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How Government Decides Which Workers Deserve Rights

Feb 1, 2012Mike Konczal

It used to be that white men had steady employment and all the government protection that came with it while minorities and women were stuck with precarious jobs. Now we're all vulnerable.

It used to be that white men had steady employment and all the government protection that came with it while minorities and women were stuck with precarious jobs. Now we're all vulnerable.

Malcolm Harris has a New Inquiry essay on the movie Sleeping Beauty (2011) and the feminization of precarious labor. A lot has been written on precarious labor recently, including both John Schmitt's book review in Dissent and Bhaskar Sunkara's critical response. I want to elaborate on this, since looking at gender and precarious work leads to an examination of a favorite topic -- the relationship between pity-charity liberalism and unconditional, universal programs related to economic security. A perfect example is how labor in the New Deal was treated differently by gender. The wedge between the two groups illuminates the difficulty in bringing economic justice to the 21st century. Precarious, vulnerable work was once relegated solely to women, but in this day and age more and more of us will fall into that category.

For Harris, the precarious worker is "indebted, insecure, vulnerable." If the classic notion of a worker "relies on having a bargaining place at the table with the boss," then precarious workers aren't workers (even though all they do is work or try to cobble work together).

How is the work gendered? Harris focuses on gendered affect: "passivity and her eagerness to please, her vulnerability and blank demeanor would look incredibly strange on a young man. Her willingness to keep treading water without the promise of anything better to come, her ability to communicate nonthreateningly and stay quiet at the right times are parts of what Nina Power describes in the chapter 'The Feminization of Labor.'"

But there's an institutional way to think about how the precarious nature of gender and work is both reflected in and amplified by governmental regulatory regimes, and how the future looks bleak in terms of bending those regimes toward just ends. Suzanne Mettler's Dividing Citizens: Gender and Federalism in New Deal Public Policy (1998) is useful for this conversation. (Mettler, a political scientist and recent author of The Submerged State, is a favorite around here -- I, II, -- and recently joined our think-tank neighbors at the Century Foundation as a fellow.)

To set up the problem, Seth Ackerman has recently discussed universal programs in the context of the Tea Party's war against the state:

...[I]t’s indisputable that Tea Partiers make some kind of conceptual distinction between universal programs like Social Security and Medicare and other government programs. But this says less about the Tea Party than it does about universal social programs. It is easy for liberals to point to the Tea Partiers and call them bigots because they make a distinction between 'people on welfare' and 'normal people.' But in fact it’s the state that made the distinction first. When the state operates a means-tested or other conditional program, it inspects each citizen and stamps him or her as belonging to one category or the other... Political scientists have long known that something almost alchemical happens to public opinion when a universal, as opposed to a mean-tested, welfare program is established.

Mettler argues that this distinction comes out of the dual administrative nature of the New Deal. Part of the New Deal was to be administered by newly created federal government programs, while another part was to be administered by local and state authorities. It just so happened that the federal government's role regulated the work and lives of white men, while the state and local role retained authority over women and minorites. Keeping part of the New Deal's welfare state and floor of economic security administered at the state and local level was predicated intellectually on Brandeis' notion of the states as laboratories of democracy and politically on getting Southern white supremacists to endorse the New Deal. This meant that how people realize economic freedom could be maintained and expanded through illiberal means.

Remember that just three years after the Lochner case, with a Supreme Court hostile to all economic regulations, it made an exception to maximum hours regulations for women. Why? In 1908, the Court ruled in Muller v. Oregon, "That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious...as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race." These are the terms on which economic regulation could exist -- protecting essentialist visions of a women's place.

Mettler argues that "programs geared toward men became nationally administered programs and those aimed toward women retained state-level authority." This welfare state led to citizens becoming "divided by gender between two different sovereignties that govern in very different ways." As she says:

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What it meant to be an "American citizen" meant very different things to the retired male breadwinner, who came to expect his monthly social security check from the national government, and to the poor mother who hoped that the social worker assigned to evaluate her eligibility for a meager welfare check would find her child-rearing and housekeeping efforts worthy. The first was treated with dignity and respect, as an entitled person; the latter, with suspicion and scrutiny.

Mettler maps out a 2X2 grid, dividing out New Deal programs:

The crucial point is that liberal inclusion was based on long-term, full-time work for a single employer. If you had a job along those lines --and these jobs were held by white men at that time -- then you were included in a regime of universal economic security. Short-term, part-time work for multiple employers -- work done by women and minorities -- falls through the cracks into a patchwork of state and local governance. That governance bases inclusion on hierarchical ideals invoking republican notions of where a person stood in his or her community. The notion of the "deserving poor" comes out of this relationship. Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), for instance, was predicated on single mothers being able to retain their "natural" work as housewives and child-raisers. ADC's spot inspections of single mothers for "male callers" gives you a sense of how this played out -- as Mettler notes, "officials monitored and regulated women's moral character."

Progress was made on these New Deal programs up through the 1970s. But there's been significant rollback over the past 30 years. The call to "means-test" social insurance programs, Ending Welfare as We Know It by block-granting welfare's administrative role back to the states, the battles over block-granting Medicaid and privatizing Social Security and Medicare -- all have shifted the momentum in the opposite direction. But where does this leave us now, especially in regard to precarious labor?

I asked Dorian Warren, Columbia political scientist, Roosevelt Institute Fellow, and union expert, about where this stands. As he puts it:

Add up the Mettler argument with Hacker's notion of "policy drift," and most New Deal social policies (especially the FLSA and the NLRA) are outdated and obsolete. They were crafted with assumptions about work and the nature of the economy in mind: an agricultural and industrial economy, where workers had long-term attachments to one employer. That's no longer the case, and labor and employment laws haven't caught up to the new employment relationship. Long story short, we don't have the adequate legal structures to deal with this new employment environment.

