The Missing Living Wage Agenda

Nov 20, 2012Annette BernhardtDorian Warren

As part of our series "A Rooseveltian Second Term Agenda," a long-term plan to provide justice on the job for all workers.

As part of our series "A Rooseveltian Second Term Agenda," a long-term plan to provide justice on the job for all workers.

Now that the election is over, our hope is that we can finally move beyond the vacuous invocations of an imaginary middle class where everyone is in the same boat. It’s time to get real about the concrete policies needed to take on the multiple inequalities that run deep through the U.S. labor market. And we’re not talking about the “skills mismatch,” another red herring routinely flung into this debate by both sides (including by President Obama as recently as the last week of the campaign).

What we’re talking about is a broad, multi-year agenda to give America’s workers a living wage and voice on the job and to take on the continuing exclusion of workers of color, immigrants, and women from good jobs. The media may have discovered inequality last year with the surprise emergence of Occupy Wall Street, but in truth, there is a 30-year backlog of policies to fix the extreme maldistribution of wages and opportunity in the labor market.

First, we have to make our core workplace standards much stronger – whether it’s in terms of wages, health and safety, or voice on the job. That means raising the minimum wage so that it’s a meaningful floor again (some good news: voters in Albuquerque, San Jose, and Long Beach raised theirs last week). It means updating health and safety regulations written in the 1970s. And it means restoring the right to organize, because at this point, virulent employer opposition and retaliation has rendered U.S. labor law obsolete. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. workers say they would like to be represented by a union, but only 11.8 percent actually are. This is what happens when one out of four workers is fired illegally for attempting to organize a union while employers face minimal penalties.

Second, we have to take on the profound reorganization of the American workplace. The poster child for precarious work is temp jobs – but subcontracting has had a much broader impact, as janitors, laundry workers, warehouse workers, security guards, food service workers, and millions of others have been outsourced to low-wage firms. A good model for a solution is California’s recent law making companies liable for minimum wage and overtime violations by their subcontractors, recognizing that end-user firms such as Walmart exert considerable control over working conditions down their supply chains.   

Third, we have to double down on enforcement. A 2008 study of Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York found that 26 percent of low-wage workers were paid less than the minimum wage and 76 percent were underpaid or not paid at all for their overtime hours. Yet the number of federal wage and hour inspectors is still below 1980 levels, and it would take 131 years for OSHA investigators to inspect each workplace just once. Until employers face substantial costs to their bottom line (as is true in other bodies of law, such as environmental regulation and employment discrimination law), practices like wage theft, retaliation against workers trying to organize a union, and independent contractor misclassification will continue unabated.

Fourth, we have to do a better job of leveraging the government’s capital. Public money touches millions of private-sector jobs, whether by purchasing goods and services for the government or by funding everything from schools and bridges to health care and social services. There are plenty of innovative models to ensure that this money results in good jobs, whether it’s responsible contracting policies (in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois), living wage laws (in more than 140 cities and counties), or accountable economic development policies (in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and New York City, among others).

Fifth, we have to explicitly break down systemic labor market exclusions of people of color, immigrants, women, the unemployed, and people with criminal records. For example, advocates are pushing the U.S. Department of Labor to finally end the exemption of home care workers from minimum wage and overtime protection, and cities across the country are passing “ban the box” policies to reduce hiring barriers for people with arrest or conviction records.  

But we also have to challenge de facto exclusions. A good example is targeted hiring and training programs on publicly funded projects, which in our mind will be crucial to solving the escalating (and chronically under-reported) economic crisis in communities of color. A great example is Portland’s 2009 residential retrofitting program, which mandated living wages and local hiring from designated training programs. As of last year, the program’s workers earned median wages of $18 per hour; fully 84 percent were local residents, nearly half of them people of color. While unemployment is still at Depression-era levels in many black communities, we know what works to employ those still excluded from access to the labor market.

A final word on why we think these policies (and many others; see the long-form version here) are politically viable. In communities across the country, there is an undeniable thirst for justice on the job and investment in local communities. This is true not just for raising the minimum wage, which consistently polls in the 70-80 percent range, but also policies such as paid sick days, increased funding for elder care and child care, cracking down on wage theft, using taxpayer money to create living wage jobs, and restoring the right to organize.

(If you doubt support for organizing, consider the recent wave of strikes by Walmart workers, or New York’s taxi workers organizing for better pay even though they are independent contractors, or Palermo’s pizza workers in Wisconsin staying out on strike for three months and now pressuring Costco to boycott their employer.)

The real question is whether President Obama and Democrats in Congress understand that raising taxes on the top 2 percent is only the first step on a long road toward building a sustainable living wage economy in the U.S. Our hope lies in the growing recognition among progressives that it will take the pressure and power of social movements to convince him to walk that road with us.

Annette Bernhardt and Dorian Warren are Fellows at the Roosevelt Institute.

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Paying Taxes to Your Boss: Another Step Toward 21st Century Feudalism

Oct 26, 2012Tim Price

Employers are already treating their workers like their subjects. Now some of them get to collect taxes, too.

Employers are already treating their workers like their subjects. Now some of them get to collect taxes, too.

