The story of organized labor has been a story of working people banding together to confront concentrated wealth and power. Unions have been fighting to get [...]]]> Unions have been fighting the 1% vs 99% fight for more than 100 years. Now the rest of us are learning that this fight is also OUR fight.

The story of organized labor has been a story of working people banding together to confront concentrated wealth and power. Unions have been fighting to get decent wages, benefits, better working conditions, on-the-job safety and respect. Now, as the Reagan Revolution comes home to roost, taking apart the middle class, the rest of us are learning that this is our fight, too.

The story of America is a similar story to that of organized labor. The story of America is a story of We, the People banding together to fight the concentrated wealth and power of the British aristocracy. Our Declaration of Independence laid it out: we were fighting for a government that derives its powers from the consent of us, the people governed, not government by a wealthy aristocracy telling us what to do and making us work for their profit instead of for the betterment of all of us. It was the 99% vs the 1% then, and it is the 99% vs the 1% now.

We, the People

Democracy is when We, the People decide things together — collectively — for the common good of all of us. Our country originated from the idea of We, the People banding together to watch out for and protect each other, so we can all rise together for the common good, or “general welfare.” Collectively we make decisions, and the result of this collective action is decisions that work for all of us instead of just a few of us. This is the founding idea of our country.

Unions Protect The Interests Of Working People

The same is true for unions. Unions work to bring We-the-People democracy to the workplace. Like the old story about how it is harder to break a bundle of sticks than the same sticks one stick at a time, unions are organizations of working people, banding together so their collective power can confront the power of concentrated wealth. By banding together in solidarity, working people are able to say, “No, you can’t do that!,” and bargain for a better life for all of us.

Organized Labor Sets The Standard

The benefits that unions win don’t just go to the union members, they become the standard. When labor won the fight for an 8-hour day and 40-hour workweek with overtime pay, that became the standard. When labor fought for minimum wages, that became the standard, when labor fought for workplace safety, that became the standard. Labor’s fight is a fight to set the standard for the rest of us.

Labor stands up to the 1%, and uses their organized power (bundle of sticks) to win better pay, benefits and working conditions for the 99%.

“Although it is true that only about 20 percent of American workers are in unions, that 20 percent sets the standards across the board in salaries, benefits and working conditions. If you are making a decent salary in a non-union company, you owe that to the unions. One thing that corporations do not do is give out money out of the goodness of their hearts.”
– Molly Ivins.

Eroded Rights

Working people banding together to bargain with management — “collective” bargaining — is a fundamental right in the United States, but this right has eroded along with the rest of our democracy. For many years, the mechanisms of government that were supposed to enforce these rights were “captured” and instead were working against the rights of working people. Bob Borosage explains, in, The Forgotten Leading Actor In The American Dream Story,

Globalization gave manufacturers a large club in negotiations—concessions or jobs get shipped abroad. And often the reality was concessions AND jobs got shipped abroad. Corporations perfected techniques, often against the law, to crush organizing drives, and stymie new contracts for the few that succeeded. The National Labor Relations Board, stacked with corporate lobbyists under Republican presidents, turned a blind eye to systematic violations of the law.

So now union workers are down to about 7 percent of the private workforce. Virtually the only growing unions are public employees— teachers, nurses, cops. Not surprisingly, conservative Republican governors, led by Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Ohio’s John Kasich, used the budget squeeze caused by the Great Recession to go after these unions, combining layoffs with efforts to eviscerate the right of public employees to organize and negotiate.

The Fight Is On

“Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of their right to join the union of their choice.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Dorian Warren, at Salon in America’s last hope: A strong labor movement, writes,

The fate of the labor movement is the fate of American democracy. Without a strong countervailing force like organized labor, corporations and wealthy elites advancing their own interests are able to exert undue influence over the political system, as we’ve seen in every major policy debate of recent years.

Yet the American labor movement is in crisis and is the weakest it’s been in 100 years. That truism has been a progressive mantra since the Clinton administration. However, union density has continued to decline from roughly 16 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent of all workers and just 6.9 percent of workers in the private sector. Unionized workers in the public sector now make up the majority of the labor movement for the first time in history, which is precisely why — a la Wisconsin and 14 other states — they have been targeted by the right for all out destruction.

