Outsider in the White House (31 page)

The consequences of downsizing and hiring temps are devastating for American workers. So is another major strategy used to boost corporate profits: reducing labor costs by shipping American jobs beyond our nation's borders. In today's global economy, the major American export is our jobs. Why pay American workers a living wage when in Mexico workers can be hired for a dollar an hour? In China the hourly wage is as low as twenty cents.

We can see the consequences of this war on workers. As the number of contingent workers has grown and millions of jobs have been shipped overseas, the number of full-time employees at the Fortune 500 companies has plunged dramatically, from 19 percent of all American workers twenty years ago to less than 10 percent today. Between 1979 and 1994, just ten of the most prominent Fortune 500 companies (including Ford, AT&T, General Electric, and ITT) eliminated more than one million decent-paying manufacturing jobs at the very same time that many of them were expanding their investments and creating jobs in China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries.

The greatest job growth has been in the service sector, which pays poorly and often provides no benefits. More than three out of every four jobs created in the 1980s were in the low-paying retail trade and service industries.

People are desperate for jobs, but all too often decent-paying jobs are not available. People work longer hours for less. Many people work two, even three jobs to keep afloat. The bond between employer and worker—do good work and your job will be safe—has eroded. Without economic security, the American dream is crumbling.

Let me be blunt. The government must accept responsibility for helping to create an economy that provides work for and ensures the economic well-being of all its citizens.

What We Need to Rebuild the Middle Class and Reduce Poverty: Decent-Paying Jobs

I know it is not fashionable to speak of what government is supposed to do for people. We live in an era of “tough love,” of the survival of the fittest, when each of us is supposed to do everything for ourselves. Today, a national industrial policy is considered an anachronism by the apologists for corporate America, even though those same apologists never have any quarrel with massive government efforts to assist “free-market capitalism” or establish “free trade” as our industrial policy. We don't hear the major corporations hollering about “government intervention” when the Federal Reserve Board makes decisions that lead to increased unemployment. While there is a rush to cut welfare for the poor, corporate welfare is vigorously defended by the wealthiest people in America. We seem to have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.

Frankly, much of our economic policy is a disgrace, designed to benefit the wealthy few at the expense of the average worker. We have government “payoffs for layoffs” in the defense industry, tax breaks for downsizing, and trade policies like NAFTA, GATT, and MFN with China which make it easy for corporations to ship jobs overseas.

It is time we developed an economic program that works for ordinary people, and that rebuilds and expands the middle class. There is no reason why, in the richest nation in the world, every American should not have a job that sustains a decent living. There is much that government can do to make this happen.

First, government can once again level the playing field between capital and labor. Trade unions in the United States are the main reason we have an eight-hour day, a five-day work week, employer-provided health benefits and pension plans, and occupational safety and child labor legislation. Unions led the effort for Medicare, Medicaid, affordable housing, and many other programs enjoyed today by millions of Americans. Strong unions were the reason why, twenty years ago, American workers led the world in terms of wages and benefits. And not coincidentally, today American workers rank thirteenth in the world in terms of wages and benefits.

In 1954, almost one of every three employees belonged to a labor union. Today, less than one in six workers is unionized. This stunning drop in union membership is no historical accident. For decades the federal government, through labor legislation and the National Labor Relations Board, acted as an umpire to maintain a level playing field between workers and management. But President Reagan's union-busting posture in the air traffic controllers' strike, and a generation of NLRB members hostile to the rights and needs of working people, have given one advantage after another to management. The possibility of workers “winning” a strike is almost unthinkable today: unions are struggling just to preserve past gains. Almost everywhere, corporations are in control and unions on the defensive, if not in actual retreat.

We need to pass labor legislation that ensures equity in contract negotiations between workers and management. Developing fair labor legislation is not hard to do—legislation to achieve the same purpose was passed during the New Deal. Such legislation would ban the permanent replacement of striking workers. It would allow unions to be certified by simple card check: if a majority of employees in a bargaining unit join a union, the union automatically represents them. It would mandate compulsory arbitration of first contracts if a stalemate between labor and management occurred, since refusing to negotiate in good faith is one of management's main tactics. It would repeal prohibitions against strikes and secondary boycotts.

Real labor law reform would also strengthen and expand the enforcement powers of the National Labor Relations Board. All of these provisions sound technical, but their impact would be enormous. They would once again establish “rules” giving workers the opportunity to fight their own battles—for decent wages, for fringe benefits, for safe working conditions—without being fired or stalemated or isolated.

But providing fair opportunities for the trade union movement is not enough. The government must protect the lowest paid workers, men and women who in most instances are not unionized. For working people, the new global economy is all too often a race to the bottom. The wage in China or Guatemala or Poland is increasingly the wage against which American workers must compete.

In the face of this problem, the least we can do is raise the minimum wage to a
living
wage. Last year, the president and Congress took a step in this direction. But it was not enough. The minimum wage should be set at a rate sufficient to support a family of three above the poverty line. In a country where CEOs earn 170 times what the average factory worker earns—where CEO pay has increased 514 percent in twenty-four years, while workers' pay failed to keep up with inflation—we can do no less.

What about the hemorrhage of jobs abroad? Can we do anything about the disastrous effects of the global economy on American workers? According to the experts, no. But the experts echo the message their employers want us to hear.

We need to address the issue of trade forthrightly and understand that our current trade policy is an unmitigated disaster. Our current record-breaking merchandise trade deficit of $112 billion is costing us over 2 million decent-paying jobs. President Clinton, like Bush and Reagan before him, is supporting a trade policy that protects the interests and profits of multinational corporations, while compromising the interests of American workers. NAFTA, GATT, and MFN with China must be repealed, and a new trade policy developed.

