room for error in this election,” said MSNBC analyst Claire McCaskill, a former Democratic senator from Missouri.
Armed fascist militias following President Donald Trump’s call to action are now actively attacking demonstrators in our nation’s cities in an effort to help him win.

A victory by Trump would lead to an entrenchment of authoritarianism, a deepening of inequality, a continuation of the coronavirus health crisis, and a further weakening of vital government institutions adopted since the New Deal. It would also be a victory for white supremacy with fearful consequences for people of color.

Trump must be defeated.

Using the ballot box and voting for Democrat Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris in November is the first and most immediate step in doing so.

Third Party Help for Republicans

The last presidential election makes it clear that voters who decide to support a third-party candidate or abstain would once again hand a victory to Trump.

In the 2020 race, two third party candidates, Howie Hawkins of the Green Party and Jo Jorgensen of the Libertarian Party, have ballot access to at least 270 electoral votes, which is the number needed to win the presidency. Republicans are backing rapper Kanye West’s bid in an effort to siphon off votes from Biden.

During the 2016 presidential race, Trump said if people didn’t like him and didn’t like Democrat Hillary Clinton, they should vote third party or not vote at all. This was a very successful strategy.

If Clinton had received the Green Party’s votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Trump would not be president. The failure of Bernie Sanders ideological purists to support Clinton and a drop in the African-American vote sealed her fate.

Unfortunately, the Greens played the same role in the 2000 presidential election that they did in the close 2016 election. Ultimately, George W. Bush’s victory in our country’s closest presidential election was determined by 537 votes in Florida, where Greens received 97,488 votes. Eight years of Republican control of the presidency followed.

For all practical purposes, the Greens have functioned as a wing of the Republican Party in presidential elections. Not only have they been a very important factor in helping to elect Republican presidents, but their constant attack on Democrats have helped make Mitch McConnell the senate majority leader and enabled Republicans to maintain control of many state legislatures.

Trump: A Menace to Democracy and Working Families

The differences between Biden and Trump are so stark that it is puzzling–not just disturbing–that many Bernie supporters and other progressives are prepared not to vote.

The bankruptcy of Trump’s policies—-apart from his threat to our democracy–is quite apparent. But a brief review is in order.

Disenchanted Republicans cite the GOP’s failure to write a platform as a sad sign of how the party has lost its bearing and evolved into a cult of a personality. Indeed, the Republican convention was little more four days of a love vest for Trump that played up his law-and-order candidacy while ignoring his dismal record, which includes nearly 200,000 deaths and more than 6.6 million cases resulting from COVID-19, mass unemployment and a crashed economy.

But despite the absence of a platform, the underlying philosophy and policies of Trump’s party are clear:

• kill off Social Security by eliminating the payroll tax

• dismantle Obamacare, leaving millions of Americans without health-care coverage

• adopt more tax cuts to continue redistributing income and wealth to the economic elite and corporations

• disenfranchise African-American and new immigrant voters and

• ignore climate change.

Defying the usually practice of presidential nominees, Biden moved to the left rather than to the center after his nomination. For progressives, Biden’s shift to the left–together with Trump’s threat to our democracy–should weaken the argument for supporting a third-party alternative or sitting out the presidential election.

If progressive ideological purists and apathetic voters deliver the election to Trump, we will lose an historic opportunity to build a new movement to fight to put an end to the right-wing and neoliberal assault on worker families that has occurred over the past four decades.

Biden offers a vision of an expansive government with policies that would address the country’s deepening of inequality resulting from tax cuts, the attack on unions, elimination of business regulations and anti-worker trade deals.

The two most progressive candidates in the Democratic primary–Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—-played a major role in shaping the platform.

The party’s unity task force included strong supporters of progressive policies like Medicare-for-All and a Green New Deal, like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Pramila Jayapal (WA).

“The people who supported Bernie Sanders–this absolutely gives us a step forward,” she said Sara Nelson, the co-chair of the party’s economic task force, who is the president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, which backed Sanders. “We improved Biden’s policies, and you can always be stronger in the fight when you’re fighting from higher ground.”

A 21st Century New Deal?