… Contrary to the intent of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which made it national policy to encourage and promote collective bargaining, the NLRA now provides incentives for employers to break the law routinely and ignore any compulsion to negotiate collective agreements. When there is little outrage for the daily violations of workers’ liberty (employers fire workers illegally in 1 in 3 union campaigns for attempting to exercise freedom of association), our democracy is in peril.

Restore The Middle Class

Unions brought us a middle class, and now that the power of organized labor has eroded we find ourselves in a fight to keep the middle class. Borosage again,

We emerged from World War II with unions headed towards representing about 30% of the workforce. Fierce struggles with companies were needed to ensure that workers got a fair share of the rewards of their work. Unions were strong enough that non-union employers had to compete for good workers by offering comparable wages. Unions enforced the 40-hour week, overtime pay, paid vacations, health care and pensions, and family wages. Strong unions limited excesses in corporate boardrooms, a countervailing power beyond the letter of the contract. As profits and productivity rose, wages rose as well.

When unions were weakened and reduced, all that changed. Productivity and profits continued to rise, but wages did not. The ratio of CEO pay to the average worker pay went from 40 to 1 to more than 350 to 1. CEOs were given multimillion-dollar pay incentives to cook their books and merge and purge their companies. Unions were not strong enough to police the excess. America let multinationals define its trade and manufacturing strategy, hemorrhaging good jobs to mercantilist nations like China.

The result was the wealthiest few captured literally all the rewards of growth. And 90% of America struggled to stay afloat with stagnant wages, rising prices and growing debt.

Support Bargaining Rights For Labor

We all need to understand that labor’s fight is our fight. Now that labor is under attack across the country, we need to understand that we are also under attack. As labor loses rights and power, all of our pay and benefits fall back. We need to support the rights of working people to organize into unions and bargain collectively, to fight our fight, the 99% vs the 1%. This battle right now is the whole ball game.

“To a right-winger, unions are awful. Why do right-wingers hate unions? Because collective bargaining is the power that a worker has against the corporation. Right-wingers hate that.”
– Janeane Garofalo

This post originally appeared at Campaign for America’s Future (CAF) at their Blog for OurFuture. I am a Fellow with CAF.

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The New York Times ran a piece recently about a study of pop song lyrics and other studies suggesting increasing narcissism in America since the 1980s. (Big news, huh?) They found “the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear more frequently along with [...]]]> How do we build the progressive brand and create demand for our policies?

The New York Times ran a piece recently about a study of pop song lyrics and other studies suggesting increasing narcissism in America since the 1980s. (Big news, huh?) They found “the words ‘I’ and ‘me’ appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in ‘we’ and ‘us’ and the expression of positive emotions.” This must make the Randians proud. Their world is all about them, and it’s a view they have sold successfully for decades. Progressives will not change that outlook just by promoting programs people don’t want to pay for, sponsored by a government they distrust, with benefits they would rather do without than see help neighbors they see as parasites.

A progressive America is less about me and more about we.

I just revisited Dave Johnson’s Firedoglake piece about building progressive infrastructure. It’s the kind of piece that reminds me that, clearly, the Democratic Party’s mission statement doesn’t involve changing minds and building the brand. With the exception of Howard Dean, party leaders think in election cycles and are more concerned with recruiting electable candidates.

Building a progressive infrastructure is about survival. In the absence of support from the left that Republicans get from a billionaire-funded infrastructure, national Democrats have turned to the same corporate sponsors as the GOP, and become servants to the same commercial interests. To put it somewhat perversely, any progressive infrastructure we build has to create public demand for Democrats to act like Democrats again, and has to figure out how to tap the progressive market that’s already there.

I’m all for punching back against conservative lies, and for rapid response, and so forth. And we need infrastructure that supports progressive legislators. But we stay so busy fighting zombie lies that we never mount a sustained message offensive of our own. Hell, it’s gotten to where we think debunking is playing offense. And while we defend, conservative think tanks and media continue seeding a right-wing worldview into the public consciousness.

Give a voter some one-off, “white knight” Democratic candidate and you might have him for an election. Teach that same voter to think like a Democrat and you might have him for life. That’s how our opponents operate. One of the founders of Reason magazine mentioned how in the early 1970s an Ayn Rand devotee suggested “converting the world to libertarianism … by going door-to-door and distributing to every household a copy of Atlas Shrugged. That’s not a sophisticated strategy, but it’s a model evangelists have used for centuries. Train people to think like conservatives and support for conservative policies follows. The Kochs et, al. have spent billions doing just that. Lather, rinse, repeat.