Though a lot of Americans really (really, really) hate paying taxes, most of us can at least justify it as our contribution to some greater good, whether it’s the broad range of social programs favored by progressives or a libertarian night watchman state. But what if the government instead told us, “We don’t want your money, but we would like to make friends with some rich guys, so just give it to them and let them have fun with it”? That could soon be the law of the land in Pennsylvania, where the state legislature has passed a bill that would, as Philadelphia City Paper blogger Daniel Denvir describes it, “allow companies that hire at least 250 new workers in the state to keep 95-percent of the workers' withheld income tax.” These workers will essentially be paying their employers for the privilege of having a job. Some have called this “corporate socialism,” but it also calls to mind an even older economic model that was once popular in Europe – except back then, the bosses were called lords. It’s a more modern innovation in the U.S., but combined with increased political pressure from employers and a crackdown on workers’ rights, it all adds up to feudalism, American-style.

The Pennsylvania bill is just the most recent example of state income taxes being turned into employer subsidies. It’s already the law of the land in one form or another in 19 states, and according to Good Jobs First, it’s taking $684 million a year out of the public coffers. The theory is that this will boost job creation. But the authors of the Good Jobs First report note, “payments often go to firms that simply move existing jobs from one state to another, or to ones that threaten to move unless they get paid to stay put.” In other words, it’s more like extortion than stimulus. With state governments facing a projected $4 trillion budget shortfall and continuing to cut social services and public sector jobs, they can hardly afford to be wasting money on companies that already have plenty and have no intention of putting it to good use. And the more governments turn over their privileges to businesses, the more the distinction between the two becomes blurred.

But if corporations have state governments over a barrel, they have their employees stuffed inside the barrel and ready to plunge down the waterfall. As I’ve noted before, some conservatives view all taxation as theft, but there’s surely no better term for what happens when employers promise their workers a certain wage or salary and then pocket some of the money for themselves. When you pay taxes to the government, you get something in return, whether it’s a school for your kids or a road to drive on or a firefighter to rescue you from a burning building. When you pay taxes to your boss, you… well, you give your boss your money. Your only reward is that you get to continue to “work the land,” so to speak. The lords didn’t consult with the peasants on which tapestries they should buy with the money they collected from them.

Did I forget to mention that these employers aren’t even required to tell their workers that this is how their “income taxes” are being used? Journalist David Cay Johnston, who covers this issue in his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use ‘Plain English’ to Rob You Blind, writes that this bait-and-switch is “stealthy by design.” Of course it is; if these workers were important enough to know where their money is going, it wouldn’t be legal to steal it.

Employers may be able to exert pressure, but they can’t actually control who you support, right? Well, they might not be able to accompany you to the voting booth (yet), but if you work in a state that allows your employer to confiscate your tax withholdings and donate them to a pro-Romney Super PAC, they can turn you into a Romney supporter whether you like it or not. It’s not enough that our current campaign finance system gives wealthy executives nearly unchecked power to support the candidate of their choice; subsidizing them with income taxes allows them to choose for everyone in their fiefdom.

If employers were always secretive about their exploitation, the comparison to feudalism might not seem apt – after all, serfs were pretty clear on what the score was. But there’s nothing subtle about the way some employers have begun to apply political pressure in the workplace. From forcing workers to attend Romney rallies without pay to outright threatening their jobs if President Obama is reelected, employers in the post-Citizens United era are feeling emboldened to conscript their employees as bannermen for the candidates of their choice. Suddenly, a job is not just a job, but an oath of allegiance. And Republicans, at least, are all for it. Mike Elk reports that Mitt Romney himself urged business owners to lobby their employees on his behalf, assuring them that there is “Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business.” And as we all know, if you can’t technically be arrested or fined for doing something, that means it’s totally okay to do it. Q.E.D., coal miners.

This lopsided power dynamic is reflected more generally in the shoddy state of modern labor law. In most states employers can fire their workers whenever they want for pretty much any reason, forcing them to fall in line with even the pettiest demands. When your boss is trying to tell you when you can and can’t go to the bathroom, forcing you to hide your Obama bumper sticker seems like an almost trifling concern in comparison. This lack of employee agency has led Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren to describe today’s employers as “mini-dictators,” and as more public funds are diverted to private business owners, that comparison is only becoming more literal.

If conservative policymakers succeed in their nationwide effort to eliminate collective bargaining rights and neutralize already weakened unions, conditions aren’t likely to get better for workers anytime soon. Business owners and corporate execs will continue to assert more and more authority, bending their workers’ will to their own while using those workers’ paychecks to solidify their power. But there’s still hope of turning things around and restoring a more balanced playing field. If more American workers take note of the fact that two of their least favorite people, the tax collector and their boss, are being combined into one entity, it might just spark enough anger for them to fight back. As the feudal lords eventually learned, the peasants were the ones holding the pitchforks.

Tim Price is Deputy Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

 

Businessman with crown image via Shutterstock.com.

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Bryce Covert: How Do We Make the Economic Case for Care Work?

Oct 19, 2012

On the latest episode of the Roosevelt Institute's Bloggingheads series, Fireside Chats, NND Editor Bryce Covert talks to Nancy Folbre, economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and editor of For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States.

On the latest episode of the Roosevelt Institute's Bloggingheads series, Fireside Chats, NND Editor Bryce Covert talks to Nancy Folbre, economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and editor of For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States. In the clip below, they discuss Bryce's main takeaway from the book, which is that there is a value to domestic care work "to everyone, to the economy, to individuals, and there's a cost when we're not valuing this care."