Biden’s far-reaching agenda has led some political observers to compare it to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. His plan includes:

• Jobs and the Economy: a $200 increase in the monthly Social Security payment; raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour; a $400 billion program to buy American goods; and rescinding Trump’s tax cuts.

• Climate Change: A $17 trillion investment in green technologies research, cutting greenhouses gases up to 28 percent by 2026, the creation of millions of union manufacturing jobs to produce green energy products and rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, which Trump abandoned

• Race: The creation of $30 billion investment fund for minority business and crimination justice reforms that would include the creation of a $20 billion grant to encourage states to reduce incarceration rates, eliminate minimum sentences and decriminalize marijuana possession, expunge records of cannabis convictions and abolish the death penalty

• Health: a plan to expand Obamacare, insure 97 percent of Americans and create a public health insurance option similar to Medicare.

• Immigration: Reverse Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexican border, eliminate the travel ban on Muslim countries, protect the “Dreamers,” the children of undocumented immigrants, guaranteeing their eligibility for federal student aid
.
• Labor: strengthen the right to organize and hold corporations and executives personally accountable for interfering with organizing efforts; check corporate power by fighting wage theft; beef up enforcement of workplace safety protections; end mandatory arbitration clauses imposed on workers contracts; ban the permanent replacement striking workers; lift the prohibition on supporting secondary boycotts; ban state laws prohibiting unions from collecting dues or comparable payments from all workers who benefit from union representation that unions are legally obligated to provide, and expand protections for undocumented workers who report workplace violations.

Also, provide a federal guarantee for public sector employees to bargain for better pay and benefits and the working conditions they deserve; extend the right to organize and bargain collectively to independent contractors; ensure that workers in the “gig economy” receive the legal benefits and protections; expand long overdue rights to farmworkers and domestic workers and stop employers from denying workers overtime pay they’ve earned.

Most Progressive Agenda in Decades

“It’s the most progressive platform of any Democratic nominee in the modern history of the party,” Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, a group that backs left-wing challengers to incumbent congressional Democrats, told Vox’s Matthew Iglesias in July.

As for Biden, he has suggested, when discussing the challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, that his challenge as president would be as great as what Roosevelt confronted during the Great Depression.

A Biden win would open a big opportunity for progressive change during the greatest social, political and economic challenges the country faces since the Great Depression. Biden needs a strong mandate. Third-party candidates and voter apathy pose a threat to that mandate and, worse, could deliver the election to Trump.

The New Crossroads blogger Gregory N. Heires is a former president of the Metro NY Labor Communications Council. Raymond Markey is a former president of the New York Public Library Guild Local 1930.

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Why the Left Should Support the anti-Trump Lincoln Project

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES and RAYMOND MARKEY
After three years in office, President Donald Trump is widely regarded as a public menace—and threat to our democracy.

The president has blood on his hands because of his incompetent handling of Covid-19 crisis, which so far has afflicted more than 5.7 million people and killed over 175,000.

The economy is a shambles with mass unemployment unseen since the Great Depression, millions facings eviction, worsening economic inequality, the permanent disappearance of jobs and families flocking to food banks.

Our survival as a democracy depends on the defeat of Trump.
We watched as right-wing racists marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 holding torches while waving swastikas and Confederate flags.

These neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” And Trump–whose international political brothers include authoritarian leaders like President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte–called them “good people.”

Later, Trump gave armed militias the green light to descend on state capitols. Carrying AK-47s, the armed goons demanded state legislators reopen the economy—and we witnessed the harm that’s done to our health.

Trump’s attack on the U.S. Postal Service is but the latest of our democratically-elected authoritarian president’s plot to steal the election.

Yet with Trump’s threat to democracy so clear and his poor track record on public health and the economy so apparent, some progressives and leftists are finding it necessary to attack anti-Trump Republicans and former members who are coalescing around The Lincoln Project, which is waging a relentless, effective and, yes, entertaining media campaign against the president.

It is no surprise that The Lincoln Project-has provoked howls of betrayal by Republican loyalists and Trump lackies.
But progressives should welcome The Lincoln Project into the broad coalition that is forming to kick Trump out of office.

The Left’s Political Malpractice

For progressives to loudly criticize the group out of a fear that it will become a powerful conservative influence on Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential campaign is a major political mistake. You might even say it amounts to political malpractice or political suicide.