If we were to plant a progressive worldview in the minds of swing voters, what would that look like? How would we do it? Accomplishing that – not just debunking and building policy shops – has to be a central component of any progressive infrastructure. Lakoff suggests that people have both a “strict father” and “nurturant parent” model within them. Conservatives worked for decades to awaken the first and put the latter into a coma. Our efforts should awaken swing voters’ progressive selves and get them to identify with us again. We’re talking about voters who are too busy with jobs and kids and bills to master policy. Our messages have to be simple. We have to reach them on an “I wouldn’t trust anybody my dog doesn’t like” level. Doing that won’t happen overnight or with a single, ripping TV commercial. But instead of starting from scratch, we can build on what voters already believe and — as a filmmaker friend suggests — use visual (or mental) imagery with emotional resonance to steer what people already believe in a progressive direction. Meet people where they are. Lead them to where we are. Win their hearts, and their heads (and votes) will follow.

Conservative think tanks and media have been waging well-funded, asymmetrical warfare for decades. But I’m convinced that big problems don’t necessarily require big solutions. With the limited resources at hand, how can we make that asymmetry work for us in seeding – or re-seeding – progressive ideas in the public mind the way distributing copies of Atlas was supposed to? How can we promote a progressive worldview in ways that don’t require Koch-level backing or building media distribution channels from scratch? (Demonstrating that that could be done on a grassroots level was the point of the eleven hundred 30-second AM radio spots Blue Century ran in 2008.) But whatever form progressive messaging takes, we first have to have the messages. (Here are three we tried in our pilot project.)

The conservative infrastructure sees messaging as an ongoing function — year in, year out — and progressives always seem to be playing defense. Yes, there’s good news out there. The conservatives’ message is starting to fall on deaf ears. But conservative failure isn’t the same thing as progressive success. If 2006, 2008 and the health care fight didn’t make that clear, then 2010 should have settled it.

Reframing the conservative message isn’t enough. We have to begin creating and planting our own seeds, and they might not bloom for some years. The messages don’t have to be detailed — less is more — but have to be more than “their math doesn’t add up” or “they want to kill off the New Deal.” We need to be seeding messages that define us on our own terms — who we are, what we want, how we believe the same, core things about America as most Americans.

Got any? That’s the hardest part.

People who follow the blog Valerie Strauss runs at the Washington Post, the Answer Sheet, experienced that. Valerie often cross-posts things written elsewhere. Occasionally she posts something [...]]]> Sometimes one encounters something that needs no commentary from me – it is complete in itself. I want to share something like that about teaching and education.

People who follow the blog Valerie Strauss runs at the Washington Post, the Answer Sheet, experienced that. Valerie often cross-posts things written elsewhere. Occasionally she posts something written directly for her. This morning she posted a piece by Linda Darling-Hammond, who is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University and was Founding Director of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. Linda — who is a friend — now directs the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.

When I read it I asked for – and received – Linda’s permission to crosspost it here and at some other sites to give it more visibility. Let me offer just a few words of introduction, then let Linda’s words speak without further commentary from me.

Linda Darling-Hammond is one of the most important figures researching and writing about education. I have written about her work before, most notably this review of her book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future

Linda Darling-Hammond was a close adviser on education to then-Senator Obama during his presidential campaign. Many of my compatriots had hoped she would be named Secretary of Education. But she had published some research which made people associated with Teach for America unhappy, and there was organized pushback against her. I suspect that some from my perspective on educational issues would be far happier to have seen her at the Department rather than Arne Duncan.

So be it. Darling-Hammond remains an important voice on issue of education. The piece you are about to read should speak for itself.

Please read it carefully.

And I thank you in advance for doing so, and ask that you also make sure it gets widely distributed.

Peace.

The first ever International Summit on Teaching, convened last week in New York City, showed perhaps more clearly than ever that the United States has been pursuing an approach to teaching almost diametrically opposed to that pursued by the highest-achieving nations.

In a statement rarely heard these days in the United States, the Finnish Minister of Education launched the first session of last week’s with the words: “We are very proud of our teachers.” Her statement was so appreciative of teachers’ knowledge, skills, and commitment that one of the U.S. participants later confessed that he thought she was the teacher union president, who, it turned out, was sitting beside her agreeing with her account of their jointly-constructed profession.