Bryce notes that the high-profile defeat of the Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights in California and the continued obstruction of a bill to provide paid sick days in New York City are both the result of Democrats giving in to pressure from business lobbyists. Given the challenge of taking on these powerful interests, Bryce wonders if there's a way "to make the economic case, to bring business in or at least to be able to combat their claims that, 'Oh, well, it's too much of a cost burden on us to do these things.'" She also points out research that shows that although these worker-friendly regulations are often met with initial resistance from employers, they've proven to be harmless or even beneficial once they're in place. This suggests that "maybe there's this disconnect between what small business owners or regular business owners think and their represented interests like the Chamber of Commerce, which tends to be very conservative even in policies that might actually benefit small businesses."

For more, including a discussion of how coalitions can be built to push for better working conditions and why men share away from traditionally female-oriented care work, check out the full video below:

 

Childcare worker image via Shutterstock.com.

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On Her Birthday, Eleanor Roosevelt's Fight for Labor Rights Lives On

Oct 11, 2012Brigid OFarrell

Then as now, labor rights and labor's voice in politics are under heavy attack.

Then as now, labor rights and labor's voice in politics are under heavy attack.

Today, October 11, is Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday, a good day to reflect on the First Lady’s values and how she translated those values into action on behalf of ideas and people she supported. Eleanor Roosevelt strongly believed in workers, their unions, and their involvement in the political process. A member of The Newspaper Guild, AFL-CIO for over 25 years, she came to see unions as fundamental to democracy itself. In 1941, she told striking IBEW workers that “it was important that everyone who was a worker join a labor organization.” Under her guidance, the right to join a union was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet workers’ rights remain under heavy attack today. Her legacy is still in need of protection and promotion.

The fact that U.S. workers have a collective voice in the political process is firmly rooted in the New Deal. Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt believed that workers had a right to a voice at work as well as a voice in politics. They also saw the two as closely intertwined as they worked with labor to win elections and support their progressive agenda. John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers Union, and Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union, led the labor movement in contributing money and getting out the union vote for President Roosevelt’s re-election efforts. Resistance was fierce. Then, as now, they were outspent by anti-union forces. Yet by 1947, Mrs. Roosevelt concluded in her “My Day” column that while “labor today is stronger than it used to be, it is no stronger than organized capital.”

Similar anti-union initiatives continue to this day. Many people in California are members of labor unions, from airplane pilots and grocery store clerks to nurses and teachers, mail carriers and electricians, police officers and fire fighters. Through their unions the pay dues, elect officers, and participate in decisions that affect their pay, benefits, and workplace safety. Should these union members also be allowed to have a collective voice in our political process through their unions?

Proposition 32, on the November ballot in California, says “no.” This proposition exempts powerful corporate interests from the limits on political spending but imposes formidable barriers to unions. Paycheck deductions – money raised through voluntary deductions from workers’ paychecks – could no longer be used for political activities. Only unions, however, not companies or wealthy individuals, rely on voluntary paycheck deductions as their source of funding to support political action.

Proponents of Proposition 32 hail it as “campaign finance reform.” Yet it places no meaningful restrictions on corporate contributions to candidates, campaigns, or Super PACs. Members of the 1 percent or the 10 percent don’t use paycheck deductions to contribute to politics. They use profits, interest, dividends, salaries, and bonuses. Professor John Logan, director of labor and employment relations at San Francisco State University, reports that the backers of Prop 32 are also some of the same wealthy individuals who helped bring us the Citizens United Supreme Court decision leading to the most expensive election year on record.

This is also a “one-two punch.” In 1958, Eleanor Roosevelt led a national effort opposing right-to-work laws in six states, including California, where the law was defeated.  Most recently, the fight has escalated in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana and has now returned to California. If Prop 32 passes this year, workers will have diminished political power and next year we can expect to see these other anti-labor propositions further weakening private sector unions. Workers’ ability to fight back in California will be stopped in its tracks by Prop 32.

Mrs. Roosevelt saw unions as fundamental to the democratic process. She thrived on educating union members and rallying them to register people to vote, participate in conventions and campaigns, and get people to the polls on Election Day. She warned that when fear and prejudice are running high, “We may wake up to find that in trying to remedy certain wrongs, we have shorn ourselves of certain very precious freedoms.” In 1958, Mrs. Roosevelt called the right-to-work effort a “predatory and misleading campaign,” an equally apt description of Proposition 32 today.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday is a fitting time to remember that when asked where human rights begin, she answered, “In small places close to home…unless they have meaning there they will have little meaning any where.” Proposition 32 is very close to home for Californians, and if it passes here it could come to your neighborhood soon.

Brigid O’Farrell is an independent scholar in Moss Beach, California, and member of the National Writers Union, UAW Local 1981, whose most recent book is She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker, now available in paperback.

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How to Make Work Pay Again

Sep 13, 2012Richard Kirsch

The latest Census data prove that we need to start rebuilding the American middle class, and a new report shows how it can be done.

The latest Census data prove that we need to start rebuilding the American middle class, and a new report shows how it can be done.

Yesterday the U.S. Census Bureau reported that family income in the U.S. dropped to its lowest level in 16 years. The key thing in this news is that the drop is not just over the last three years, during the Great Recession. The squeeze on the middle class isn’t new, it wasn’t caused by the recession, and it won’t be fixed as we come out of the recession. If we’re going to rebuild the middle class, we need an agenda aimed at making work pay in the 21st century.   

That’s why I worked with more than 20 groups who understand the daily struggles of working families on a new report we’re releasing today, 10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class for Hard Working Americans: Making Work Pay in the 21st Century. The report is a road map for addressing the truth that we don’t just have a jobs problem; we have a good jobs problem.

