Chatting with my colleague Jeff Madrick  this morning about the Wisconsin protests, Sam Cooke's immortal words kept running through my mind. Working people of Wisconsin, who have given us so much hope, this one's for you.

Harvey J. Kaye reports from rallies against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's budget -- and gets ready for the continuing fight.

It was chilly and wet outside. Not as cold as it might have been here in the Upper Midwest, but cold enough to make you uncomfortable standing outdoors in a drizzle for an hour. Still, several hundred students, staff, and faculty turned out yesterday at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Student Union parking lot to protest Governor Scott Walker's Budget Repair Plan.

Admittedly, nothing happened here in Titletown as dramatic as that which transpired in Madison this week. There, tens of thousands have marched and filled the halls of the state capitol and from which Democratic lawmakers have absented themselves rather than allow the Republican-controlled legislature to actually vote on the governor's anti-labor -- indeed, anti-democracy -- bill. This is a bill that would not only dramatically transfer the costs of pension and health care programs to the backs of already strapped public employees, but also strip workers of their collective bargaining rights.

Nevertheless, what transpired did matter. We stood together. And we spoke our minds. We have no idea what will come of it. But we had to do it. And we will likely have to do more.

Students carried signs of SOLIDARITY with those who teach them, advise them, serve them, and clean up after them, and they made known their hostility towards the Governor and his right-wing comrades' ambitions. Staff members spoke of their love of the state, the pleasure they derive from their work, and the shock and anger they feel that Republicans and corporate-sponsored groups are portraying them in the media as "spoiled public employees," especially when they have already suffered real pay losses and furloughs for the past few years. And professors talked of what, and of how long, it took for American workers to secure their rights to organize unions -- and of the sad irony that it was only last summer when the then Democratic-controlled state legislature finally granted UW faculty those very same rights. Now, even before we have had a chance to vote for representation, we look likely to lose them.

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It was a characteristically Wisconsin event. Everyone who addressed the crowd was "nice" -- even in their most mocking remarks. Their words drew applause, their references to Governor Walker garnered both boos and laughter, and their expressed affection for their fellow citizens and the University warmed us all.

All of which both elated and saddened me.

This is a great state. I grew up in New Jersey, just 20 miles from Times Square. But I have lived in Wisconsin for more than half of my life. And here in Green Bay we have the Packers, a great, democratically-owned football team. In fact, as historian R. David Myers has written, progressivism -- "the direct primary, railroad and public utility regulation, income taxes, worker compensation" -- essentially began here under the committed and energetic leadership of Governor Robert M. La Follette. Moreover, progressivism emerged from the Wisconsin Republican party, not from the Democratic party.

But that was then, and this is now...

As we know, reactionary GOP governors are determined to bust public employee unions. And apparently the newly elected Scott Walker volunteered to lead the assault. We knew it would be rough after the Democratic losses this past November. But we didn't realize that when Walker turned down the offer of federal funds to create high-speed rail lines in this state, it was because he wanted to personally drive Wisconsin back to the Gilded Age.

So, On Wisconsin! But stop the Governor. And whether we win or lose, I urge my fellow unionists and citizens in other states to get ready for struggles in New Jersey, Ohio, and elsewhere.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. A member of the National Writers Union/UAW who looks forward to becoming a member of a UW faculty union, he is currently writing The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America. Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HarveyJKaye

Offering scheduling that fits employees' needs will help companies be more competitive.

Sunday's New York Times reported that accounting firms lead corporate America in offering workplace flexibility. Employees can reduce their hours, take the summer off, take off a few years and then return to their prior jobs... whatever they need. And the firms are committed to ensuring that flexible options don't hurt prospects for advancement.

Why are the accounting firms out in front? For a simple reason: they do the numbers. It costs 1.5 times a worker's annual salary to replace a professional who leaves. So when workplace flexibility cuts PricewaterhouseCoopers' turnover from 24% to 15%, that's real money.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the wage spectrum, employers are struggling with turnover rates as high as -- I kid you not -- 500%. A study of retail stores found that two-thirds had turnover rates in excess of 80%, according to researchers Susan Lambert and Julia Henly, whose path-breaking work has defined a field. Of course, replacing sales staff does not cost as much as replacing an accountant. But the costs do add up. Even under the conservative assumption that it costs 30% of a salary to replace an hourly worker, replacing 300 employees means you've tossed away $1.8 million, according to workforce management consultant Lisa Disselkamp. And employers hire a lot more sales staff, nursing assistants, airline catering personnel, and hotel housekeepers than they do accountants.

Absenteeism is a big problem, too. In one flagship department store, 80% of associates were on probation due to absenteeism. Employers typically see sky-high turnover and absenteeism rates as unavoidable, on the theory that hourly workers have disordered lives and lack workplace readiness. What kind of people don't come to work and quit at the drop of a hat? But if you look a little deeper, you see a different picture.