The battle to move the welfare state to the federal level, where it could be administered inclusively and universally, was an intellectual and political battle waged within the New Deal. How is this playing out in the Obama administration? I'll eventually build a full case against the "nudge" theory of the administrative state, but for now a theory of using subtle and unconscious government techniques to help people work better within "choice architectures" isn't up to the challenge of recreating a regulatory environment for a new age.

For insight into how the current administration's approach is playing out in this model, take a look at the administration of health care reform. I asked Richard Kirsch, recent author of Fighting for Our Health and Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow, about the federal/local administration of health care reform. He responded:

The House bill set up a strong federal exchange and let the states do their own only if their exchanges had stronger consumer protections. However with the Senate bill -- the law we have now -- states can set up very weak exchanges. And the insurance industry has lots of clout at the state level. The best hope is that there will be a strong federal exchange for states that don’t set up their own. But that will only be true if HHS creates one.

So we have an outdated regulatory regime, an intellectual climate geared towards local, illiberal control, and the application of economic freedoms designed to keep women yoked to essentialist and moralistic discoures. A "polarizing" workforce means that the labor market, without significant reform, will take on an exaggerated version of the split we saw in the New Deal, with the precarious work falling into a patchwork administration system of moralizing and without opportunities to organize.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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130 Years After His Birth, We Still Live in FDR's World

Jan 30, 2012David Woolner

President Roosevelt's transformative government not only saved the country from a Great Depression and the world from the grips of fascism, it crafted the country we live in today.

President Roosevelt's transformative government not only saved the country from a Great Depression and the world from the grips of fascism, it crafted the country we live in today.

Government has a final responsibility for the well-being of its citizenship. If private cooperative endeavor fails to provide work for willing hands and relief for the unfortunate, those suffering hardship from no fault of their own have a right to call upon the Government for aid; and a government worthy of its name must make fitting response. - Franklin D. Roosevelt

January 30 marks the 130thbirthday of Franklin D. Roosevelt. For most of today's generation, FDR has become a somewhat distant figure, far removed from the day-to-day struggle to make ends meet at a time of slow growth and high unemployment. They know from their history books that FDR launched the New Deal in the midst of the Great Depression, and that he led the nation to victory in the Second World War. But aside from these basic facts, the average American knows very little about the extent to which the government -- and America's role in the world -- was transformed in the critical years between 1933 and 1945.

Yet, if these same individuals were to pause for a moment to consider just how much Franklin Roosevelt's leadership continues to influence their lives, they might soon conclude, as the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once observed, "that the world we live in today is Franklin Roosevelt's world."

Consider, for example, just a few of the major initiatives that were introduced under FDR's leadership: the banking and financial reforms that brought us the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and, until the passage of the Graham-Leach Act in 1999, the separation of commercial and investment banking. These monumental pieces of legislation brought much needed stability and transparency to our financial system and helped restore the American people's faith in the banking and securities industries. What is more, they were not inspired by any deep-seated enmity for capitalism on FDR's part. Rather, they were based on common sense principles derived from the hard-won lessons of the 1920s, which, above all else, taught the American people that "heedless self-interest" represents not just "bad morals," as FDR put it, but also "bad economics."

FDR also acted swiftly and effectively to help troubled American homeowners through such programs as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, which refinanced approximately 20 percent of all urban mortgages in the country in less than three years; revolutionized the mortgage industry through the widespread use of the 30-year amortized mortgage; and led to the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA). His administration also pushed through the Social Security Act, which not only provided pensions for the aged, but also our nation's first national system of unemployment insurance, two programs that remain critical to our social and economic wellbeing. Then there was the passage of the National Labor Relations Act that established the National Labor Relations Board and guaranteed the rights of workers to form unions and engage in collective bargaining, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established maximum hours and minimum wages for all workers, unionized or not.

But that was not all. To put people back to work, FDR launched a series of efforts to improve America's woefully inadequate economic infrastructure. Between 1935 and 1943, the most famous of these programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), literally built much of modern America, including 572,000 miles of rural roads, 67,000 miles of urban streets, 122,000 bridges, 1,000 tunnels, and 1,050 airfields. The WPA also constructed thousands of schools, hospitals, water treatment facilities, firehouses, and nearly 20,000 other state and local government buildings, many of them adorned by murals painted by out of work artists. This infrastructure helped lay the basis for the massive economic expansion that took place during World War II and the post-war years. In the meantime, the Rural Electrification Administration "wired" the 90 percent of American farms that still had no electricity while the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Soil Conservation Service restored America's forests and farmland. As a result, there is hardly a community in this nation that still does not enjoy the benefits of the public works ushered in under the New Deal.

Click here to buy Senior Fellow Richard Kirsch’s new book on the epic health care reform battle, Fighting for Our Health.

Finally, we should remember that prior to World War II the United States had turned inward and refused to play a leading role in world affairs. Convinced that the Second World War had come about in part from the global economic depravity that helped give rise to fascism in Europe and Asia, FDR used the war as a catalyst for the construction of a new political, strategic, and economic order. It was based in large part on the extension of American moral and military power through the United Nations and the extension of American economic power through the creation of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and a new multilateral economic system that would open up the world's markets and natural resources to freer trade. Taken together, these measures resulted in a permanent restructuring of the world's social, economic, and strategic makeup. They formed the basis of the new world order that has given rise to the globalization of the world's economy and the American-led multilateral security system that the United States has played a leading role in since 1945.