Before we get to what we do about it, we need to confront the fact that even though the proportion of Americans with a college education doubled in the past three decades, the share of working people with a decent job dropped. Six out of ten (58 percent) jobs now emerging from the recession are low-wage. On top of that, the jobs projected to have the most openings between now and 2020 are mostly low-wage and require no more than a high school education. So there is no reason to think things will get better unless we act.

One set of solutions proposed in 10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class is to tackle the lack of support and protections for low-wage workers. A first step is to restore the minimum wage, which buys 30 percent less now than it did 40 years ago. The minimum wage for tipped workers is $2.13 an hour, the same as it was in 1991. One in five workers would get a pay raise if the minimum wage were increased. That includes workers who get paid just above today’s minimum wage, who would also benefit as the legal floor got raised.

Remarkably, four out of ten private sector jobs – including the great majority of low-wage jobs – do not give employees any paid time off if they are sick or need to care for an ill family member. In response, Connecticut and several cities have passed paid sick days ordinances. The federal government and states and localities should update basic labor standards to include this essential benefit to working families.

The report recommends tough enforcement, with meaningful penalties, of laws that unscrupulous employers now routinely flout. Many employers of low-wage workers routinely steal wages by not paying the minimum wage, not paying for overtime, or simply not paying workers at all. Other employers misclassify workers as “independent contractors” in order to get out of paying payroll taxes or benefits and hire “permatemps.” Worker safety and health is another area where measly penalties, weak enforcement, and widespread retaliation against workers who dare to speak up allow employers to keep low-wage workers in hazardous work conditions every day. 

It will take systemic solutions to address the broader problem of stagnant wages. A crucial step is to uphold the freedom of workers to organize a union by modernizing the National Labor Relations Act and stopping employers from harassing organizing efforts with virtual impunity. Nothing in our nation’s history has done more to bring workers decent pay, benefits, and dignity at work than organized labor. The factory workers of the mid-20th Century didn’t have a college education; they organized unions. The low-wage workers of the 21st Century – the housekeepers and janitors and home health aids and retail clerks – will only be able to get decent wages and become part of the middle class when they are able to effectively organize to bargain collectively.

Other proposals in the 10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class report would create new social insurance protections for the 21st Century, just as Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid were key to fighting poverty and building the middle class in the last century. The nation took one major step in 2010 with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which in 2014 will enable working families to get affordable health coverage even if they don’t get it on the job.

The report proposes two other steps to provide families more security in their work and in their retirement. Though today’s norm is for all the adults in a family to be in the workforce, only one in ten workers (12 percent) has paid family leave through work to care for a new child or a sick family member. A solution is to establish a national family and medical leave insurance program, similar to Social Security and successful programs in California and New Jersey, for workers to draw on when they are out on family leave.

To address the fact that pensions have been replaced by thread-bare 401Ks over the past 30 years, the report recommends establishing new pooled and professionally managed retirement plans for those who rely solely on Social Security and 401Ks, which would pay a defined amount – a pension – each month.

In addition to these and other steps, 10 Ways to Rebuild the Middle Class recognizes that a foundation of improving work is full employment. That is why we need to stop laying off public workers and outsourcing jobs overseas.  It's also why we should create millions of jobs now by investing in infrastructure and a green economy.

Rebuilding the middle class is about more than assuring that every working American can support his or her family with dignity and security. It’s about powering the economy forward in the 21st Century. The middle class is the engine of our economy, an engine that can only be rebuilt by making today’s jobs good and tomorrow’s jobs better.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

 

Construction worker image via Shutterstock.com.

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The Chicago Teachers Union Strike Viewed From the Local Level

Sep 10, 2012Mike Konczal

As of 10 p.m. last night, the Chicago Teachers Union has gone on strike. Here is a webpage for why they are striking, complete with the one-page explanation and the 46-page one. Here's PCCC's summary.

As of 10 p.m. last night, the Chicago Teachers Union has gone on strike. Here is a webpage for why they are striking, complete with the one-page explanation and the 46-page one. Here's PCCC's summary. Here's a local teacher explaining why he is on strike.

As Bill Barclay at Dissent Magazine noted, there was a special bill passed last year that required 75 percent of teachers to vote -- with absentees counted as no votes! -- to strike. Stand For Children CEO Jonah Edelman said at the Aspen Ideas Festival that “the unions cannot strike in Chicago" because that requirement, only required of teachers, was so restrictive. Turns out that this strike got 90 percent of teachers (and 98 percent if you exclude the absentees).

I reached out to two Chicago journalists and writers - Yana Kunichoff and Micah Uetricht - who are covering the situation locally to get their on-the-ground perspectives. A lightly edited transcript of the interview with each follows. I hope to have more coverage of this very important event in the days to follow.

Mike Konczal: Please introduce yourself.

Yana Kunichoff: My name is Yana Kunichoff. I'm a journalist for Truthout, which is a progressive online news magazine. I've written for a lot of independent media, where my focus has been immigration, investigative issues, and social justice activism. I've been living in Chicago for four years now.
 
Why is a strike happening?
 
YK: There are several layers to why this strike is happening. The shallowest, headline news one is because the Chicago Teachers' Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were not able to agree to a contract. A deeper reason is because this is one of the first times that an education public sector union has resisted and pushed back against the privatization and changes that have been happening in the education sector.
 