A typical take on The Lincoln Project is one by the left/progressive ragingchicken.org media site founded by Kevin Mahoney.
“The Democratic Party Convention has come and gone,” raigingchicken.org commented recently, complaining that the party’s invitation to Republicans to the convention was a sign that the rebels are already winning influence.
“Looks like the Lincoln Project’s efforts to convince establishment Democrats to lead to the right have had an impact. I’m not sure that the Republican Convention will have as many Republicans as the Democrats did.”

“Progressives would do well to keep a skeptical eye on the Lincoln Project,” Jeet Heer warned in a July article in The Nation. “These ads should be seen as an attempt to stake a claim in Joe Biden’s victory so that if he becomes president he’ll give hawkish Republicans a seat at the table.”

“Everyone realizes the entire Lincoln Project/Never
Trump GOP stuff is all designed to make sure that after Trump loses, America is owned by Bush/Cheney Republicans and Wall St Demos. While progressives are cancelled…right?,” David Sirota, an advisor to Bernie Sanders, tweeted on July 7. “Everyone gets that, right? Just checking.”

The alarm on the Left suggests that the Lincoln rebels constitute a Trojan Horse, reactionary conspiracists plotting to become a conservative bloc within the Democratic Party.

But we believe the concern is misguided.

Progressives should instead embrace The Lincoln Project, whose avalanche of powerful political ads against the president provide strong ammunition for his defeat. The ads have hit Trump for his lack of leadership, playing loose with the truth, doing nothing about the Russian bounty on American troops, subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin, weak China policy, and calling for a boycott of Goodyear.

Rather than wasting time debating whether the group will drive the Biden campaign to the right, progressives should use their time more productively by helping The Lincoln Project’s scathing—and effective–ads go viral. The group plans to sink $30 million in its effort to oust Trump and some of his allies in the U.S. Senate, including Susan Collins of Maine.

Getting Under Trump’s Skin

It was quite clear from the beginning that if nothing else The Lincoln Project’s media warfare would get under the president’s skin. Its first ad, titled “Mourning in America,” struck a nerve by suggesting that Trump has betrayed the legacy of Ronald Regan, whose sunny “Morning in America” campaign is widely regarded as a model for effective political advertising.

“A group of RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied (no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, “Morning in America”, doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures,” Trump tweeted in response to the ad.

Who is behind The Lincoln Project?

The founders of the Lincoln Project include Steve Schmidt, a political strategist who worked for President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and is now a political commentator for MSNC; John Weaver, Republican strategist, who worked for President George H.W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and Gov. John Kasich; Reed Galen, who worked for George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 campaigns; conservative lawyer George T. Conway III, and Rick Wilson, a Republican media consultant and author of “Everything Trump Touches Dies” and the forthcoming “Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump and Democrats From Themselves,” who is president and co-founder of the group.

Another member of the group is Stuart Stevens, author of the book “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.” The chief strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, Stevens spent four decades working for Republicans but grew disenchanted as its soul was overtaken by racism, xenophobia, the loss of a governing philosophy, a cult of the personality, the dishonesty and anti-democratic values. On the opening day of the Republican convention, former GOP Chair Michael Steele, an MSNBC analyst, announced he joined The Lincoln Project.

Republican Loyalists Fight Back

Republican Party loyalists have vigorously backed Trump’s attack on members of the group he inaccurately described as Republicans in Name Only. In fact, the Lincoln Project most prominent voices are so disgusted with today’s Republican Party that they have renounced their membership.

The conservative Club for Growth reacted to the revolt of the former Republican political operatives by running an ad that attacked them as a group of failed strategists who view the country’s toxic political climate as an opportunity to line their pockets.
“They don’t just hate him,” said the ad, called “We Lose,” which aired on Fox News. “They hate you.”

“After watching their careers go up in flames, they’ve set up a Democrat PAC, a get rich quick scheme pushing Joe Biden for president,” the ad said. “America pays the price. Higher taxes on the middle class, crushing regulations on small business, halting our economic recovery. If Biden wins, we lose.”