In much the same way that FDR's wartime leadership expanded America's role in the world, the New Deal dramatically expanded the scope of the federal government's responsibilities in American life. Where Washington had previously been only a distant factor in the social and economic standing of the nation, it now became the federal government's responsibility to maintain economic prosperity, to mitigate the worst effects of unfettered capitalism, to spread industrial and agricultural development to impoverished regions of the nation, to guarantee workers' right to choose their unions, to protect the bargaining rights of those unions, and to conserve and develop the nation's vast natural and artistic resources. In less than a decade, the United States government had become the primary guarantor of social and economic justice for all Americans, rich and poor alike.

Today's right-wing extremists, much like the conservative critics in FDR's own day, call this "socialism." But the New Deal did not set out to radically change the foundations of American capitalism. On the contrary, it revised that system in order to save it. While Roosevelt did foresee and support the increased socialization of the American economy and society -- insofar as that meant greater government responsibility for the people's welfare -- he took for granted that the system would remain rooted in free market principles, and he was no socialist.

The overall result was to create a domestic social and economic structure that allowed capitalism to flourish even as the government put in place the means by which it might be regulated. This new "philosophy," which included the embrace of Keynesian economic policy, stood at the root of what President Obama has correctly called the post-1945 creation of the "strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known."

President Obama is right to call for more action on the part of the federal government to stimulate the struggling U.S. economy. He is also right to demand a return to an America where "everyone gets a fair shot, ...everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules." But thanks to the mythology perpetuated by the same right wing that attacked FDR, the New Deal and the philosophy behind it has been largely forgotten. Instead, we are told time and time again that the free market will provide all we need -- excessive wealth for some and well paying jobs for everyone else -- so long as government, with its nasty habit of deficit spending, gets out of the way. This free market myth ignores the overwhelming evidence from the 1920s, '30s, and '40s that the free enterprise system can fail and that there are times when the government must step in to restore the economic health of the nation. Yet it has become so pervasive that even in the wake of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, our political discourse remains fixed not on how much the government should spend to restore the economy, but on how to reduce the deficit; not on how we might use government to restore basic fairness to our economic system, but on how we might reduce government involvement in the economy at a time when we can least afford it. In such a political environment, is it any wonder that even President Obama's effort to pass his modest jobs bill faces an uphill battle?

Franklin Roosevelt once said that there was nothing he loved so much "as a good fight." Perhaps, in this critical election year, it is time for the president and the leaders of the Democratic Party to take on the right-wing soothsayers of doom and make the case clearly and unequivocally for the one instrument strong enough to take on the forces of greed and avarice that have hijacked our democracy. Perhaps they should remind the American public, as Franklin Roosevelt did, that there comes a time in the life of every people when the only way to take on the forces of "economic tyranny" -- whose callous behavior has twice in the past century nearly brought our country to ruin -- is to turn to "the organized power of government."

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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Blame Marriage Rates on the Family Values of the 1%

Jan 23, 2012June Carbone

family-150 While low marriage rates among the working class are being blamed on their flawed morality, the real problem is their lack of jobs and education.

family-150 While low marriage rates among the working class are being blamed on their flawed morality, the real problem is their lack of jobs and education.

Charles Murray is at it again. He burst onto the national scene in the '80s, announcing that he knew why the African-American non-marital birth rate had risen so dramatically: the government made them do it. He explained that welfare and a host of other liberal sins had weakened the moral fiber of the poor, producing disaster. It would take free market discipline to instill the right values once again. Now Murray is back with a new book and a long article in the Wall Street Journal attempting to explain income inequality among whites. His claim: working class whites have lost ground because they have abandoned a commitment to marriage, religion, and hard work. In his world, unemployment is high because those on the losing end of today's economy refuse to work, non-marital births occur because of a lack of emphasis on marriage, and the upper class can assist only by expressing its disapproval and "preaching what it practices" -- presumably investments in Ivy League education, parent-subsidized internships, and marriage between two investment bankers at 32.

In this new work, Murray says no five-point plan can change things. What he doesn't tell you is how little his last five-point plan accomplished. Murray's past work helped spark the movement that led to the abolition of welfare "as we know it" in 1996. And the welfare mothers who were able to get and hold jobs -- in no small part due to government subsidized health benefits and day care -- were in fact better off. But Murray claims no credit because throughout the twenty-year attack on welfare (and the steady erosion of benefits that went with it) marriage rates continued to decline.

Murray-like prescriptions -- even when they are right that the behavior of the working class is a problem -- have always failed. The simple fact is that prosperity and equality improve behavior more than privation or preaching. Consider the Irish potato famine. The potato blight wiped out the principal source of food for Catholic Ireland while leaving the cattle and wheat of Protestant Ireland (the 1% of their day) unaffected. The British responded with soup kitchens -- for six months. Then, Murray-like editorial cartoons in London started to depict the English taxpayer with drunken Irishmen on their backs. The editorials complained that soup kitchens encouraged idleness and worse -- too many Irish births. The English brought back market discipline (and upper class disapproval of Catholic behavior) and their solution worked: the Irish population fell by a quarter in the next several years, due in roughly equal parts to death and emigration. But no Englishman heralded the improved moral qualities of Irish Catholics. The improvement in the reputation of the Irish took jobs and equal community membership, factors the Irish never found under British rule.