Looking back at bills passed last year and before, they all narrowed what the teachers' union is allowed to strike over. On paper, the biggest questions are on merit pay and seniority rights. But there are all these other points. Rahm Emanuel said in his press conference after the strike was declared that the two points under debate "are not financial." The two big issues under debate, from Emanuel's point of view, are teacher evaluation and principals having the full ability to hire and fire teachers.
 
What's it like for Democrats in Chicago?
 
YK: I don't know how much I can speak to the battle in the Democratic Party. There's an interesting contradiction that exists in Chicago. If you are a liberal in Chicago you support Obama, but at the same time there's a possibility you support the union. I know people supporting the campaign that support the teachers' union, even though someone associated with the administration is trying to smash it.
 
How is the Chicago community as a whole reacting?
 
YK: Chicago is a pretty divided city, with neighborhoods divided by class. I spent today riding my bike around Latino, working-class neighborhoods -- Pilsen, Little Village, and North and South Lawndale. These are areas that aren't doing well in this economy.
 
I'm seeing a lot of cars honking their horns, and police running their siren while they go by a school picket. The people that have to deal with the daily reality of school cutbacks, or mental health clinic shutdowns, or how'll they get home in winter with less public transit, the people who deal with austerity budgets, are in support of the teachers' strike.
 
Chicago is becoming increasingly gentrified, though, with more people who don't rely so much on public services. I'm not sure what they think of the strikes yet.
 
Most people will get their news from nationally-targeted coverage of the strike. As someone from Chicago, covering it locally, what would you like people to know?
 
YK: The charter system is something that started in Chicago but has since been brought national. These kinds of policies that work against teachers aren't going to stay contained to one city. This trend will continue into other cities and states, especially where unions are weak. So this is where the fight is happening. When you are here on the ground, it feels like a strong line of opposition. Opposition to policies that aren't just national but international - think of places like Greece and the more general fights against austerity happening across Europe here.
The national coverage will watch the specific contract terms, though they'll miss that 10 years from now, the specific, narrow terms will matter less than whether or not a union in an American city will have been successful in pushing back in this way. This is a fight over public resources, public jobs, and the idea of a public that isn't discussed by national media as if it exists. Will there be public schools as we understand them in 10 years?
 
I also spoke with Michah Uetricht separately.
 
Mike Konczal: Please introduce yourself.
 
Micah Uetricht: I'm Micah Uetricht, and I'm an organizer for a group called Arise Chicago as well as a freelance writer. I've been covering the teachers' strike in Chicago from the ground.
 
What is the core of this strike about?
 
MU: Last night, at the conference announcing whether or not the teachers were going to go on strike, several reporters asked CTU President Karen Lewis and Vice President Jesse Sharkey about what the core issues were. Both repeatedly emphasized that there weren't one or two core issues but it was instead about the total package. The package included wages, compensation, and benefits, but also the vision of what school reform looks like. CTU started talking about school reform that actually makes schools work for kids.
 
So there are traditional things that unions go on strike for, like wages and benefits, but also the bigger picture vision of what school reform is going to look like.
 
What's the energy like covering this strike from the streets in Chicago?
 
MU: I've been around a lot of strikes and labor actions, but this is totally like nothing I've seen before. I'm about five miles north of Chicago, and I've been on my bike going from actions to picket lines. Every public school I passed had crowds of 40, 50, 60 teachers. The energy is incredible. People were up at 5 in the morning to picket at their school, and then move to phone bank.  It's a big feat of organizing that CTU has pulled off.
 
How is the Chicago community as a whole reacting?
 
MU: The community support piece of the strike has also been incredible as far as I've seen. There's a lot of support from parents, community members and others. There's a group called Parents for Teachers that has been active, and a very vibrant Chicago Teacher Solidarity Campaign. Both have done an amazing job organizing before and during the strike.  People beyond the usual suspects are getting involved in this fight.
 
The city has worked really hard to try and divide parents against teachers, painting teachers as overpaid and greedy and harming students. So I was expecting to see some hostility from people on the streets, but all morning long I saw no stories of negativity or hostility. I'm looking for signs that average Chicagoans are annoyed or angry, but I haven't seen any yet. People I've talked to haven't seen any yet either.
 
Most people will get their news from nationally-targeted coverage of the strike. As someone from Chicago, covering it locally, what would you like people to know?
 
MU: CTU is very vocal in saying that the Democratic Party in Chicago and Rahm Emanuel are not serving their interests. In Chicago the Democratic Party is the major party, and they are pushing this austerity agenda, and so a lot of the future of whether or not unions are afraid of calling out Democrats will be determined here.
 
This is a fight over public sector workers, and we've seen that a lot over the past several years. We saw it in Wisconsin under Governor Walker, for instance. In that fight, the labor movement and the left in general made some serious missteps, and suffered a pretty crushing defeat with the law and the loss of the recall.
 
In Chicago, I haven't seen anyone say this explicitly, but my sense is that they learned from that fight that you have to be in the streets to win these fights. The CTU is incredibly well organized, especially down at the rank-and-file level. That shows when you are wandering around Chicago today, where 40 or 50 people are on every line and more in the streets. The recent laws that push against public sector unions have forced them to organize the entire organization, keeping their membership involved the whole way, and it is paying off today.
 

Note: This post has had slight edits of the transcript for clarification (4:24pm ET, 9/10/12).

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How Does Education Help in the Great Recession?