The National Review is running an aggressive campaign to counter The Lincoln Project ads and undermine the integrity of its leaders.
The National Review’s Steve Sampley called The Lincoln Project a “scam .” He described it as “little more than the most brazen election-season grift in recent memory,” run by a ragtag band of three otherwise unemployed strategists plus one lawyer.”

“The 2020 general election, by every indication, will be about persuasion, with turnout expected to be at record highs,” wrote Conway, Schmidt, Weaver and Wilson, when they announced The Lincoln Project in New York Times editorial in December 2019. “Our efforts are aimed at persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts to help ensure a victory in the Electoral College, and congressional majorities that don’t enable or abet Mr. Trump’s violations of the Constitution, even if that means Democratic control of the Senate and an expanded Democratic majority in the House.”

Weaken Trump’s Voter Base

In a tightening presidential race in which Trump appears to be doing whatever he can to hold on to his political base and is laying the groundwork to steal the election, Biden supporters need to make every effort to cut into the support for the president.

A New York Times survey found that 86 percent of Trump’s backers in 2016 are committed to sticking with him, which leaves a sizable percentage of voters who should be receptive to the Lincoln ads.
Negative political advertising works, despite the claims that such ads turn off voters.

The 1964 “Daisy Girl” ad—-regarded as the first negative TV ad in political history–is widely credited for helping Lyndon B. Johnson win because it painted Republican Barry Goldwater as someone who would recklessly launch a nuclear attack.

The infamous ad about the convicted African-American murderer Willie Horton who committed assault, armed robbery and rape after being released early from prison helped torpedo the Michael Dukakis’ presidential campaign by appealing to racist fears and characterizing the Democratic presidential candidate as soft on crime.
“Like pornography, voters say that they don’t like negative advertising,” a political consultant said. “But, they read it and watch it–and it works!”

Should the race tighten up, a shift of a few thousands could ensure that Trump falls short of winning the Electoral College votes he needs to be elected.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes in the 2006 election in which nearly 138 million Americans participated. But her losses in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania by a margin of just 79,316 gave Trump the electoral votes he needed for victory. Biden needs every vote he can get, especially when Trump will undoubtedly cry fraud if the election is close.

The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne got it right when he wrote, “If you believe (as I certainly do) that defeating President Trump is the prerequisite for anything good happening again in American politics, you should welcome everyone willing to help get the job done. And in light of Trump’s threats to challenge the results if he loses, the health of our democracy may depend on Biden’s winning by a landslide that would leave not a smidgen of doubt about what the voters were saying. This is an all-hands-on-deck proposition.”

The New Crossroads blogger Gregory N. Heires is a former president of the Metro NY Labor Communications Council. Raymond Markey is a former president of the New York Public Library Guild Local 1930.

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EconomicsEnvironmentIncome InequalityJobsLabor IssuesNewsPoliticsSafety NetSocial SecurityUncategorized

Yup, Trump Did Scam Us

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES
The evidence keeps growing that President Trump’s tax overhaul was little more than a gift to Corporate America and the 1 percent at the expense of the middle class.

What’s more, with economists predicting we are headed into a recession, it’s quite apparent the president’s promise that his massive tax cuts would turbo-charge the economy has proved bogus.

The typical American family didn’t come close to receiving the $4,000 in tax savings promised by Trump. Ordinary taxpayers got a $1,000 cut but then basically lost it to inflation.

The president also suggested that wages would pick up as a result of the tax cuts. That didn’t happen either.

In 2018, real wages did increase. But they grew more slowly than the economy.

Adjusted for inflation, the wage growth amounted to 2.0 percent. But for ordinary workers (“production and nonsupervisory workers,” as classified by the government), the wage growth was lower than that–1.2 percent.

Deepening the Wealth and Income Divide

Thus, the tax plan has plan has done virtually nothing to reverse the decades-long shift of income from working families to the rich in spite of rising productivity.

So, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 deepened the U.S wealth and income divide. Our trickle-up economy continues to become more polarized as the middle class hollows out.

The new law increased after-tax incomes of people with incomes of more than $1 million by 3.3 percent, compared to 1.3 percent or less for people earning less than $100,000, according to the Tax Policy Center. Millionaires received an average tax cut of $69,840, while people making less than $100,000 typically received $453.