Murray can't tell you what really caused the class divide in marriage because the class-based changes in families he laments closely track the class warfare of the 1%. Up through the mid-'80s, upper class and working class divorce rates rose and fell together. Starting in 1990, the lines diverged, with the divorce rates of college graduates falling back to the level of the mid-sixties (before no-fault divorce) while the divorce and non-marital birth rates of everyone else continued to rise. What really happened?

First, the income of college graduate men increased handsomely in the '90s and the incomes of the 1% increased even more through the next decade.

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Second, the income of all other men declined in real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation). American industry enjoyed impressive gains in productivity, but working class men received almost none of the benefits. Moreover, while many conservatives argue that the increase in global competition explains the change, Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson present a convincing case in Winner Take All Politics that the real cause lies in deregulation and the decimation of union protections.

Third, women's employment increased in the same period and women's wages gained the most vis-à-vis men at the bottom of the income scale. As recently as 1990, women of all educational levels earned about the same percent of the hourly wages of men with the same education. To the extent the gendered "wage gap" varied, college educated women enjoyed slightly more parity with men than working class women. By 2007, the wage gap varied dramatically by class. College-educated women earned a smaller percentage of the hourly income of their male counterparts, while the wage gap between working-class men and women shrunk substantially.

Fourth, working-class male employment in the same period became less stable, while employment stability for college graduate men did not change and employment stability improved for women.  Today, working-class women find they have to work and generally can in the expanded service sector (think WalMart) that offers stable jobs with some benefits. Working-class men are far more likely to work in construction or small businesses with frequent layoffs. And as Newsweek reported, "laid-off men tend to do less -- not more -- housework, eating up their extra hours snacking, sleeping and channel surfing (which might be why the Cartoon Network, whose audience has grown by 10 percent during the downturn, is now running more ads for refrigerator repair school)."

The result: a change in family norms. College-educated women postpone childbearing, invest in their careers, and conduct a long search for a compatible and reliable mate. The working class increasingly cannot afford college (defunding public education is very effective class warfare), and working class women have little faith in the available men. A working class mother who comes home from a job she doesn't like to find the father of her children sleeping on the couch or playing video games doesn't stay with him. Christian parents tell me that, like Sarah Palin, they approved of their daughters' decisions not to have an abortion, but they were relieved when their daughters did not marry the unreliable Levi Johnstons who fathered the children.

It is time to recognize the real cause of family change. A corporate strategy that destroys unions, raids pension funds, lays off workers, and values speculative or dishonest ventures (i.e. subprime loans) over long-term institutional development may earn six figure bonuses, but it destroys families and communities. It is the values of Murray's elite, not working class values, that should be the focus of family reform.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

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Flournoy Leaves the Pentagon: Another Sign That Our Workplace Policies Fail Women

Dec 13, 2011Bryce Covert

If women continue to be penalized for flexible work needs and depended upon for household and childcare duties, they will continue to face impossible choices.

If women continue to be penalized for flexible work needs and depended upon for household and childcare duties, they will continue to face impossible choices.

Women have made huge strides in the workforce, now accounting for half of it. But our policies haven't kept up with them. That fact was made strikingly clear by a story today about Michèle A. Flournoy, the chief policy adviser to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and one of the highest-ranking women in the history of the Pentagon, stepping down from her job to "rebalance" her life and spend more time with her children. The article cites the fact that she "is often at the Pentagon from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, plus many weekends, a typical work schedule for a top Defense Department official."

As women have made strides in the workforce, they are heavily congregated in the public sector, working for governments at every level. They make up 61 percent of the workers at the local level, 52 percent at the state level, and 43 percent at the federal level. Why have women flocked to the public sector? Because just as for minorities, historically it was a place that welcomed them, more so than the private sector. But even as the percentages make clear, women's involvement slows down the further up you go, from local to federal.

Why this drop off? There was a big to-do in September over whether the Obama administration is a woman-friendly work environment. But what may be more to the point is that few work environments are friendly to women's family obligations, including the federal government. Its policies haven't caught up to the needs of its female employees.

The U.S. is still among a very small handful of countries that don't mandate paid maternity leave, keeping company with no industrialized countries -- just Papua New Guinea, Lesotho, and Swaziland. In 2010, 44 million workers lacked access to paid sick days, which means that even if a child is too sick to go to school, a mother can lose her job to stay home and care for her. And flexible workplace policies, which it sounds like Flournoy desperately needed, are almost unheard of. A study by the Department of Labor found that under 30 percent of full-time workers can vary the times they begin and end their work day -- and only one-third of those, or 10 percent of the entire workforce, actually have official flextime policies at their place of work. So it's little wonder that even a government division like the Department of Defense would be one more workplace that wasn't able to accommodate a mother.

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The other side of the coin is Flournoy's husband. The article on her job transition briefly mentions him: "Ms. Flournoy is married to W. Scott Gould, a career naval officer who is No. 2 at the Department of Veterans Affairs." There's no mention of his hours or whether he considered leaving his position to be with their school-age children. That's pretty typical of most families: women in the U.S. still do the majority of housework and care work, even when they're employed. Employed women do twice the amount of housework as men. Women spend over an hour providing care to their children on an average day; men spend 26 minutes. If women are already expected to be the primary workers for this kind of labor while employed, why wouldn't it make sense for them to get rid of their jobs to focus on it full-time, rather than ask their husbands to do it?

Flournoy is certainly entitled to decide what's best for her family and to leave her job, but she harms both her own career and the paths she blazes for other women by doing so. Had she stayed in her current role, the story reports, she was widely seen as a "likely candidate to be the first female defense secretary years from now, when she would have more experience." By dropping out, she loses that experience and thus is not likely to advance. This is a big part of the leaky pipeline for many professions and why women have yet to make up our 50 percent share at the highest ranks.