There were many “firsts” in this remarkable Summit. It was the first time the United States invited other nations to our shores to learn from them about how to improve schools, taking a first step beyond the parochialism that has held us back while others have surged ahead educationally.

It was the first time that government officials and union leaders from 16 nations met together in candid conversations that found substantial consensus about how to create a well-prepared and accountable teaching profession.
And it was, perhaps, the first time that the growing de-professionalization of teaching in America was recognized as out of step with the strategies pursued by the world’s educational leaders.

Evidence presented at the Summit showed that, with dwindling supports, most teachers in the U.S must go into debt in order to prepare for an occupation that pays them, on average, 60% of the salaries earned by other college graduates. Those who work in poor districts will not only earn less than their colleagues in wealthy schools, but they will pay for many of their students’ books and supplies themselve

And with states’ willingness to lower standards rather than raise salaries for the teachers of the poor, a growing number of recruits enter with little prior training, trying to learn on-the-job with the uneven mentoring provided by cash-strapped districts. It is no wonder that a third of U.S. beginners leave within the first five years, and those with the least training leave at more than twice the rate of those who are well-prepared.

Those who stay are likely to work in egg-crate classrooms with few opportunities to collaborate with one another. In many districts, they will have little more than “drive-by” workshops for professional development , and – if they can find good learning opportunities, they will pay for most of it out of their own pockets. Meanwhile, some policymakers argue that we should eliminate requirements for teacher training, stop paying teachers for gaining more education, let anyone enter teaching, and fire those later who fail to raise student test scores. And efforts like those in Wisconsin to eliminate collective bargaining create the prospect that salaries and working conditions will sink even lower, making teaching an unattractive career for anyone with other professional options.

The contrasts to the American attitude toward teachers and teaching could not have been more stark. Officials from countries like Finland and Singapore described how they have built a high-performing teaching profession by enabling all of their teachers to enter high-quality preparation programs, generally at the masters’ degree level, where they receive a salary while they prepare. There they learn research-based teaching strategies and train with experts in model schools attached to their universities. They enter a well-paid profession – in Singapore earning as much as beginning doctors — where they are supported by mentor teachers and have 15 or more hours a week to work and learn together – engaging in shared planning, action research, lesson study, and observations in each other’s classrooms. And they work in schools that are equitably funded and well-resourced with the latest technology and materials.

In Singapore, based on their talents and interests, many teachers are encouraged to pursue career ladders to become master teachers, curriculum specialists, and principals, expanding their opportunities and their earnings with still more training paid for by the government. Teacher union members in these countries talked about how they work closely with their governments to further enrich teachers’ and school leaders’ learning opportunities and to strengthen their skills.

In these Summit discussions, there was no teacher-bashing, no discussion of removing collective bargaining rights, no proposals for reducing preparation for teaching, no discussion of closing schools or firing bad teachers, and no proposals for ranking teachers based on their students’ test scores. The Singaporean Minister explicitly noted that his country’s well-developed teacher evaluation system does not “digitally rank or calibrate teachers,” and focuses instead on how well teachers develop the whole child and contribute to each others’ efforts and to the welfare of the whole school.
Perhaps most stunning was the detailed statement of the Chinese Minister of Education who described how – in the poor states which lag behind the star provinces of Hong Kong and Shanghai – billions of yuen are being spent on a fast-paced plan to improve millions of teachers’ preparation and professional development, salaries, working conditions and living conditions (including building special teachers’ housing) The initial efforts to improve teachers’ knowledge and skills and stem attrition are being rapidly scaled up as their success is proved.

How poignant for Americans to listen to this account while nearly every successful program developed to support teachers’ learning in the United States is proposed for termination by the Administration or the Congress: Among these, the TEACH Grants that subsidize preparation for those who will teach in high-need schools; the Teacher Quality Partnership grants that support innovative pre-service programs in high-need communities; the National Writing Project and the Striving Readers programs that have supported professional development for the teaching of reading and writing all across the country, and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which certifies accomplished teachers and provides what teachers have long called some of the most powerful professional development they ever experience in their careers.

These small programs total less than $1 billion dollars annually, the cost of half a week in Afghanistan. They are not nearly enough to constitute a national policy; yet they are among the few supports America now provides to improve the quality of teaching.