One mother who worked at a flagship department store worried she would be fired if her preschool-age daughter got sick again, and wondered out loud how she would make it through the flu season. A nursing assistant told a researcher that she got sick days -- but also demerits for taking them under her employer's "no fault absenteeism" policy. So she risked being fired for absenteeism if she used her sick days.

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One problem is the design of "no fault absenteeism" systems. But that's only the beginning. The underlying problem is "just-in-time scheduling," which focuses on maintaining a tight fit between labor supply and labor demand. The key to global competitiveness, many employers feel, is to control their labor costs. That may be true, but the way employers currently design just-in-time scheduling creates a bleed of cold, hard cash.

To maintain a tight fit between, say, sales staff and customers, employers today send workers home after they have reported for work if demand is lower than expected. Employers tend to offer only part-time work so they can design schedules that change from week to week and give less than a week's notice of next week's schedule. Meanwhile, the low-wage workforce tends to rely on relatives for child care -- relatives whose schedules are equally unstable. And of course because many employees have only part-time hours, they need to get other jobs to survive. So their employers are competing not only with workers' children, but also with their employees' other employers (who offer equally unstable schedules) as well as with the employers of those relatives their workers rely on for childcare.

No wonder absenteeism is stratospheric and turnover terrific. Meanwhile, employers bemoan high labor costs, but assume that it is workers' inherent irresponsibility that's to blame.

Now hear this: it's the workers' responsibilities that are to blame. They cannot leave toddlers home alone. They need to take grandma to get treatment for her ulcerating diabetes sores. They need to get to work at the employer who held out the possibility of full-time work. Anyone who would ignore these... well, you probably wouldn't want to hire them anyway.

Employers of hourly workers need to do what accounting firms do: the numbers. Once employers start taking into account the way the current design of just-in-time scheduling fuels turnover and absenteeism, they will redesign it to achieve greater schedule effectiveness. WorkLife Law's new report, Improving Work-Life Fit in Hourly Jobs: An Underused Cost-Cutting Strategy in a Globalizing World, provides concrete tools to help organizations redesign just-in-time scheduling so they can control labor costs much more effectively than most are doing so today.

Joan Williams is the author of Reshaping the Work-Family Debate.

What’s coming in 2011?  We asked thought leaders to share their perspectives on the biggest challenges for the year ahead, along with the changes they’d like to see and the hopes they cherish. Marshall Auerback explains how misguided attempts to reduce the deficit kill jobs, squeeze the working and middle classes, and inflate crude oil prices. And a corrupt political system doesn't help.

The beginning of the year always seems a good time to lay out some broader themes which could develop throughout the year, good and bad, so here goes:

The good news is that the US budget deficit still looks to be large enough to support modest top line growth and sustain and stabilize incomes, even if it's not large enough to bring the jobs we need. As I've argued many times in the past, higher government deficits facilitate private sector deleveraging and continuously add to incomes and savings. It is no coincidence that the financial burdens of households and corporations have continued to fall (and savings rates risen) as government deficits have increased.

Unfortunately, the new Congress appears bent on misguided deficit reduction. By next week, the House of Representatives will have a deficit hysteric majority, with many pledged to a balanced budget amendment. And the world seems to be leaning towards fiscal tightening pretty much everywhere. The unemployment benefits program has been extended, but benefits still expire after 99 weeks, and less in many states. Net state spending continues to decline as state and local governments continue to reduce their deficits.

It is true that state tax collections are up quite nicely these days. But even with the recent improvement many states' total monthly collections are just getting back to 2007/2008 levels, so they are not in the position to ramp up spending. The commentators who are crowing about the current increase in revenues do not understand the historical significance of the extreme weakness we have seen for two full years. As Philippa Dunne (co-author of the excellent Liscio Report) has pointed out to me, sales taxes began to show signs of trouble in early 2007. Catch-up in the funding of unfunded pension liabilities will also continue to be a drag on demand.

Clearly, much of the emotion surrounding government deficit spending could be rectified if we simply viewed the deficits for what they really are. The budget balance is the difference between total revenue and total outlays. At the federal government level, if total revenue is greater than outlays, the budget is in surplus and vice versa. It is a simple matter of accounting with no theory involved. That's it. In other words, without any discretionary policy changes, the budget balance will vary over the course of the business cycle. When the economy is weak, tax revenue falls and welfare payments rise, so the budget balance moves towards deficit (or an increasing deficit). When the economy is stronger, tax revenue rises and welfare payments fall and the budget balance becomes increasingly positive. Automatic stabilizers attenuate the amplitude in the business cycle by expanding the budget in a recession and contracting it in a boom (see this for further explanation).

To judge from statements on both the left AND the right, it is clear that very few politicians get this basic accounting point, which increases the odds that these social programs will continue to come under attack in 2011. This has already occurred in the UK over the past few months. There, a Tory-led coalition government has completely drunk the deficit reduction "Kool-Aid". Instead of the public sector providing employment leadership at a time when the private sector is not yet ready to expand jobs growth, David Cameron's administration has been cutting jobs and forcing unemployment up (see the UK's Labour Market Statistics). As the austerity drive deepens, the deflationary impact of these job cuts will undermine private sector employment growth. Not that this will stop the cuts from happening here in the US. This sort of economic vandalism has now metamorphosed into "responsible fiscal action", if one is to believe the vast majority of the "experts" in the mainstream commentariat.