And by not continuing on, she opens fewer doors for women to follow in her footsteps. She herself said in 2009, "The thing I feel the most is wanting to do well by the younger women who are counting on me to kind of open doors and blaze a trail for them." Her leaving is not a personal failing. It's a failing of our society to protect and support women workers and their needs.

Bryce Covert is Editor of New Deal 2.0.

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Eleanor Roosevelt's Legacy: How the World Recognized Workers' Right as Human Rights

Dec 9, 2011Brigid OFarrell

eleanor-roosevelt-150This year has seen uprisings around the world demanding rights. Eleanor Roosevelt recognized those rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

eleanor-roosevelt-150This year has seen uprisings around the world demanding rights. Eleanor Roosevelt recognized those rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Tomorrow we celebrate the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948. This year is especially significant. Thousands of people surged through the streets of Cairo as the Arab Spring emerged, challenging dictators across the Middle East. Here at home thousands of workers gathered in the streets of Wisconsin and Ohio fighting an unprecedented attack on labor unions. Workers joined with the unemployed as Occupy Wall Street and the 99% moved from New York City across the country to shut down the Port of Oakland. Economic inequality became the subject of media, new and old. As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich reminded us, employee pay is now down to its smallest share of the economy, while corporate profits make up the largest share of the economy since the start of the Great Depression. Average citizens around the world are standing up for their human rights: political, civil, economic, and social.

Often overlooked in this time of reflection on human rights is the inclusion of  workers' rights and the role of unions. On April 25, 1945, delegates from around the world met in San Francisco to begin deliberations on a charter for the United Nations. In an unprecedented move, over 40 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were invited to participate. Only seven NGOs were then given consultative status to attend meetings, suggest agenda items, and present positions to the Economic and Social Council. Three of them were labor groups: the AF of L, the World Federation of Trade Unions, where the CIO played a leading role, and the International Confederation of Christian Trade Unions representing European unions. Phil Murray, president of the CIO, said that he represented all of labor when he gave his full support for including human rights in the charter and establishing a Human Rights Commission, both of which were accomplished.

That same year, after President Roosevelt's death, President Truman asked Eleanor Roosevelt to become a delegate to the United Nations. The UN established a commission to bring nations together to agree on some very basic principles, and he asked Mrs. Roosevelt to chair the effort. Just as Doris Kearns Goodwin describes Lincoln as orchestrating a team of political rivals, ER, as she often signed her name, guided a complex international team of philosophers, lawyers, politicians, diplomats, and trade unionists to develop the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They addressed economic and social rights, as well as political and civil rights, for the first time.

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Eleanor Roosevelt was a very proud and public member of a labor union. As a working journalist, she joined the American Newspaper Guild in 1936 and had her union card in her wallet when she died in 1962. When she went to the United Nations, she worked closely with David Dubinsky of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, Mathew Woll of the Photoengravers Union, Jim Carey of the CIO, and Rose Schneiderman of the Women's Trade Union League. The AF of L hired Toni Sender, a journalist and politician who had fled Nazi Germany, to be its full-time staff person at the UN. Together, they made strong arguments for the specific inclusion of trade union rights in the document and they addressed the closed shop and the right to strike. ER explained that the United States delegation considered that "the right to form and join trade unions was an essential element of freedom." While fighting against the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act at home, under her guidance Article 23 declared that everyone, without discrimination, has the right to a decent job, fair working conditions, a living wage, equal pay for equal work, protection against unemployment, and the right to join a union.

The General Assembly met in Paris in 1948. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed on December 10 with 48 votes in favor and none against. ER thanked the unions for their help and they acknowledged her contributions when Phil Murray sent a letter supporting Eleanor Roosevelt's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Declaration remains one of her greatest accomplishments and the cornerstone of today's powerful human rights movement.

Practicing what she preached, ER told striking members of the IBEW that "everyone who is a worker should join a labor organization." She came to believe this was true for workers in the public sector as well as in the private sector. She argued for full employment at home and economic aid abroad. For her, all employees around the world had a right to a decent job and a voice at work, without fear of harassment or intimidation. But when asked "Where, after all, do human rights begin?" she answered, "In small places close to home... the neighborhood... the school or college... the factory, farm or office... unless they have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere."

Eleanor Roosevelt's voice resonates today with a call for reform not only to achieve economic gains, but to restore a basic element of democracy to women and men who work for a living. And as she told the delegates at a CIO convention, "We can't just talk. We have got to act... And we must see improvement for the masses of people, not for the little group on top." International Human Rights Day is a call to action for the 99% across the country and around the world.

Brigid O'Farrell is an independent scholar. This blog draws on her most recent book, She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker, now available in paperback from Cornell University Press.

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Frank Luntz and the Battle Over Economic Freedom

Dec 5, 2011Mike Konczal

Occupy Wall Street has some conservatives running scared, leaving a window of opportunity to change the dialogue on what freedom really means.

Occupy Wall Street has some conservatives running scared, leaving a window of opportunity to change the dialogue on what freedom really means.

Last week, Republican strategist and wordsmith Frank Luntz shared his concerns about the Occupy movement with a group of Republican governors in Florida. "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death... They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." Chris Moody wrote a must-read article on the matter, including the ten dos and don'ts that Luntz suggested to his audience.