Clearly, another first is called for if we are ever to regain our educational standing in the world: A first step toward finally taking teaching seriously in America. Will our leaders be willing to take that step? Or will we devolve into a third class power because we have neglected our most important resource for creating a first-class system of education?

I asked Lynda Hiller if she felt generally optimistic or pessimistic. She was quiet for a moment, then said: “I don’t think things are going to get any better. I think we’re going to hit rock bottom. The big shots are in charge, and they just don’t give a darn about [...]]]> which ends like this

I asked Lynda Hiller if she felt generally optimistic or pessimistic. She was quiet for a moment, then said: “I don’t think things are going to get any better. I think we’re going to hit rock bottom. The big shots are in charge, and they just don’t give a darn about the little person.”

Bob Herbert has a column titled Absorbing the Pain. He attended a small gathering in North Philadelphia organized by Working America, an effort of the AFL-CIO. The people gathered were not union members, simply those coming together to share the pain.

Things are bad in America. Herbert’s column reminds us how bad:

after telling us the specifics of some of the people at that meeting, he offers four powerful paragraphs, too much to quote here without exceeding fair use, then concludes with the words with which I began.

In the first of these four Herbert reminds us that the people around that table in Philadelphia do not represent extraordinary cases, and that they sound as if they came from a nation in a deep depression.

He says one benefit of the turmoil in Wisconsin and elsewhere is that it puts a

spotlight that is being thrown on the contemptuous attitude of the corporate elite and their handmaidens in government toward ordinary working Americans: police officers and firefighters, teachers, truck drivers, janitors, health care aides, and so on. These are the people who do the daily grunt work of America. How dare we treat them with contempt.

Let me reflect on this point for a moment. In theory we believe in the dignity of work. That is part of the reasoning of some for their opposition to welfare. And yet, are not our tax breaks for the wealthy and for corporations and our refusal to impose appropriate fines for illegal and destructive corporate behavior a form of welfare for the corporations and the rich? If the actions we do not sanction are destructive of the possibility of work for the ordinary people do not we demean the dignity of the work they had been doing? Or is it our attitude going to be that only the work of some matters and to hell with the rest of us?

Herbert tells us that this not just about the right of public workers to be in unions:

As important as that issue is, it’s just one skirmish in what’s shaping up as a long, bitter campaign to keep ordinary workers, whether union members or not, from being completely overwhelmed by the forces of unrestrained greed in this society.

The predators at the top, billionaires and millionaires, are pitting ordinary workers against one another. So we’re left with the bizarre situation of unionized workers with a pension being resented by nonunion workers without one. The swells are in the background, having a good laugh.

That laugh sounds familiar to this student of history. It reminds me of the powerful who pitted poor whites against blacks in the South and elsewhere in order to maintain power over both, to depress the wages of both while maximizing their own profits. It is the cackle of those folks at the notion they should care about working conditions that maim and murder as if the broken lives and families should somehow matter more than their ability to consume conspicuously, to buy more expensive toys, to act as if their shit didn’t stink.

Too many who should know better have allied themselves with the wealthy and the powerful against the rest of us – they may not be part of the elite but they hope to benefit personally from the work they do that is destructive of hope to millions. We find such folks in Congress and state legislatures, in governor’s mansions and in positions supposed to regulate to protect all of us. We find far too many in the organs of media that should be exposing the corruption and greed and telling us truth rather than seeking to indoctrinate us on behalf of their puppetmasters.

Herbert writes about ordinary, hard-working people. The rhetoric that the wealthy and powerful like the Koch brothers have funded and promoted is about to hit the middle class. It is not only teachers like me, and government workers of all stripes in states with governors like that idiot in Wisconsin. By this time next week it may well be most of the federal civilian work force.

We live in the DC Metro area. At the time of the last shutdown, the Congress eventually provided the federal workforce with back pay for the time workers were locked out. That was a total of several weeks. This time? It is not clear that the Republicans in House would offer any back pay to federal workers.

Our household is not unique. As a teacher my pay this year has been cut more than 10%. My federal employee wife makes more than I do. Were we to go a month without her income, we might well be in danger of losing our home of 27 years: we have no reserves.

But we are better off than many: think of the ordinary folks working in coffee shops living on tips who will have no customers if the government shuts down. Even if the government workers get back pay after the shutdown ends, they have lost that income forever.