Let's look at some of the components of a sensible trade policy. First, we must recognize that trade is not an end in itself. The function of American trade policy must be to improve the standard of living of the American people. America's trade policy must be radically changed, by committing ourselves to a “fair” rather than “free” trade policy. This means developing and supporting legislation that safeguards American manufacturing jobs and cuts our enormous balance of payments deficit. Companies should be encouraged to invest
here
, in the United States. Currently, this is not the case. There are all sorts of incentives, ranging from direct payments of subsidies to tax breaks to tax loopholes, which encourage corporations to ship American jobs beyond our borders. It is time to tighten our tax laws, eliminate corporate welfare, and penalize corporations that eliminate American workers so that they can replace them with low-paid workers overseas.

It is important that we use our leverage as the world's largest and most lucrative market to protect American jobs. Reagan, Bush, and Clinton have all supported policies that opened our markets wide to foreign products, asking far too little in exchange. At the same time, we must explore new economic models here at home. We need to develop more worker-owned businesses. We must move from agribusiness to sustainable agriculture, not only for the sake of our economy but also for our environment. We must once again insist that it is at least as important for businesses to meet human needs as it is for them to augment their bottom line.

But reforming the private sector is not enough. The government has a very large role to play in rebuilding our physical and social infrastructure, and when it accepts that role, it will create millions of new jobs at the same time.

Let's Rebuild America: Government Has an Important Role to Play

Let's face it, under heavy pressure from Republicans and conservative Democrats, the nation has not paid attention to the things government is
supposed
to do. No private company can safeguard the quality of our drinking water. No multinational corporation can provide us with decent roads and inexpensive mass transportation. No amount of charity will house all the homeless, feed all the hungry, or protect the personal safety of all Americans. The government has a very large role to play in making the world we inhabit livable and safe.

Rebuilding our physical infrastructure means repairing our aging roads and bridges, cleaning up toxic waste dumps, constructing sewage treatment facilities, restoring our schools and libraries and equipping them with computers so that all Americans can enter the information age. It means building affordable housing so millions do not have to pay exorbitant rents to live with peeling lead paint and substandard plumbing in crime-infested areas. It means establishing fast, reasonably priced mass transportation in and between our cities.

Rebuilding our social infrastructure is also necessary. It is high time we put more cops on the beat, had more trained teachers in the schools and more nurses in our health care clinics. High-quality and affordable day care should be available in every community. We need more inspectors to monitor the quality of our meat, the potential dangers of our pharmaceuticals, the safety of our airplanes. We require more affordable nursing homes for the elderly and job training for young men and women, together with retraining for workers who have lost their jobs.

Can We Do All of This and Move Toward a Balanced Budget?

Won't all of this cost money? Yes. Isn't it foolish to spend money rebuilding our infrastructure when we have a huge national debt? No. Because there is one final way to build and expand the middle class: we must make radical changes in our national priorities.

If we cut military spending and corporate welfare, we would have more than enough money to meet America's needs. This nation currently spends $260 billion a year on defense, even though the Cold War is over. (We are spending $100 billion to defend Western Europe and Japan against nonexistent enemies.) And this $260 billion does not count the $30 billion spent annually on intelligence or the $20 billion in defense-related expenditures hidden away in our federal spending on energy.

Combine a sizeable chunk of that $310 billion we spend on defense-related matters with the $125 billion we spend each year on corporate welfare, and there is adequate money to rebuild our infrastructure and meet the pressing needs of Americans. (We can do this and still have the strongest military in the world.) And this is before we increase revenues by instituting a more progressive income tax that requires the wealthy to pay their fair share, and before we establish a wealth tax on millionaires.

We do not have to cut back on nutrition programs for poor children, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other vitally needed programs to balance the budget. We can move toward a balanced budget and significantly increase funding in a wide range of areas that will improve life for the American people and, in the process, create millions of decent-paying jobs. We can do it if we have the courage to put the people's interests before corporate interests, and to make fundamental changes in our national priorities.

In rebuilding America, we need to concentrate in particular on two issues that both the president and Congress have failed to address adequately: health care and education.

Health Care for All Through a Single-Payer System

The United States is the only industrialized nation, besides South Africa, that does not have a national health care system. In every other developed nation, health care is a right and not a privilege.

After Clinton's failure to reform our health care system, we ended up with a cumbersome, profit-driven, consumer-unfriendly, inefficient health care delivery system dominated by insurance companies. And I mean
dominated
.

Managed care pretends to be efficient. That is because it cuts back on health care for many of us, and rations it for the rest. It is a sign of how bad things have become that the last Congress had to pass legislation allowing a mother to stay in the hospital for at least twenty-four hours after giving birth. The insurance companies had decided that if drive-by banking worked, then it seemed a reasonable bet that drive-by deliveries would work, too.

But in their well-publicized initiatives to reduce costs, not one single insurance company has proposed reducing their profits from “managing” health care. The solution to our health care crisis—80 million uninsured or under-insured—is not difficult to find. We need a single-payer system administered at the state level. Currently, we spend one-quarter of all medical expenses on paperwork and bureaucracy. By eliminating most of the paperwork involved in health care, single-payer systems produce remarkable savings. In the United States, those savings would be enough to insure every single American. We not only would all be covered, we could go back to having freedom of choice in picking our doctors. And this would cost no more than the nation is currently spending on medical care.