As Seth Ackerman pointed out, there's an entire industry around Democrats and liberals trying to get an edge on Luntz with even more carefully polled wordplay. However, by talking directly about the power of the 1 percent over our lives, the broken political process, burdensome debts, and a collapsed labor market, the Occupy movement has gotten Luntz's attention in a few short months. As Ackerman puts it:

For twenty or thirty years, Democratic politicians... have been paying what must amount to billions of dollars by now to consultants, pollsters, and think tank gurus to tell them how to talk to the public about inequality in some way that might spark sustained public engagement... Then the Occupy movement comes along and after two and a half months shifts the national consciousness so palpably that Republican governors are scrambling to ask their Rasputins how capitalism can be defended to their constituents back in Peoria.

Luntz suggests 10 sets of words, phrases, and concepts to abandon and has some easily defended ones to use instead. "Jobs" and "entrepreneur" are out. "Careers" and "job creators" are in. Many people across the spectrum are noticing that Luntz is suggesting a retreat from the word "capitalism," but few reference where he wants to retreat to:

1. Don't say 'capitalism.'

"I'm trying to get that word removed and we're replacing it with either 'economic freedom' or 'free market,'" Luntz said. "The public...still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we're seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we've got a problem."

Luntz suggests retreating to "economic freedom" as an easily defensible phrase conservatives can use to describe the economic status quo. This is astute, as there's been a long, 30-year conservative project to locate freedom in the laissez-faire marketplace.

It hasn't always been this way. Take this 1930 cartoon in the Chicago Defender, where economic freedom is seen as part of the right to unionize (click for larger image):

(Source: Foner, The Story of American Freedom.)

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Economic freedom as freedom from coercion was once a core part of progressive thought. Economic freedom as economic security was a central part of the New Deal and Roosevelt's four freedoms. And economic freedom as freedom from domination in the workplace is a central aspect of what unionization brings to the country. This was thought of as essential to the lives of the individuals and democracy itself -- as Samuel Gompers said, "Men and women cannot live during working hours under autocratic conditions, and instantly become sons and daughters of freedom as they step outside the shop gates."

This is on the minds of people I've talked with at various Occupy movements. Early on in Occupy Wall Street I went and asked 15 random people at Zucotti Park what "freedom" meant to them. Their answers invoked these earlier versions of economic freedom as essential aspects: “I think that freedom is your ability to carry out what you want to do. It’s not just about your social freedom, it is also about economic freedom." "Freedom is...when people can go to public universities and not have to go into debt. So not only so they can get the careers they want, but so they can be productive people in society." With the movement, we have an opportunity to change the dialogue.

Corey Robin's excellent essay in The Nation, "Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom," can act as a guide to why this is so important and what the roadmap toward changing it could look like. He says:

The secret of conservatism’s success -- as any reading of Reagan’s speeches and writings will attest -- has been to locate this notion of freedom in the market... We must confront this ideology head-on: not by temporizing about the riskiness or instability of the free market or by demonstrating that it (or its Republican stewards) cannot deliver growth but by mobilizing the most potent resource of the American vernacular against it. We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job...

The politics of freedom does not dismiss the value or importance of state resources. But rather than conceiving of them as protections against the hazards of the market or indices of public compassion, it sees them as sources of power, as the tools and instruments of personal and collective advance. Armed with universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, public pensions and the like, I am less vulnerable to the coercions and castigations of an employer or partner. Not only do I have the option of leaving an oppressive situation; I can confront and change it -- for and by myself, for and with others. I am emboldened not to avoid risks but to take risks: to talk back and walk out, to engage in what John Stuart Mill called, in one of his lovelier phrases, “experiments in living.”...

That is why the politics of freedom refuses to view the state as the conservative does: as a constraint. Or as the welfare-state liberal does: as a distributive machine. Instead, it views the state the way the abolitionist, the trade unionist, the civil rights activist and the feminist do: as an instrument for disrupting the private life of power. The state, in other words, is the right hand to the left hand of social movement.

It will be challenging to square this idea of the state as a partner in economic freedom with the more anarchist-leaning tendencies of much of Occupy thought, but it's a debate worth having.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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Hoop Dreams: Dorian Warren on the Link Between NBA Players and the 99%

Nov 1, 2011

What do Occupy Wall Street protesters have in common with NBA players who are on strike? At first glance, not much. Few basketball stars are worried about avoiding foreclosure, and the people camped out in Zuccotti Park aren't signing multimillion-dollar endorsement deals with Nike. But as Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren tells CNN's American Morning, they're all being exploited by the richest of the 1%.

What do Occupy Wall Street protesters have in common with NBA players who are on strike? At first glance, not much. Few basketball stars are worried about avoiding foreclosure, and the people camped out in Zuccotti Park aren't signing multimillion-dollar endorsement deals with Nike. But as Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren tells CNN's American Morning, they're all being exploited by the richest of the 1%.

Dorian explains that the driving force behind the NBA strike is that team owners are raking in bigger profits than ever while claiming there's not enough to go around when it comes time to compensate the players who are doing the actual work. Sound familiar? The difference between basketball players and most American workers is that the athletes still have a strong union that's ready and willing to fight for their interests.

To read more about the strike and why it represents an opportunity for solidarity rather than resentment, check out Dorian's recent Washington Post op-ed, co-written by Princeton's Paul Frymer.

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Dorian Warren: Politics to Blame for Income Inequality

Oct 28, 2011

In case Occupy Wall Street hasn't focused you on income inequality, a new report from the CBO documented just how bad things have gotten. Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren joined Lawrence O'Donnell on The Last Word to discuss how this could happen. "Most explanations of this are that it's the economy, it's the labor market, but in fact this is due to politics and policy," he says.

