|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Economy : Labor : Regime |
|
On Job Front, 'Recovery' Meaningless |
Current rating: 0 |
by Jay Bookman
(No verified email address) |
08 Mar 2004
|
|
Notably missing from the president's description of why "we're doing so good here in America" is any mention of jobs. Yes, the stock market is up, as are corporate profits. If you work on Wall Street, these are indeed good times. But to most Americans, the primary function of an economy is not to drive up stocks, but to put people to work so they can support themselves and their families and contribute to their country. By that very human measure, a jobless recovery is not a recovery at all. |
Sometimes, a small number casts a very large shadow.
Take the number of new jobs that were created last month. Economists expected to hear Friday that 125,000 additional jobs had come on line in February. While that performance wouldn't have been great, it would have been reassuring, since that's roughly the number of additional jobs we need to absorb new workers joining the labor force each month. In other words, it would have meant that we were at least holding our own.
But we weren't. Only 21,000 additional jobs were created last month, far too few even to accommodate population growth, let alone make up for the millions of jobs lost previously. Even more ominously, the number of private-sector jobs created last month was actually zero: All 21,000 new jobs occurred in government.
Surprisingly -- or then again, maybe not -- that sour news didn't have much impact on the stock market. But you can bet that it reverberated in the halls of Congress, in the White House and in certain political campaigns. According to polls, the economy and jobs are the No. 1 issue worrying voters, and February's news will only magnify that concern.
So far, President Bush has responded to that concern with a studied air of defiance, insisting that the economy is doing fine and that his policies are working. "The economy is getting stronger," he said last week in California. "Inflation is low; interest rates are low; manufacturing is up; home ownership is strong. The entrepreneurial spirit in America is alive and well, and one of the reasons why I think we're doing so good here in America is because of the tax relief we passed."
Notably missing from the president's description of why "we're doing so good here in America" is any mention of jobs. Yes, the stock market is up, as are corporate profits. If you work on Wall Street, these are indeed good times. But to most Americans, the primary function of an economy is not to drive up stocks, but to put people to work so they can support themselves and their families and contribute to their country. By that very human measure, a jobless recovery is not a recovery at all.
As the president also indicated, the centerpiece of his job-creation policy has been a series of large tax cuts that have contributed to record federal deficits. It certainly seems fair to ask, more than three years into his term and more than two years since the end of the recession, whether those tax cuts have worked as planned. And the fairest way to make that judgment would be to measure the administration against its own numbers.
A year ago, the White House Council of Economic Advisers projected that if the president's proposed tax cuts were approved and implemented by the middle of 2003 -- which they were -- the newly stimulated economy would create an additional 3.6 million jobs by now. That prediction, which the council called conservative and cautious, turns out to have been off by a mere 3.5 million. The real number of jobs created in the past year is 122,000, another very small number that looms very large.
In some ways, that dismal performance is not surprising. Many mainstream economists had warned the Bush administration from the beginning that huge tax cuts skewed toward the rich would not do enough to stimulate the economy, because the rich would be less likely to spend that additional money and thus generate jobs.
The administration chose to ignore that advice for its own narrow ideological reasons, and voters have every right to hold it accountable for that mistake.
In the meantime, there's little to be done but wait and hope. The soaring federal deficit makes it difficult to contemplate yet another massive tax cut, even one better targeted to stimulate the economy. The Federal Reserve has also fired all of its bullets, so to speak, lowering interest rates as much as possible to stimulate job creation, but again to little effect so far.
Economic theory says that we should be getting a jump in job creation any month now. But the worrisome thing is, it's been saying that for months.
© 2004 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
http://www.ajc.com/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
|
Capital Gains, Labor Losses |
by Peter Kellman
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
09 Mar 2004
|
The leadership of organized labor has taken different paths in working to rid the White House of George W. Bush. Last fall, leaders of the unions that make up the AFL-CIO split. Some groups, like the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, two large government and service-sector unions, endorsed Howard Dean as the Democratic nominee to unseat Bush. Many of the industrial unions went with Richard Gephardt, while others like my union, the United Automobile Workers, remained neutral.