This country is at serious risk. Our GINI coefficient, indicating our economic inequality, is going up even as we sit here. The stock market may have recovered, but people still lack jobs, and many jobs that exist or are being created at a snail’s pace pay less with fewer benefits than those that were lost. Wealth continues to be shifted into the pockets of those who already have too much.

We cannot afford our military-industrial-congressional complex. That is how Eisenhower wanted to describe it.

Our endeavors in Afghanistan are not only killing and destroying lives, of Afghans far more than of Americans, it is using up scarce funds that are desperately needed to help the American people.

Our tax policies are destroying what is left of the ability of the government to intervene on behalf of those in or approaching desperation.

It is early morning on a Saturday. Today’s New York Times contains yet another must read from Bob Herbert. I read it. I wrote about it, and more.

And now? Today there are demonstrations all around the nation.

Today we have an opportunity to try to take back our nation.

Today we should remind ourselves that we need to be vigilant and active, to ensure that our government is of the people, by the people, and for the people, not – as I wrote in this piece for CNN a government of the corporations, by the already powerful, for the wealthy.

If it is not already too late.

So, here’s a frame. Over at AlterNet, I have a feature up arguing that labor markets only work when workers can bargain collectively. As it stands, [...]]]> Like all progressives, we obsess on the quest for good ‘framing’ quite a bit around here (when I lived in DC, even the cabbies and doormen were reading Lakoff).

So, here’s a frame. Over at AlterNet, I have a feature up arguing that labor markets only work when workers can bargain collectively. As it stands, with private-sector union density in the U.S. hovering at just 7 percent, the wages of many, many workers in this country represent a market failure of significant proportions.

By all means, read the whole thing for some lefty-bomb-throwing goodness, but for our purposes, here is the relevant passage (sorry for the long excerpt):

In economic terms, the wages of many Americans working in the private sector represent a “market failure” of massive proportions. Even the most devout of free-marketeers — economists like Alan Greenspan and the late Milton Friedman — agree that it’s appropriate and necessary for government to intervene in the case of those failures (they believe it’s the only time such “meddling” is appropriate). But the corporate Right, which claims to have an almost religious reverence for the power of “free” and functional markets, has gotten fat off of this particular market failure, and it’s dead-set on continuing to game the system for its own enrichment.

The market does work pretty well for Americans with advanced degrees or specialized skills that allow them to command an income that’s as high as the market for their scarce talents will bear. There are also people with more common skills who have the scratch (and/or connections) and fortitude to establish their own businesses — think George W. Bush or a really great mechanic who owns his or her own shop.

But that leaves a lot of people; about 80 percent of working America are hourly workers, “wage slaves” in the traditional sense. There’s no doubt that their salaries are heavily influenced by the laws of supply and demand. We saw that clearly in the latter half of the 1990s, when, under Bill Clinton, the Fed allowed the economy to grow at a fast clip, unemployment dropped below 4 percent, and for a brief period, a three-decade spiral in inequality was reversed as wages grew for people in every income bracket.

But a common fallacy is that wages are determined by market forces. They’re not, for a variety of reasons that require more explanation than space permits. I’ll focus on two: what economists call “information asymmetries” and coercion. Both are anathema to a functional free market, and both exist today, in abundance, in the American workplace.

To understand these failures of the free market, one has to go back, briefly, to basic economic theory. In order for a free market transaction to work, both the buyer and the seller need to have a good grasp of what the product being sold — in this case, people’s sweat — is worth elsewhere, who else is buying and selling, etc. In other words, they have to have more or less equal access to information. There can be no misrepresentation by either the buyer or the seller in a free market transaction. And both parties have to enter into the transaction freely, without being coerced; neither side can exercise power or undue influence over the other, whether implicitly or explicitly, through threats or other means.

Now let’s look at how that theoretical construct plays out in the real world of the American workplace. When an individual worker negotiates a price for his time, effort and dedication with any business bigger than a mom-and-pop operation, there’s quite a bit of explicit coercion (much of it in violation of our labor laws), which I’ll get to shortly. But there’s always an element of inherent coercion when an individual negotiates with a company alone, because of the power differential: a company that’s shorthanded by one person will continue to function, while a person without a job is up a creek with no paddle, unable to put a roof over her head or food on the table.