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The attacks on public sector unions reflect another flank in this ruthless pincer movement on middle and working class Americans, as this NYTimes article illustrates. It is fascinating to see how the public narrative in the media has gradually shifted over the past year from Wall Street's sociopathic practices (which were directly responsible for the creation of the crisis) to the alleged greed of public employee unions and their pension benefits, many of which were the product of agreed wage negotiation packages in which unions were receiving these pension benefits in lieu of increased wage benefits. During 2008, we were told that the government's hands were tied and that sanctity of contracts had to be honored. This was when the Federal Reserve authorized 100% payouts to the likes of Goldman Sachs on AIG's credit default swaps (in effect allowing the Fed to act as an extra budgetary vehicle of the Treasury, which is a violation of the Constitution and shows how patently false the Fed's claims of independence are). But I don't seem to recall many Wall Street types going on about the sanctity of contracts when agreements with the UAW were reworked to save GM or now when public employee union pension benefits are under attack. The argument seems to be that the states are suffering from a genuine solvency crisis in which everybody has to make sacrifices, including the "greedy" unions. So why should big financial firms, which would otherwise have been toast but for the munificence of the suffering American taxpayer, be any different? If the attacks outlined in the NYTimes piece reflect a broader trend this year, then it has ominous implications for the country as a whole.

Another worry related to the potential diminution of spending power is the troublesome rise in crude prices. Net demand is not up appreciably, and Saudi production remains relatively low. Peak oil dynamics could well be at work here. In a broader sense, what Paul Krugman describes -- "we're living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing up their prices" -- could well prove accurate. Which, in the absence of countervailing support to incomes via fiscal policy or increased private sector activity that increases jobs, means cuts in other areas of discretionary spending. Hardly a healthy trend in a world still constrained by inadequate demand. Crude prices are already up enough to be a substantial tax on US consumers that has probably more than offset whatever aggregate demand might have been added by the latest tax package.

A federal pay freeze has been proposed. The Fed's zero rate policy and its continuation of "quantitative easing" both serve to reduce net interest income earned by the economy.

Bank regulators continue to impose policies that work against small bank lending, whose wholesale funding costs are substantially higher than their "too big to fail" counterparts. The Dodd-Frank "financial reform" entrenches the dominance of the systemically dangerous institutions at the expense of the 6,000 or so other banks that engage in classic loan intermediation activity -- the sort of thing we want our banks to be doing.

Overseas, the euro zone looks set to muddle through with very weak domestic demand. The periodic disruptions to the credit markets have hitherto been mitigated by repeated European Central Bank bond buying of the national debts in the secondary markets, but at the cost of further fiscal austerity being imposed on the periphery countries.

What about the emerging world, which has hitherto been held out as the major repository of global growth? Does China slow as a result of fighting inflation? Or Brazil? Maybe India as well?

Finally, there is the odious problem of political corruption, which manifests itself in many forms, but most recently through the cynical revolving door policy between Wall Street and government. Peter Orszag's move to Citi after spending months launching broadsides against Social Security from his perch at OMB and then the NYTimes goes beyond cynicism. Nobody expects a former government official to live like a monk after spending time in public service. But the idea that someone would help plan, advocate, and carry out an economic policy that played such a crucial role in the survival of a financial institution and then, less than two years after his administration took office, would take a job that (a) exemplifies the growing disparities the administration says it's trying to correct and (b) unavoidably call on knowledge and contacts he developed while serving at OMB is sickening in the extreme. That his successor also comes from Citi simply perpetuates the incredulity. All this, under an ostensibly "progressive" Democratic administration.

The revolving door between Wall Street and Washington calls attention to the rotten heart at the core of the American polity today -- what James Galbraith has felicitously termed "the predator state". The state has become too weak and therefore remains another instrument of corporate predation. The revolving door policy (eagerly embraced by this president, much like his predecessors) perpetuates the problem because it enhances the dominance of the so-called "FIRE" (finance, insurance, real estate) sector of the economy. The FIRE sector simply acts as a parasite on the production and consumption core, extracting financial and rent charges that are not technologically or economically necessary costs. Its revenue takes the form of what classical economists called "economic rent," a broad category that includes interest, monopoly super-profits (price gouging) and land rent, as well as "capital" gains. Its ethos consists largely of denuding the state of any provision of public goods, privatizing the public domain and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees for basic necessities such as health insurance, land sites, home ownership, the communication spectrum (cable and phone rights), patent medicine, water and electricity, and other public utilities, including the use of credit cards or the credit needed to get by. It's a zero-sum economic activity. One party's gain (that of Wall Street usually) is another's loss. It looks like we'll have much more of the same as we enter into 2011.

"Happy" New Year everybody.

Marshall Auerback is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and a market analyst and commentator.