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Leo W. Gerard
International President
September 3, 2010
On Labor Day, Work to Save the Middle Class
This Labor Day feels gloomy. It’s a
celebration of work when there is not enough of it, a day off when too many
desperately seek a day on.
America has commemorated two Labor Days since this brutal recession began near
the end of George Bush’s presidency in December of 2007. Now the relentless high
unemployment, the ever-rising foreclosures, the unremitting wage and benefit
take-backs have replaced American optimism and enthusiasm with fear and anger.
Happy Labor Day.
On this holiday, we can rant with Glenn Beck, kick the dog and hate the
neighbor lucky enough to retain his job. Or we can do something different. We
can join with our neighbors, employed and unemployed, our foreclosed-on
children, our elderly parents fearing cuts in their Social Security lifeline and
our fellow workers worrying that the furlough ax will strike them next. Together
we can organize and mobilize and create a grassroots groundswell that gives
government no choice but to respond to our needs, the needs of working people.
We can do what workers did during the Great Depression to provoke change,
to create programs like Social Security and achieve recognition of rights like
collective bargaining. These changes were sought by groups to benefit groups. In
a civil society, people care for one another. And America is such a society –
one where people routinely donate blood to aid anonymous strangers, children set
up lemonade stands to contribute to Katrina victims and working families find a
few bucks for United Way.
The self-righteous Right is all about individuals pulling themselves up by
their bootstraps. That proposition – the do-it-all- by-yourself-winner-takes-all
philosophy – clearly failed because so many Americans are jobless, homeless and
too penniless to afford boots.
Over the past decade, the winner who took all was Wall Street. The
banksters gambled on derivatives and other risky financial tomfoolery and won
big time. Until they lost. And crashed the economy. After the American taxpayer
bailed them out, those wealthy traders returned to making huge profits and
bonuses based on perilous schemes.
Still, they believe they haven’t taken enough from working Americans.
They’re lobbying to end aid for those who remain unemployed in a recession
caused by Wall Street recklessness. And they’re demanding extension of their
Bush-given tax breaks. This is the nation’s upper 1 percent, people who earn a
million or more each year, the 1 percent that took home 56 percent of all income
growth between 1989 and 2007, the year the recession began.
Since 2007, 8.2 million workers have lost jobs. Millions more are
underemployed, laboring part-time when they need full-time jobs, or barely
squeaking by on slashed wages and benefits. Since the recession began, the
unemployment rate nearly doubled, from 5 percent to 9.6 percent, and that does
not include those so discouraged that they’ve given up the search for jobs, a
decision that is, frankly, understandable when there are only enough openings to
re-employ 20 percent of the jobless. Five unemployed workers compete for each
job created in this sluggish economy.
And American workers weren’t prepared for this downturn, having already
suffered losses in the years before it began. The median income, adjusted for
inflation, of working-age households declined by more than $2,000 in the seven
years before the recession started.
At the same time, practices like off-shoring jobs and signing regressive
international trade deals contributed to the loss of middle class, blue collar
jobs. A new report, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S. Labor
Market,” by the Center for American Progress and The Hamilton Project, says:
“The decline in middle-skill jobs has been detrimental to the earnings and labor
force participation rates of workers without a four-year college education, and
differentially so for males, who are increasingly concentrated in low-paying
service occupations.”
The recession compounded that, the report says:
“Employment losses during the recession have been far more severe in
middle-skilled white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill,
white-collar jobs or low-skill service occupations.”
What that means is high roller
banksters are living large; lawn care workers and waitresses subsist on minimum
wage, and working class machinists and steelworkers are disappearing altogether.
The researchers found the U.S. economy is increasingly polarized into
high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-skill, low wage jobs. America is losing the
middle jobs and with them its great middle class.
No wonder the rising anger in middle-class America.
But fury doesn’t solve the problem. This Labor Day, we must organize to
save ourselves and our neighbors. We must stop America from descending into
plutocracy. We must demand support for American manufacturing and middle class
jobs. That means terminating tax breaks for corporate outsourcers, ending trade
practices that violate agreements and international law and punishing predator
countries for currency manipulation that subverts fair trade by artificially
lowering the price of products shipped into the U.S. while artificially raising
the price of American exports.
We must demand support for American industry, particularly manufacturers
of renewable energy sources like solar cells and wind turbines that create good
working class jobs, increase America’s energy independence and reduce climate
change.
We must insist on policies that support the middle class, including
preserving Social Security and Medicare, extending unemployment insurance while
joblessness remains high, and enforcing the health care reform law so that every
American worker and family can afford and is covered by insurance.
On this Labor Day, we should all have a
picnic, invite neighbors, friends and family, and over hot dogs and potato
salad, organize to save the American middle class.
Mobilize to end the gloom and restore American optimism.
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For help: the Union of the Unemployed, the AFL-CIO, USW, Working America. Join
the One Nation March for jobs Oct. 2 in Washington, D.C.
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