The “information asymmetries” in such a negotiation are immense — they’re actually more like process asymmetries. Companies spend millions of dollars on human resource experts, consultants, labor lawyers, etc., and they know both the conditions of the market and the ins and outs of the labor laws in intimate detail. While working people with rarified skills are often members of trade associations or guilds, read trade journals and have a pretty good sense of what the market will bear, many low- and semi-skilled workers don’t know their rights under the labor laws, don’t know how to assert them and (rightfully) fear reprisals when they do. They often have little knowledge of the financial health — or illness, as the case may be — of the company to which they’re applying for a job, how profitable it is, how much similar workers in other regions or firms earn, etc.

For the majority of Americans who lack scarce talents or a high level of education, negotiating a price for one’s time with a firm on an individual basis is anything but a free market transaction. That’s where collective bargaining comes in — when workers bargain as a group, they do so on a level playing field with employers, and the resulting wages (and benefits) are as high as the market can bear, but no higher.

Unions, like corporations, have a great deal of information about the market. They know how a firm is doing, how profitable it is and where it is relative to the larger industry in which it operates. They know what deals workers at other plants have negotiated. They have attorneys who are just as familiar with the American labor laws as their counterparts in management.

And while an individual has very little leverage in negotiations — again, most companies can do with one less worker — collectively, an entire work force has the ability to shut down or at least slow down a company’s operations if management chooses not to negotiate in good faith (as is often the case).

It’s not difficult to quantify the difference between what most hourly employees take home and what the free market would dictate. Economists Lawrence Mishel and Matthew Walters estimate the “union wage premium” — the amount of additional pay a unionized worker receives compared with a similar worker who isn’t a member of a union — at around 20 percent (that’s in keeping with other studies, using different methodologies, which put the premium in a range between 15 and 25 percent). If one includes benefits — health care, paid vacations, etc. — union members make almost 30 percent more than their nonunion counterparts.

Another way of looking at it is this: Millions of American families are scraping by on below-market wages, and if that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be such a large group of American families among the “working poor.” In economic theory, it’s a given that a producer can’t sell his or her wares below the cost of production. The equivalent to the cost of producing a gizmo, when we’re talking about the sale of someone’s working hours, is the cost of providing basic necessities — nutritious food, safe housing and decent medical care. These are out of reach for the almost three million American families who work full-time and live beneath the poverty level. According to the Working Poor Families Project, half of the working poor have no health insurance.

So, I’m turning the free market argument around and using it against the union-busters. What do you think?

Here are the words of Jo Koebert:

I am a Wisconsin [...]]]> This diary is the contents of an email widely distributed by Cynthia Koebert. It was written by her mother Jo Koebert to her brother. I have the permission of both Koeberts to distribute. I urge you to read it and to pass it on

Here are the words of Jo Koebert:

I am a Wisconsin resident who was born and raised in Milwaukee. I come from a working class family, and although I am lucky enough to spend some of the winter in Arizona, I am deeply connected to my Wisconsin roots. As I watch what is going on in Madison right now, I think about what unions have meant to our family.

My father had no skills other than the willingness to work hard, but he made a living wage because of the automobile union. He didn’t get rich, but he was able to provide for us, buy a simple house and own a car. My uncle worked in a unionized factory, again with no specific skills, yet he had a steady paycheck and enough sense to invest and leave his wife a comfortable inheritance. Another uncle also worked in a factory under safe conditions thanks to the union. We became middle class because of unions and, of course, our willingness to get up in the morning and go to work. Several in our family worked for a time in a Milwaukee forge plant, where men worked hard, got filthy cleaning furnaces, but took home a living wage thanks to the unions.

When I was at the central office of Milwaukee Public Schools as an administrator and the teachers were on strike, I remember complaining about the power of the union because it was making our jobs harder. I also remember one of the decision makers candidly saying, “Jo, if they didn’t have a union do you know how we would screw them over?” The unions have been responsible for forming the middle class in this country, and our family has been the recipient of the fruits of their labor in negotiating contracts. Yes, there were times when they became too strong and the workers were as much at their mercy as they would have been from the company itself. Today, they no longer have that kind of power, but they do still give the little guy a voice. They are, in fact, the single most active political voice actually working on behalf of working and middle class Americans.