Aug 21, 2012Mike Konczal

There's a new report from Anthony Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera, and Ban Cheah, "Weathering the College Storm," that has attracted some attention in the economic blogs.

There's a new report from Anthony Carnevale, Tamara Jayasundera, and Ban Cheah, "Weathering the College Storm," that has attracted some attention in the economic blogs. Dylan Matthews wrote about it here and again here, with Dean Baker and Larry Mishel adding in critical commentary.

The report looks at who has gained the most jobs since the "recovery" started, a period they benchmark to January 2010. They find that people with bachelor's degrees and some college have gained all the jobs, while people with just a high-school diploma or less haven't gained any jobs over this time period. They also find that about 80 percent of the new jobs created since January 2010 have gone to men.

What should one conclude? Well, one conclusion is that we wouldn't have any unemployment if we had fewer women and more men. Since men are gaining all the jobs, it stands to reason that if we, on net, had more men and fewer women, we'd have a lot more people employed. Public policy should involve job-training programs where unemployed women get boyish haircuts and study movies like the cult 1980s hit Just One of the Guys and other high school movies loosely based on Twelfth Night. They should learn about swagger, sports metaphors, and that thing where dudes treat job requirements as suggestions when they apply for them, while women don't apply unless they have all of the requirements.

You might point out that I must have skipped a step somewhere. When we are so far away from full employment, does this analysis make sense? Instead of actually reflecting the proper allocation of labor this is just reflecting the fact that, for a variety of reasons including discrimination, men are jumping to the front of the queue to take all of the new jobs that are created. But the report seems to go in the other direction and argue that if there were a lot more college-educated workers we'd have more employment; alternatively, the lack of properly educated workers is a check on recovery.

Dean Baker and Larry Mishel focus on the fact that unemployment rates have gone up for college-educated workers and that most of the big net job increases have gone to those with post-bachelor degrees. I'm interested in the issue of line-jumping. How much does growing employment for college-educated workers in this recession have to do with being prepared for a variety of new, cutting-edge jobs that require a high level of education? And how much is education like a zero-sum hedge that puts the person in question at the front of the line for the limited jobs the economy is creating, even if those jobs require less education?

This chart from the report is interesting:

These are numbers since the recovery began in January 2010. Here people with bachelor's degrees have substantial growth in "high education" occupations. But they also have substantial growth in middle-education ones as well. Meanwhile, those with associate degress have significant growth in "low education" occupations. All the while those with high school diplomas are falling out of middle-education occupations. So two big trends are those with a high-school diploma being kicked out of middle-education (and presumably middle-class) jobs, combined with a down-tier move in education -- those with bachelor's degrees taking middle-education jobs and those with associate degrees taking low education jobs.

The 866,000 jobs lost in middle-education for those with a high school diploma or less are largely a function of the job category "office and administrative support occupations" (see Table 9 of the main report). There were 502,000 jobs lost for high-school diploma or less education in this category; if this is excluded it is a significantly different analysis. Bryce Covert and I flagged this category of work as explaining a lot of missing jobs for women and a broader change in the work environment for GOOD Magazine (data supplement here). This is a function of both longer-term trends and a speedup that has taken place in workplaces since the recession, where people are expected to do more with less. Workplaces keep the same amount of work even as they lose their support staff. So these changes aren't just the result of technological change, but reflect the way that recessions are reworking office environments to put more pressure on workers.

There's no denominator in the graphic above. Is the percentage of those with an associate degree working in the low-education occupations increasing, or has it held constant? What do these changes look like? Though not definitive, it would give us a clue as to whether or not this hedge aspect of education, the ability to jump to the front of the line for jobs, even crappy jobs, is in play in this weak recovery. I take education by occupation for all workers over 25, first quarter 2010 and first quarter 2012, from BLS/CPS, using the reports division of education levels, and compare the percentage of each education group in an occupation before and after to see how they are changing:

As we can see, there is a movement downward in education. BAs gain in their share of medium-education jobs, while AAs and some college gain in the low-education jobs.

In a buried part of the report, the authors anticipate this, noting "increased hiring of more educated workers in low- and middle-education occupations raises a valid concern about whether the workers need more education to perform the tasks or whether workers are being 'underemployed' in a slack labor market. This concern is addressed in detail in the Center on Education and the Workforce report, The Undereducated American....The analysis found a Bachelor’s degree wage premium in jobs at all education levels. The simple fact that employers are willing to pay more for educated workers suggests that they see added benefit in such workers."

I'm willing to believe this, though it still wouldn't directly address the underemployment issue. However, the analysis cited (page 28) only looks at 2007 through 2009, and doesn't look at people specifically hired in that period, much less the recovery. That premium has a lot to do with differentiation within occupations that analysis isn't capturing, like rookie cops and veteran detectives falling under the same occupation, but the second more likely to have more education and pay. But to the extent that premium exists, it isn't clear that it is going to people who now require some college to get even the most menial jobs our economy is producing.

When the economy is stalled, the limited number of new jobs will create certain winners and certain losers. But the first priority for us isn't to make sure that we help people fight for the scraps of a weak economy; it's that we grow the economy and demand full employment to provide for all.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  
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Rediscovering Government

The Young and the Jobless

Jul 10, 2012Ilyssa Weingarden

By taking innovative steps, the government can help recent college graduates who are confronted by the most daunting job market in recent history. 

By taking innovative steps, the government can help recent college graduates who are confronted by the most daunting job market in recent history. 