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In case Occupy Wall Street hasn't focused you on income inequality, a new report from the CBO documented just how bad things have gotten. Roosevelt Institute Fellow Dorian Warren joined Lawrence O'Donnell on The Last Word to discuss how this could happen. "Most explanations of this are that it's the economy, it's the labor market, but in fact this is due to politics and policy," he says.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

What policies? Well, for starters, he mentions an increasingly unbalanced tax code, languishing minimum wage laws, and broken labor regulations. None of this happened overnight. "It's shocking... that this is now becoming a mainstream issue," he says. "It has been talked about for decades."

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Yet the message hasn't sunk in. "It's hard for Americans to believe that the United States is the most unequal of all advanced industrial democracies," he points out, and yet it's very true. And New York may be one of the most unequal of the states. "It's no accident that Occupy Wall Street is Occupy Wall Street," he notes. The top 1% of earners in the city gobble up 45% of the city's income, and "that's driven by the financial sector."

For more, check out his post warning that those who still dismiss the protesters do so at their own risk.

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FDR, Obama, and Occupy Wall Street: Time for Another New Deal?

Oct 20, 2011David Woolner

FDR didn't just extend his sympathies to protesters. He listened to their demands and worked to implement real solutions to their problems.

As the Occupy Wall Street protests that originated in lower Manhattan gain momentum, a good deal of speculation has arisen in the press. Will the protesters coalesce around a set of demands? Will President Obama and the Democratic Party embrace the movement? What impact will the protests, which have now spread to other parts of the country, have on the 2012 presidential election?

FDR didn't just extend his sympathies to protesters. He listened to their demands and worked to implement real solutions to their problems.

As the Occupy Wall Street protests that originated in lower Manhattan gain momentum, a good deal of speculation has arisen in the press. Will the protesters coalesce around a set of demands? Will President Obama and the Democratic Party embrace the movement? What impact will the protests, which have now spread to other parts of the country, have on the 2012 presidential election?

Although there has been some resistance to the idea of the movement adopting a formal agenda for reform, many of the demands and some of the rhetoric generated by the protesters echo similar calls for reform that emanated during the New Deal. Last Sunday evening, for example, it was reported that Occupy Wall Street's Demands Working Group had endorsed the idea of a New Deal-style public works program that would put millions of Americans on the government payroll rebuilding the nation's crumbling infrastructure. Another idea that has surfaced within the movement is the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act.

What is most significant, however, is the possibility that the Occupy Wall Street movement might spur the Obama administration and Congress to embrace reform and take stronger government action to combat the current economic crisis. In this respect, it has the potential to mirror the powerful social justice movements that emerged during the 1930s -- movements that not only drew national attention to the great disparities in wealth between the rich and the poor in the United States, but also pushed the Roosevelt administration and Congress to adopt some of the most significant pieces of reform legislation in U.S. history. The passage of the all-important Wagner Act, which established a permanent National Labor Relations Board and enshrined the right of private sector workers to form unions, was inspired in large part by the more than 1,800 strikes that broke out in 1934. The Social Security Act, which provided an old-age pension and established unemployment insurance, was spurred on in part by the 2 million-member Townsend movement that put forward a tax and pension scheme that made it clear that the government had to do something to provide basic economic security for the elderly. For the millions of unemployed, who often took to the streets in frustration, Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, which put over 8.5 million Americans to work building the roads, bridges, airports, and schools that still make up a significant portion of our nation's economic infrastructure.

On Oct. 23, the FDR Library presents a free forum on FDR’s foreign policy advisers. Click here to find out how you can join the conversation!

President Obama has recently indicated that he sympathizes with the concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but he has yet to embrace it. FDR was not nearly so circumspect. It is true that during his initial year in office, FDR -- much like President Obama -- adopted what can best be called national unity politics. This, coupled with his innate political caution and abhorrence for ideology, made him reluctant to join ranks with those who were in the streets demanding reform.

But as early as mid-1934, the president -- who in his heart of hearts agreed with the calls for more progressive government -- began to change his tune. In one of his famous Fireside Chats, delivered near the end of June 1934, FDR took note of the fact that in spite of the great progress that had been made stabilizing the economy and meeting the immediate crisis, it was time to look to the future -- time for the country "to find a way once more to well-known, long established but to some degree forgotten ideals and values," and time for the Government and Congress to "seek the security of the men, women and children of the nation." He continued:

That security involves added means of providing better homes for the people of the Nation. That is the first principle of our future program.

The second is to plan the use of land and water resources of this country to the end that the means of livelihood of our citizens may be more adequate to meet their daily needs.

And, finally, the third principle is to use the agencies of government to assist in the establishment of means to provide sound and adequate protection against the vicissitudes of modern life -- in other words, social insurance...

A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it "Fascism," sometimes "Communism," sometimes "Regimentation," sometimes "Socialism." But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.

I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies. I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing -- a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals.

In the coming 18 months, FDR -- inspired and motivated by the determination of the millions of Americans who embraced a number of mass movements demanding social and economic justice -- would launch his famous Second New Deal. It was a wave of legislation that, through such programs as Social Security and the Wagner Act, is still very much with us to this day.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, perhaps the president and our leaders in Washington should do more than merely extend their sympathy. Perhaps they should take a lesson from the New Deal and act to address the concerns of a new generation -- a generation that may not yet have articulated a specific set of demands, but one that is crying out for a government animated by the same spirit that stood at the heart of the New Deal, driven by the desire to provide social and economic justice for all.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book on U.S.-UK economic relations in the 1930s, entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

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Why We Need the Government to Create Not Just Jobs, but Good Jobs

Oct 17, 2011Richard Kirsch

A new book exhausts all the private sector possibilities, ultimately showing why the government has to ensure decent wages for all.