I realize that much of this has been forgotten by many people who are clamoring for the destruction of the unions. Maybe, as educators and as parents, we didn’t do our job well in helping our kids to understand the history of labor in this country. Maybe I needed to tell the stories my dad used to tell about what it was like during the fight to unionize when the National Guard was made to fire upon common men who were demanding to organize.

In Madison, the excuse for these proposed policy measures is about saving money, but it seems obvious to me that this is not true. When the unions made clear that they were willing to concede the salary and benefit reductions the governor is proposing, so long as they get to keep their collective bargaining rights—the lifeblood of union power—Governor Walker refused to negotiate. The true agenda is to get rid of the unions, which will eventually get rid of the middle class and the little power that those who are not in the corporate elite have at this time. I won’t be around to see it, but our young people have got to open their eyes to what is going on in this war against the have-nots, both in Wisconsin and on the national level.

We should not have to fight for PBS and NPR to be saved. We should not have to hear that a proposal to cut all federal funding to Planned Parenthood programs has been introduced. This is serious and the agenda is much more than budget balancing. To my own family and all the others in America who share a similar history: may you never forget your roots. I come from the working class and I am proud of the people I see in Wisconsin fighting for their rights.

Sincerely,

Jo Koebert

CODA:

I am the Jo Koebert who wrote the letter mostly for family about the WI situation. You may distribute it if you wish, although I don’t know that it will change anyone’s mind.

Anyone wishing to contact MS Koebert may email me at kber at earthlink dot net

Peace

“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a [...]]]> Remember the Enron recording where two traders were joking about how they crewed the people of California and then “Grandma Millie” was trying to get her money back?

“Yeah, now she wants her f——g money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her a—— for f——g $250 a megawatt hour.”

Every time I hear a quote from someone resenting what a great deal the public employees unions have I remember that quote. It reminds me of who we are not hearing from in this prearranged crisis in Wisconsin.  We are not hearing the voices of the people who set up the financial crisis in the state.

Today Ian Murphy, editor of the Buffalo Beast, called Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, pretending to be billionaire industrialist and secretive conservative political activist David Koch. Koch (pronounced “coke”) is one of the big money people behind Walker. Walker’s office admits the call is real and for a brief period of time the media will be forced to move the focus of the story from unions and their supporters fighting Walker and conservatives.

In the call we got to hear how Walker sounds when he talks to big money. Now I’d love to hear how rich people like Koch actual talk to each other about these protests.  Are they laughing at everyone? Do they chuckle when the media miss their role in this? Do they smirk watching tea partiers play their role? There will be a lot of press calling Walker’s office about the Fake Koch call, but how many will call the Real Kochs? Even if some do, Koch will be on guard.

I want to hear more unguarded conversations like this, to hear the real emotional tone behind the words. Radio is a powerful medium because while it might take listeners some time to process the meanings of the words, the tone and emotional context behind the words is deduced almost immediately. Video can also give us lots of information, as anyone who has watched Lie To Me can attest to; but it requires more focus than listening, which can slip into people’s mind almost everywhere they go.

Why do I want more people to hear how the rich say things? Because I’d like to activate certain groups of people on an emotional level. Emotions, like anger, need to be directed at the right entities. As Silivo said to Tony in the Sopranos, “Our true enemy has yet to reveal himself”.

If the Tea Party people are directing their anger and resentment at the public union employees that means they are not mad at the rich corporate persons who are actually behind making their life less rich. I suppose it is easier to be mad at someone who has a slightly better life than you than with someone who has a wildly better life than you. But if you heard these rich people laughing at you as they talk about their schemes to keep beating you down I would think that even many tea partiers would get upset.

It’s too bad that we won’t hear the conversations of people who were responsible for driving states into deficits via unproductive corporate tax breaks. Wouldn’t you love to hear the conversations of the people responsible for the financial meltdown?  Do they joke about our inability to prosecute them for their economic treason? Do they laugh as the media moves on to the crisis of the day without looking for the true cause of people’s pain? Do they breath a sigh of contented relief as we turn on each other?  What would it sound like?

If we heard them in all their cackling glory or insensitive obliviousness perhaps we all would want to take the fight to them. Not physically, of course, but financially.  The UK Uncut movement has been showing us the way. One of the funniest and most profound movies of the eighties has a quote that I think applies here. In Trading Places Eddie Murphy’s Bill Ray Valentine finds Dan Aykroyd’s Louis Winthorpe III character cleaning a gun and explains why that is a spectacularly bad idea.

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