As a college student, every new statistic and report on the increasing difficulty for college graduates to find a full time job terrifies me. Haven’t I done everything I was told? I worked hard in high school, applied and was accepted to a reputable university, and now I take the right classes, chose the right major, and get the right grades. I deserve my just reward: a well-paying upper middle class white-collar job in my chosen field. Right? Isn’t that what my parents and society have always promised?

Unfortunately it seems that having a college degree is no longer a guarantee for success in the way it once was. In 2000, 41% of recent college graduates were unemployed or underemployed. Today, we are at 53.6% of degree-holders under the age of 25.

Although certain fields like education and medicine have ever-increasing demand (currently 5.4% unemployment rate, not including underemployment), non-technical degrees in the arts or humanities face rates closer to the national average (11.1 and 9.4% respectively). It seems that the value of having a bachelor’s degree alone has become almost non-existent. It is only the specific skills, experience, and knowledge that a technical degree or prestigious internships provides that employers look for.

While having a bachelor’s degree does give you a statistical advantage, however slight, over those with only a high school education, it also often saddles you with overwhelming debt. The pressure to pay back student loans coupled with an increasingly depressed job market and expected wages for graduates paints a bleak future for current college students. This begs the questions: is getting a degree worthwhile? Is there a way to fix this? Can the government do anything? Should the government do anything?

It is my firm belief as a progressive that the government’s purpose is to respond to issues exactly like this one. Already the government has made strides toward making college a more realistic dream for bright kids across the country. Pell Grants and other need-based aid on the national level supplement state-specific scholarship opportunities. The next step is to focus this aid money as incentives for majors that will be viable in the current job market.

There are students at every university who choose a major solely on earning potential, and there are students that study what they love, regardless of the likelihood of getting a job post-graduation. Then there are those that are unsure, that decide on a major at the last possible moment, and these are the students who can be targeted.

Our country is in desperate need of teachers, nurses, and highly skilled engineers. We graduate thousands of virtually unemployable history and English majors every year. What if those students had monetary incentives to study what the country needs? Programs like this are already in place, like the National SMART Grant that offers money based on need to students majoring in sciences, technology, engineering, or critical foreign languages. What I propose is expanding and marketing these aid programs through the national and state levels. High school students might work more diligently in their math and science classes if they know they can have a more affordable college career by applying to engineering schools. Nursing programs that guarantee jobs after graduation have been around for over 20 years and should be promoted and expanded through government funding.

Funding for this project would involve little to no new funds, because the government could simply reappropriate money from general or merit-based scholarships to more specialized scholarships, or write new requirements into existing aid packages.

Each state should conduct research to find out which industries have the most unfilled positions and are growing the quickest, and issue grants to deserving students who study those subjects. Within a few years, the pool of recent graduates can be more streamlined and viable in the job market so students can flow seamlessly into the working world.

Other ways to make college graduates more attractive to possible employers is to encourage and possibly require greater work-study and internship opportunities at state schools. Employers are more likely to hire a candidate with real-world experience and professional skills. Policy changes on a state level would be helpful, and private institutions would likely jump onboard to keep their graduates competitive in the job market.

These solutions, while certainly helpful in the near future, will not help the current graduates who have already chosen their major and completed (or not completed) their internships. Jena McGregor suggests that a big part of the problem is employers, not the candidates. Many companies rely on software programs that rule out qualified candidates based on restrictive requirements. Candidates without experience in a very specific field can be thrown out despite being a good fit for the job.

Hiring recent college graduates or other young people without much experience can actually be beneficial for the company by exposing them to new and fresh ideas, as well as allowing them an opportunity to train the employees to the company’s specific standards. The government can incentivize hiring less experienced people and giving them on-the-job training by giving tax breaks to companies that hire employees right out of college. This would cost the government very little, and be balanced out (hopefully) by a lower unemployment rate for recent graduates.

The government and some private institutions already have some projects in place that make education more affordable. The next step is to prioritize education to be more applicable to the real world. Getting young educated people into well-paying jobs and off of unemployment has never been more relevant, and taking steps to turn these suggestions into realities should start with people like me; high school and college students who will be facing these issues in the not-too-distant future. The harder we work now, the easier it will be when it’s time for us to enter the real world.

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Ilyssa Weingarden is a Roosevelt Institute summer intern and a rising junior studying International Affairs at George Washington University. 

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Rediscovering Government

The Rebirth of Unions

Jul 2, 2012Hye Mi Ahn

Unions are a crucial aspect of the U.S. economy and should be adapted to be made more efficient rather than dismissed or eliminated. 

Unions are a crucial aspect of the U.S. economy and should be adapted to be made more efficient rather than dismissed or eliminated. 

In a letter to the president of the National Federation of Federal Employees in 1937, President Roosevelt wrote: "Organizations of government employees have a logical place in government affairs. The desire of government employees for fair and adequate pay, reasonable hours of work, safe and suitable working conditions, development of opportunities for advancement, facilities for fair and impartial consideration and review of grievances, and other objectives of a proper employee relations policy, is basically no different from that of employees in private industry." 

But the days of elected officials supporting organized labor may be behind us for good. Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin who stripped government employees of collective bargaining rights, easily survived a recall election recently, inciting Republicans to declare that the backbone of the American labor union had been finally and truly broken. The discussion then turned to the implications for Democrats in the 2012 election, but the uncertain future for labor unions should not be dismissed so easily. 