A new book exhausts all the private sector possibilities, ultimately showing why the government has to ensure decent wages for all.

The millions of underemployed Americans today, working part-time or in jobs significantly beneath their skill level, underline a persistent feature of our workforce, starting long before the Great Recession: one out of four jobs pay sub-standard wages. Good Jobs America, a new book written by Paul Osterman and conceived with co-author Beth Shulman before her death, tackles this other half of the jobs crisis: the need to create more good jobs, with wages that can support a family.

A great strength of the book is the authors' creation of new data on low-wage jobs, bringing to light how little so many of us bring home from our work. The authors are exquisitely cognizant of the current policy and political climate that looks skeptically on the ability of government to intervene in the "power and correctness of the market." As a result, much of the book carefully examines the arguments and strategies that rely on non-government interventions in the labor market to increase job quality, as well as a refutation of conservative arguments against public policies to increase wage levels. In thoroughly exploring other avenues of change, and doing their best but ultimately failing to identify promising paths that don't rely principally on government, Osterman and Shulman make it clear why they conclude "what is needed is a broader political, social, and economic environment that supports progressive employment strategies." By exhausting the limits of other avenues, the book ultimately ends up making the case that we must have government action to ensure decent jobs for all.

The authors refute the "myth" that education is the solution to the problem by pointing out the obvious: "There will always be hotel room cleaners and food servers and medical assistants and the myriad of other low-wage jobs." Education may help an individual, but it won't solve the large societal problem. Furthermore, they review research that finds "most adults holding these jobs will not escape them." They describe numerous programs developed in industries like health care and hospitality to create career ladders for low-wage employees and -- while doing everything they can to accentuate the positive -- find that few of the programs are sustainable or result in many employees moving into better jobs.

The persistence of the problem is underlined in their discussion of another common bugaboo: immigration. Data they assembled show that from 1994 to 2010, while the proportion of immigrants in the workforce increased by 70 percent, the percentage of jobs that were low-wage stayed the same, 24 percent. Their data also reveal that while immigrants held more low-wage jobs in 2010, the percentage of immigrants who took jobs that were below the low-wage standard remained at just below 40 percent.

As the authors deeply believe that employers need to be part of the solution, they look closely at the problems that employers face in raising wages and promoting career training. But they find that "high-road" employers are few and far between, motivated by the rare business with a mission or CEO that is committed to decent wages and benefits. They find no evidence that a Costco has any impact on a retail job market dominated by WalMart, which when it comes into a market suppresses wages in its competitors. The history of labor partnerships also is not promising. Levi-Strauss' attempt at paying good wages collapsed under the pressure of foreign competition and when an agreement between the hotel employee union HERE and San Francisco hotels to trade employer flexibility for more training and wage increases melted in the face of non-union competition.

On Oct. 23, the FDR Library presents a free forum on FDR’s foreign policy advisers. Click here to find out how you can join the conversation!

The authors also highlight community and non-union worker organizing that has led to the passage of local ordinances and agreements with large employers. But they admit that these are few and far between, with the biggest benefit being a change in the political relationships of power rather than the creation of many new good jobs.

Their exploration of what could be the most promising new labor market for good jobs, green jobs, is very telling. They do a marvelous job of detailing the competing forces in Boston when the city government tried to balance the trade-off between weatherizing more homes or paying higher wages. It negotiated with multiple actors: community action agencies, environmental groups, unions, big and small contractors. The results were not promising. On the other hand, Portland, OR provided a model of success due to the rare cooperation between community and environmental groups and unions, bolstered by strong political leadership.

Which gets us back to government. The 2009 economic stimulus legislation required that prevailing wages, following the Davis-Bacon law, be paid for weatherization jobs. But the Obama administration interpreted that as prevailing wages in the already low-wage weatherization industry. That was a lost opportunity to use a major investment in green jobs to set a foundation for good jobs.

So what will work? Looking at the history of what has worked in our past -- legislation and regulations promoting wage standards, job safety, and unionization -- they conclude simply, "The government made bad jobs into good." There's plenty of ammo in the book showing that minimum wage laws do work and that unionization leads to better jobs.

The authors say that creating a climate for good jobs requires a shock to the system that will come from "public policy or employee voice." Actually, they recommend both: laws that raise wages and protect union organizing, accompanied by cooperation between community groups, more internally democratic unions, and small business associations.

On the next to last page, the authors finally reach for a broader strategy that meets the political challenge of our times. Ending where they began -- "the gap between the low-and-middle-class is collapsing" -- they conclude that "the reality is that strengthening job quality is a middle-class issue" and making the concerns of low-wage workers compelling "requires a broader political base than is currently at hand."

Building that political base will require making more than a rhetorical link between the concerns of the shrinking middle class and the working poor. We will need to build a movement that unites "the 99%" to those pushing for a broader jobs agenda, that demands that we not only create more jobs, but that every job pays enough to support a family with security and dignity. The agenda must look beyond the workplace to broader systems of opportunity and social insurance: education, health care, retirement, and leave policies. Organizing that movement must link across communities, exemplified by efforts like the Caring Across Generations campaign that is uniting unions and community groups to create two million good jobs for those who care for seniors and people with disabilities. We need to build a political movement through campaigns at the local, state, and federal level that demand good jobs for everyone in America.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a Senior Adviser to USAction, whose book on the campaign to win reform will be published in 2012. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

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