Excellent history and a call to action. Some highlights: In 1974, wages fell by 2.1 percent and median household income shrunk by $1,500. To be sure, it was a year of mild recession, but the nation had experienced five previous downturns during its 25-year run of prosperity without seeing wages come down. What no one grasped at the time was that this wasn’t a one-year anomaly, that 1974 would mark a fundamental breakpoint in American economic history. In the years since, the tide has continued to rise, but a growing number of boats have been chained to the bottom. Productivity has increased by 80 percent, but median compensation (that’s wages plus benefits) has risen by just 11 percent during that time. The middle-income jobs of the nation’s postwar boom years have disproportionately vanished. Low-wage jobs have disproportionately burgeoned. Employment has become less secure. Benefits have been cut. The dictionary definition of “layoff” has changed, from denoting a temporary severance from one’s job to denoting a permanent severance. From 1972 “Some people will have to do with less,” Business Week editorialized. “Yet it will be a hard pill for many Americans to swallow—the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more.” Why right to work laws are wrong...The more recent influx of European- and Japanese-owned nonunion factories to the South has had a similar effect. In their homelands, Mercedes, Volkswagen, and Toyota work closely with unions, and the German companies pay their workers as much as or more than the most highly paid American autoworkers. When such companies move into the American South, however, they go native, not only paying their workers far less than they do in Europe or Japan but also opposing their efforts to form a union. (Under pressure from the German autoworkers union, however, Volkswagen has recently committed itself to establishing a consultative works council at its Tennessee plant. Such councils are standard at Volkswagen plants in Germany and other nations; in the U.S., the particulars of American labor law require that the company recognize the UAW as the workers’ representative. Is there hope for the future? It’s worth noting that one high-wage advanced manufacturing nation has seen its workers thrive in the past 40 years: Germany. Like American multinationals, all the iconic German manufacturers—Daimler, Siemens, BASF, and others—have factories scattered across the globe. Unlike the American multinationals, however, they have kept their most remunerative and highest-value-added production jobs at home. Nineteen percent of the German workforce is employed in manufacturing, well above the 8 percent of the American workforce. German industrial workers’ wages and benefits are about one-third higher than Americans’. While the U.S. runs the world’s largest trade deficit, Germany runs a surplus second only to China’s and occasionally surpasses it. To be sure, Germany’s identity is more wrapped up in manufacturing than America’s is, but that’s because of national arrangements that not just bolster manufacturing through such policies as excellent vocational education but also give workers more power. By law, all German companies with more than 1,000 employees must have equal numbers of worker and management representatives on their corporate boards. For the most part, German companies don’t get their funding from issuing stocks and bonds but rather by generating investment either internally or by borrowing from banks; the role of the shareholder is insignificant. By practicing a brand of capitalism in which employees and communities still matter, Germany has been able to subject itself to the same forces of globalization that the United States has without substantially diminishing its workers’ power and income. Bottom line: The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class isn’t ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. Many of the impediments to creating anew a broadly prosperous America are ultimately political creations that are susceptible to political remedy. Amassing the power to secure those remedies will require an extraordinary, sustained, and heroic political mobilization. Call to action Americans will have to transform their anxiety into indignation and direct that indignation to the task of reclaiming their stake in the nation’s future.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 22:23:55 +0000
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