The tax doubled what the wealthy can transfer to their heirs without triggering the estate tax to $11 million for children and $22 million for married couples.
Remember those promised bonuses?

The Trump administration suggested that our generous employers would share their tax savings with their employees. Well, the widespread distribution of significant bonuses didn’t happen. In our economy of 157 million workers, the average bonus came to a paltry $28, according to Americans for Tax Fairness.

What Economic Stimulus?

As far as its impact on the economy, the tax law has turned out to be a dud.
A Congressional Research Service report released in May concludes that the tax plan had “a relatively small (if any) first-year effect on the economy.”

The economic growth rate did increase from 2.2 percent in 2017 to 2.9 percent in 2018. But the increase was much lower than what Trump claimed would happen.

Early this year, the national Association for Business Economics released the findings of a survey about how corporate economists viewed the tax cuts.
Eighty-five percent of the economists reported that the tax cuts “have not caused their firms to change hiring or investment plans.

“The economic benefits of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act seem to have petered out,” a Tax Policy Center report said in August. “The economy’s strength now seems to lie almost entirely with consumer spending.”

Rather than pouring their huge tax savings into the economy, companies opted instead for a buyback bonanza to enrich corporate chiefs and shareholders. Buybacks hit a record $1.1 trillion in 2018.

“Corporations have used their tax windfalls to line the pockets of their rich executives, not to increase wages for their workers,” Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez said in August. “Meanwhile workers at places like Harley-Davidson are losing their jobs.”

As for the repatriation of profits that the administration predicted would follow the tax cuts, corporations have apparently generally chosen to continue to park those estimated $2.6 trillion to $4 trillion in accumulated earnings in tax havens outside the United States. Shortly after the Trump tax law went into effect, a Federal Reserve Bank study found “no obvious spike in investment” by the 15 companies that account for most of the profits deposited abroad.

The tax plan lowered the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. Over a decade, the projected savings for corporations will be $1.35 trillion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, which reports to the Senate and House finance and budget committees.

All told, the tax cuts will add an estimated $1 trillion to the deficit by 2022, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Meanwhile, the number of companies paying zero taxes doubled in 2018, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

The 31 percent drop in corporate tax revenues registered by the U.S. Treasury in 2018 is far larger than expected. A report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy called the reduction “a more precipitous decline than in any year of normal economic growth in U.S. history.”

So, apart from filling corporate coffers and the pocketbooks of the 1 percent, the $1.9 trillion cut has put the federal government in a financial straightjacket.

Starving Government

Take a look at what, according to the Center American Progress, the lost revenue could pay for:

• the elimination of childhood poverty

• a doubling of the federal investment in climate science

• extending universal access to affordable child care and pre-kindergarten

• a $10,000 raise for teachers in high-poverty schools

• free community college and

• addressing the opioid epidemic.

Government is being starved.

Quite clearly, the Taxs Cut and Jobs Act of 2017 is about more than giving handouts corporations and the wealthy.

Today, it is ever so evident that–as critics contended from the beginning—anti-government Republican legislators concocted the tax scheme in part as a Trojan Horse for gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

In November 2020, the agenda is clear for voters who care about those programs and economic fairness: They must unite to vote out Trump and the other politicians who are turning our country into an authoritarian plutocracy.

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Labor IssuesPolitics

The Benefit of Investing in Unions

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

duesBy GREGORY N. HEIRES
Union-busting law firms and right-wing groups charge that unions are fleecing members through mandatory dues charges.

What’s worse, they say, workers get little back for their contributions.

“Union Dues Are A Prohibitively Bad Investment” blared the headline of an op-ed article in Forbes magazine by conservative lobbyist and consultant Richard Berman.

“In the free market, of course, we can fire our financial adviser if they lose our money or spend it in ways we don’t approve,” Berman says. “Unfortunately for union members, it doesn’t work the same way when their union is letting them down.”

But the argument that union dues are a rip-off and bad investment doesn’t add up. Furthermore, this attack is usually linked to the bogus charge that so-called anti-democratic unions funnel dues into political activities against the wishes of their members.