After Gephardt and Dean threw in the towel, the unions of the AFL-CIO endorsed John Kerry. Assuming Kerry, now the presumptive Democratic nominee, beats Bush, where does that leave organized labor? Worse off than when Clinton left office, and the prospects for growth are dim.
For many reasons, I will vote for the Democrat running against Bush. But I can't delude myself into thinking that this election will turn around the fortunes of unions in the United States. To do that, labor will have to reinvent itself as a social movement and take on the corporate oligarchy that's so influential today in America.
The national unions of the AFL-CIO need members to stay active. Their leaders reason that if a Democrat is elected, he will appoint National Labor Relations Board members who will be favorable to labor, and in turn their rulings will help unions gather more members. The problem is this theory hasn't materialized.
Let's look at the presidency for the years 1976 through 2000 - 12 years overseen by a Republican president and 12 by a Democrat. The loss of union members, as a percentage of the work force, has been greater under Democrats (4.1 percent) than Republicans (2.8 percent).
I am not trying to make the case that labor should back Republicans, because under them labor hasn't hemorrhaged quite so much over the last 24 years as under Democrats. On the contrary, over the last century the only major increases in labor membership took place during the Democratic presidencies of Woodrow Wilson - 2.3 million new members - and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman - when membership jumped by 13 million.
The labor decline as a percentage of the work force began in 1953. Two results of the decline is that inflation-adjusted wages are lower now for working people than in 1973, and hours of work have increased to the point that U.S. workers labor approximately three months more a year than do workers in Germany.
So the problem for labor is much bigger than who is running for president this year. The conundrum is that it's almost impossible to talk about these setbacks because we have just about lost the language to describe them. Here is an example:
"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never exist if labor did not exist first. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." So said Abraham Lincoln in his first State of the Union message in 1861.
It's difficult for people today to think about labor and capital - better understood as wealth - in terms that people did in Lincoln's time. The shadow capital casts is so strong, the juxtaposition of labor and capital has all but disappeared from our language. The influence of that wealth now dominates in the press, in the courts, in the legislatures, and on the campaign trail. Sadly, when a society loses the words to express a concept - such as worker rights - the society loses that concept.
For example, we don't talk about "run-a-way shops" anymore, we say the company's "outsourcing." We don't say 1,000 people lost their jobs, we explain that a corporation is "downsizing." And when the corporation downsizes, its stock goes up. More and more, the words we use focus on a corporation's health and not the worker's.
Today, everything is viewed from the perspective of capital. What used to be called "labor" is now called "human capital." If we were to switch labor and capital in Lincoln's State of the Union message - "Capital is the superior of labor, and deserves much the higher consideration" - and attribute it to almost any of today's political leaders, few would question the statement.
The complicity of labor unions in the present practice of corporate governance began when the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, and the political climate of that period, changed labor from the social movement it had been to an interest group. This led to what has mistakenly been called a "social contract" between labor and management in which labor negotiates with executives over wages, hours and working conditions, but doesn't question their right to manage - or, more accurately, to govern. Since then, capital has been referred to as management, and labor as human capital. Management extracts human capital, the way it does any other of the Earth's resources, with little regard to human health, happiness, justice or the environment.
The candidate unions back for the presidency will become important the day unions stop being an interest group and take the lead in a social movement that challenges capital's role in the governance of this society.
To do this, labor must lift the veil on the problems the corporate elite would like us all to believe don't exist: poverty, unemployment, homelessness, lack of health care, and a prison population seven times greater, per capita, than that of Western Europe. And we need to talk about issues that haven't been raised in a long time, like how do we create meaningful work for all? How do we move from corporate education to democratic education? Why don't we have universal single-payer health care, a national pension plan for all, and the eight-hour day? We also need to come to grips with why our nation is often at war.
These problems, to name a few, need to be addressed not as single, unconnected issues, but from the perspective of a social movement built on human rights. A movement that promotes cooperation and gives a pink slip to those whose only interest is profit margins. A movement fueled by the hearts, minds and soul of the American working class.
Peter Kellman is a labor activist, historian and writer who lives in North Berwick, Maine. He's the author of "Divided We Fall - The Story of the Paperworkers' Union and the Future of Organized Labor," recently published by Apex Press.
Copyright © Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc
http://www.pressherald.com/news/index.shtml |
|