Unions played a vital role in buoying the middle class throughout the 20th century, and they still remain a prominent fixture in countries around the world. During the 1950s—the height of unionization in the United States—membership rates hovered around 35p ercent and the public attitude toward unions was generally favorable. Progressives like President Roosevelt understood the importance of healthy unions to level the playing field between labor and management, and as a necessary check on the free market, so that employers would be beholden to their workers as well as shareholders and profits.

But in the following decades, several factors contributed to the steady decline of unions. As the United States began to move away from manufacturing, the middle class that supplied unskilled labor to the economy began to lose its collective power and political clout. Stonemasons, construction workers, and machine operators were laid off as the skills-focused service industry dominated the economy. Globalization led to the mass outsourcing of traditional middle class jobs. The relentless advent of technology required employees to have specific training or college degrees, when their positions weren’t replaced entirely by machines.

Unsurprisingly, income inequality grew larger as union membership rates fell during this time. And when union membership rates slow down, so do blue-collar wages. The middle class share of aggregate income has been in consistent decline since the 1960s, to an alarmingly low level today. 

In light of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the ongoing discussion of class warfare, it would be easy to presume that the "99%" would support labor unions that have been the historical equalizer between management and the working class. However, the fact that Scott Walker remains governor today is a sure sign that the existing model of unions, especially in the public sector, is unsustainable in an era of global economic turmoil. Eventually, budget deficits must be dealt with at every level of government, and austerity will spare few of the perks, like pensions and health benefits, that are associated with union membership.

But the election results should not be taken as the final word. Just as the motive for profit does not drive all employers to act ruthlessly, unions should not be assumed to exploit powers like collective bargaining to freeze out non-union members or hold employers hostage with strikes. Likewise, unions do not inherently cause inflation, unemployment, or state budget deficits, according to leading economists.

Here are some findings from a report by the Economic Policy Institute that show how unions benefit society as a whole:

  • “Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28%.”
  • “Unions reduce wage inequality because they raise wages more for low and middle-wage workers than for higher-wage workers, more for blue-collar than for white-collar workers, and more for workers who do not have a college degree.”
  • “Strong unions set a pay standard that nonunion employers follow. For example, a high school graduate whose workplace is not unionized but whose industry is 25% unionized is paid 5% more than similar workers in less unionized industries.”
  • “Unionized workers receive better pension plans. Not only are they more likely to have a guaranteed benefit in retirement, their employers contribute 28% more toward pensions.”

There was a spurt of experimentation in the 1990s when companies and unions from AFL-CIO cooperated to form teamwork strategies that improved efficiency. Industry giants like Xerox Corp. found the initiatives to be so successful that they moved hundreds of jobs back to the United States and invested in their unionized workers for higher quality output and increased competitiveness. This is a norm in other industrialized nations; the history of modern European states shows a robust relationship, not fatal incompatibility, between organized labor and firms.

In the United States over the past few decades, unions have become saddled with an unsavory reputation of being ineffective, stubborn components of the economy that prioritize membership benefits at the expense of efficiency. The cozy, symbiotic financial relationship between public unions and elected Democrats hasn’t helped either. Instead of fanning the flames of the management-labor divide, as the unions tried to do with the recall effort in Wisconsin, unions should direct their energy to adapting and becoming cooperative elements in the free market by working with firms to generate productivity.

As the nation grapples with growing inequality, we should not categorically reject the place of unions in our economy. And as technology and changing business models reshape the global economy and feed the growing income gap as they have in the past, unions could prove to be critical at resuscitating the middle class now and protecting workers’ rights in the future. 

Hye Mi Ahn is a rising senior at Carleton College, and a Roosevelt Institute summer intern. 

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Mike Konczal and Sarah Leonard on the Myth of American Meritocracy

Jun 11, 2012

On the latest episode of "Fireside Chats," Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal brings in Sarah Leonard, editor at Dissent and The New Inquiry, to discuss the ways that student debt and unpaid internships have completely skewed the labor market.

On the latest episode of "Fireside Chats," Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal brings in Sarah Leonard, editor at Dissent and The New Inquiry, to discuss the ways that student debt and unpaid internships have completely skewed the labor market. Mike used to think of internships as an equal opportunity mechanism, but then realized "you have to be able to feed yourself, you have to be able to survive," something that's hard to pull off when you're deep in debt and not making any money.

As Sarah bluntly puts it, "American meritocracy has always been a myth," but now these two forces have conspired even more to allow "people who make it to the top" to consolidate power there and "consolidate it for their children." Not only does a young person need money to take an unpaid position, but those who go into debt to get through college have an even harder time doing so if they need to work to pay off those loans. "Internships are absolutely a reinforcer of privilege," she concludes.

Mike compares student debt to the indenture system that brought Europeans to America's shores: it was set up "to solve an economic problem, a problem of travel," and now we have a similar problem in which we need to "get people who have significant talents to grow the economy to the spaces where they have their talents fully developed and they’re capable of exercising those talents." The biggest question? "How do we pay for it?" In other words, how do we make it affordable for everyone to have people get the education they need to best contribute to the economy?

Compounding this, Sarah notes that the language around student debt is about "investing in yourself," but in reality the need to take on massive amounts of debt to get an education isn't a way to open up opportunities at all. "It restricts your freedom after college," she says.

Watch the full segment below for their discussion of precarious work, the future of organized labor, and "Sex in the City" feminism:

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