Far from being a bad “investment,” dues are arguably the best expenditure workers can make to protect their jobs and livelihoods.

In Illinois, for every $1 a worker pays in dues and fees, she receives an estimated $6.12 back in after-tax income, according a recent study by Frank Manzo IV, policy director of the Illinois Economic Policy Institute, and Robert Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program of the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The financial return on dues is in addition to health-care and other benefits that come from union membership.

The annual return on investment for the average worker in Illinois amounts to 512 percent. (The average annual return on the S&P 500 since its inception in 1928 through 2014 was about 10 percent, according to Investopedia.)

The authors based their study on 2014 LM-2 reports unions are required to file with the Dept. of Labor, as well as data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The study covers 258 labor unions that represent 744,439 members in Illinois, where 15.2 percent of the workforce is organized.

The typical union member in Illinois contributes $663 in annual dues, fees and other membership payments to her union local. That comes to $55 a month. Union membership boosts the annual after-tax income of workers by $4,060 a year.

Conservatives ignore the positive ripple effect unions have on the economy.

The higher earnings and consumer spending of union families creates 43,000 jobs in Illinois. This includes 10,000 jobs in labor unions and about 33,000 in the rest of the economy.

All told, union members add $3.6 billion to the state’s economy. They generate $218 million in tax revenue.

“Any attempt to weaken labor organizations in Illinois, if successful, would reduce these positive impacts that union members have on the state,” the authors say.

The report debunks the argument of conservatives like Berman that unions use a large percentage of dues for political activity. As executive director of the Center for Union Facts, Berman is promoting the Republican-backed Employee Rights Act, which would roll back decades labor protections and undermine the power of unions.

In Illinois, labor unions spend 77 percent of dues and fees on bargaining and representation. Only 2 percent of dues and fees–$14 a year for each member–are spent on political activity. Unions account for 10 percent, or $30.7 million, of the state and local political spending in Illinois.

Basically, conservatives paint a picture in which unions enjoy a giant piggy bank of funds that allow unaccountable labor leaders to politicians. In fact, many unions make state and local political expenditures after a democratic screening process that includes and a vote by elected rank-and-file representatives. In addition, members have the legal right to request a return of their dues spent on politics.

In general, using dues for federal elections is prohibited. But dues can be used to educate and communicate with the membership about politics. Dues can also be used for non-partisan get-out-the-vote work and voter registration. And members may contribute to union PACs for expenditures in national elections.

A companion study by the Midwest Economic Policy Institute describes the impact of construction union dues in Minnesota. This report estimates for every $1 paid in dues and fees, union members receive $5.59. The annual cost of union dues and fees results in an increase in wages of $7,720 after taxes.

In 2014, unionized construction workers contributed $808.6 million and 9,300 jobs to Minnesota’s economy. They added $99.5 million more to the state’s revenue than there would have been without unions.

The attack on dues is simply part of the right-wing arsenal being used to try to wipe out unions. It was behind anti-union Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case before the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in a deadlock earlier this year.

In the early ‘90s two labor economists found that labor unions raise the wages of workers by 10 to 17 percent. This “union wage premium”—a result of the financial investment of members in their union–continues to this day. And it is what anti-union interests would like to destroy–along with the political power of unions.

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EconomicsIncome InequalityPolitics

The Minimum Wage and the Divide Between Wall Street and Main Street

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES
It’s always eye-opening to look at the divide between Wall Street and Main Street.

The income gap gives you a sense of the depth and cost of inequality in the country, where an estimated 42 percent of workers earn less than $15 an hour. That’s right, more than four of every ten workers!

The $25 billion in bonuses given out to 172,400 Wall Street employees in 2015 would be enough to double the earnings of the 895,000 Americans who work in full-time jobs at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, according to “Off the Deep End: The Wall Street Bonus Pool and Low-Wage Workers,” a recent report of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Highlighting the divide between Wall Street and Main Street, the Fight for 15 movement has created a political climate to allow for state and local initiatives to boost the minimum wage. Both New York and California have raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, who put inequality at the center of this year’s Democratic primary race for the presidency, helped make the $15 minimum wage–once regarded as a pie-in-the-sky proposal even by some on the left–a realistic goal. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is for boosting the federal minimum wage to $12 an hour while encouraging local $15 an hour initiatives. Republican candidate Donald Trump has flip-flopped on this issue.

“For Wall Street employees, annual bonuses come as an extra bonus on top of their base salaries, which averaged $404,800 in 2014,” the IPS report states. On top of their bonuses and salaries, executives often receive large stock options and restricted stock gains.

The 2015 bonus pool in 2015 would be enough to bring the wages of the workers in any of the following groups up to $15 an hour:

• restaurant servers and bartenders (2.6 million workers)

• home health and personal care aides (1.6 million), or

• fast food preparation and serving workers (2.6 million).

Fairness and Economic Policy

The startling pay gap between Wall Street employees and low-wage workers raises questions about fairness and economic policy.

A pay rate of $15 an hour is what’s needed to cover basic living costs in most areas of the country, according to the National Law Project. As a society, do we want to tolerate an out-of-balance economy in which more than two out of five workers earn less than $15 an hour?

By increasing the minimum wage, the government would not only raise the income of low-wage workers, it would also stimulate the economy.

Low-wage workers typically spend their entire paycheck to meet their day-to-day expenses, sparking additional economic activity. In contrast, the wealthy tend to save and invest more of their earnings.

“The Wall Street bonus season may coincide with an uptick in luxury goods sales, but a minimum wage hike would give America’s economy a much greater boost,” the IPS briefing says.

The government could address inequality by raising the Earned Income Tax Credit, implementing a transaction tax on financial trading and adopting more progressive income tax policies. Closing a loophole that allows certain earnings of hedge fund managers to be taxed as capital gains rather than as income (with its higher rate) would also help curb inequality.

As an economic policy, raising the minimum wage makes sense. Ethically, in our economically polarized county, it’s ethically the right step to take.

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Labor IssuesPoliticsUnemployment

The Threat to Black Public Sector Jobs

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES
The Great Recession disproportionately harmed public sector black workers—and especially black women.

Job losses and growing racial inequality in the public sector threaten the gains that minorities and women have made over decades through government employment.

“Public Sector Employment Inequality and the Great Recession,” a study by sociology professor Jennifer Laird of the University of Washington, examines the impact of the state and local government downsizing resulting from the Great Recession, which officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. The study found that public sector black women were more likely to lose their jobs and leave the work force because of the government retrenchment.

Blacks were more likely than whites to lose their jobs because they are over-represented in the public sector. At the peak of the state budget cuts in 2010, 17 percent of black women were employed in the public sector, compared to 15 percent of white women, and 13 percent of black males had government jobs, compared to 12 percent of white men.

A Pathway to the Middle Class

The employment opportunities for blacks and women steadily grew in the decades following World War II. A series of executive orders and equal opportunity procedures opened up the door to public service to them.

Government service created a pathway to the middle class for millions of workers. Significantly, the jobs came with decent pay, health insurance, pensions and other benefits, and, often, union representation.

About one in five black adults work in the public sector. They are 30 percent more likely to have a government job than non-Latino whites and twice as likely as Latinos.

Blacks accounted for 27 percent of the new positions in federal government between 1960 and 1965 even though they made up only 10 percent of the country’s population. Women’s share of government jobs rose by 70 percent from 1964 to 1974.

Today, conservatives have been able to tap into the public’s resentment caused by the drop in pay and benefits in the private sector to promote their anti-tax and anti-government agenda. That agenda includes pension reductions, curbing the power of unions, downsizing and cuts in health-care and other benefits.

The Conservative Threat

If conservatives succeed in smashing public employee unions and further defunding public services, minorities and women may find their pathway to the middle class closed.

Historically, inequality between blacks and whites and between males and females has been lower in the public sector.

But the Great Recession has led to increase in employment inequality, as blacks and women in the public sector experienced higher post-recession job losses than other workers. The unemployment rate for black males returned to its pre-recession rate by 2013. But the prime-age unemployment rate for public sector black women remained 4.6 percent below that of 2008.

Stagnation in the pubic is driving down the jobs recovery, according to the the Brookings Institute. By September, the private sector had experienced 54 months of employment growth, adding 10.0 million jobs to the economy. Over the same period, government employment dropped by 500,000.

All told, the financial crash led to the loss of more than 700,000 government jobs as state and local governments adopted austere policies. A 2012 report by the Hamilton Project found that public sector employment was at its lowest point in four decades.

Unfortunately, with Republicans controlling so many state and local governments, it’s hard to be hopeful that a public sector rebound will come any time soon.

“The protective effect of working in the public sector decreased substantially for black workers—especially black women—after the Great Recession, while white workers were relatively insulated,” Laird says. She adds that, “without a course correction, further efforts to dismantle the public sector will most likely have a negative effect on the workers who have historically gained the most from public sector employment.”

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EconomicsIncome InequalityPolitics

The Recovery Fails to Deliver Rising Wages

by Gregory N. Heires
written by Gregory N. Heires

By GREGORY N. HEIRES
If you believe that the so-called economic recovery means that the living standards of workers have improved, you should think again.

The stagnation of wages—the defining characteristic of our economic times along with rising inequality—continues. Since the 1970s, wages have failed to grow along with productivity, fueling economic inequality not seen since the Great Depression.

“2014 Continues a 35-Year Trend of Broad-based Wage Stagnation,” a report by Elise Gould of the Washington-based Economic Institute, describes the pay crisis.

“Last year was yet another year of poor wage growth for American workers,” the EPI report says. “With few exceptions, real (inflation-adjusted) hourly wages fell or stagnated for workers across the wage spectrum between 2013 and 1014—even for those with bachelor’s or advanced degrees” The report adds that, “ever since 1979, the vast majority of American workers have seen their hourly wages stagnate or decline.”

Yes, the economy shows signs of a rebound. But the recovery has left millions of workers behind. Millions of others are struggling to keep up with the cost of living. Record profits have benefitted only those at the top of the economic pyramid.

The EPI report’s conclusions:

• During 2013 and 2014, real hourly wages fell for the majority of Americans.

• Since the recession, only those at the top of the wage distribution have experienced a real increase in pay.

• People of color continue to experience falling wages significantly below that of their white counterparts.

• The most significant wage loss occurred among those with college and advanced degrees. That calls into question the belief that wage performance is rooted education and training.

• Workers with the least education actually experienced a growth in their wages. The growth was likely a result of increases in state minimum wages, demonstrating the impact public policy can have on wages.

The Roots of Our Economic Malaise

The Economic Policy Institute discusses the factors at the root our economic malaise in a Jan. 6 report called, “Causes of Wage Stagnation,” by Lawrence Mishel, the president of the progressive think tank. The factors include:

The abandonment of full employment: Policy makers’ obsession with inflation as opposed to unemployment has harmed wage growth. High rates of unemployment dampen wage growth, which in turn leads to greater inequality.

Declining union density: The decline of unions helps account for the increase in corporate profits in recent decades. The erosion of union power accounts for a third of the growth of inequality among men and a fifth of that of women.

Other labor market policies and business practices: The long-term decline in the federal minimum wage accounts for about two-thirds of the increase in the gap between lower- and middle-wage workers.

Growth in power of the top 1 percent, particularly finance and CEOs: Financial deregulation has allowed CEOs and other managers to earn excessive wages and bonuses, and

Globalization policies: Trade agreements have benefited U.S. corporations and driven down the wages of its United States-based workers. The government’s failure to maintain the value of the dollar has hurt domestic labor by encouraging imports from lesser-developed countries with lower-paid workers.

Unemployment and Wages

“As long as you have unemployment, employers don’t have to cater to their workers,” said Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, chair of the National Jobs for All Coalition, which advocates for full employment.

Today, the official employment rate is 5.5 percent. Some 27.7 million workers are unemployed or forced to work part-time. Some 18.5 workers million workers make up the working poor, earning less than the $27,000 poverty line for a family of four. All told, 40.2 million lack good jobs.

“Until we have a tight labor market, we won’t we see lower unemployment or any significant increase in wages” Schaffner said.

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Newcrossroads.com is devoted to analysis of political, economic and cultural issues. Blogger Gregory N.Heires is the former president of the Metro NY Labor Communications Council and a former Sr. Associate Director in the Communications Dept. of District Council 37, AFSCME, in New York City.

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