WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
INMATE’S GUIDE TO EARNING 24 CENTS PER HOUR
Inmate pay in New York State is often allocated on a grade system, determined by job title and level of education. At Livingston, anyone who doesn’t have the equivalent of a high school diploma can’t earn higher than Grade 2 pay, which tops out at slightly under 18 cents an hour. An inmate who’s enrolled in a high school equivalency course is eligible for Grade 3, which is just under 22 cents an hour. But if, like me, an inmate has earned a high school diploma or its equivalent, they’re eligible for the Holy Grail: Grade 4 pay, the highest in the prison. That’s 24 cents an hour, 4 whole cents over the national inmate average. In this facility that’s as good as it gets, and probably as good as it’s ever going to get. New York’s inmates haven’t received a pay raise since 1993. In the free world, I took great pride in my jobs, even though most of them were low-level restaurant positions. Back then, my work had value. Now a month of my life, of my labor, adds up to $11… The vast majority of Americans believe that slavery has been completely abolished. That’s almost correct. In reality, the Thirteenth Amendment stipulates that slavery is still allowed in this country “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” More
It’s Not the 'Future of Work,' It’s the Future of Workers That’s in Doubt
As another Labor Day passes, the stakes have never been higher for workers, unions, and people who believe in a just economy and a decent country. The capitalism of recent decades has relentlessly undercut worker bargaining power, triggering an explosive rise in inequality that has undermined democracy itself. Driven by an ideological embrace of “creative disruption and destruction” and supercharged by the fusion of Wall Street’s financialization of the economy with Silicon Valley’s techno-monopolies, this profoundly destabilizing version of capitalism is reshaping every aspect of the economy. Meanwhile, however, the architects of inequality are brilliantly distracting us from their growing domination by defining and controlling the debate about what is inevitable and what is possible. More
The Collapse of the Middle Class and the Rise of a New 'Precariat'
You know, you have $1.5 trillion student debt. You have, an income inequality thrumming under all this. You know, since 1997 the top one percent, its income has grown 20 times faster than the other 90 percent. So that’s like, ah, jeez, that’s–it’s so high now, and the gap is so great. And you have this whole world of counselors and coaches and certificate programs that, I think of them as like vultures on the carcass of the middle class. also, when you’re talking about race, the whites’ median wealth is 68 times the median wealth of African Americans… Everyone wants to be seen as middle-class, right. People don’t want to admit that even that category is a shaken and unstable one. So I think first we have to start acknowledging it and saying it out loud when things are not going well. I mean, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that since 2016 the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America has gone up from 6,000 to like 43,000. You know, the reason that all these young people between 18 and 34–view socialism positively is simply because they recognize their own precarity. So somewhat older people, I think it would behoove us to start recognizing ours as well, and acting from that. More
Union Card or Master Card -- How a Nation of Workers Became a Nation of Debtors
For many reasons unions were less effective at sustaining the newly huge middle-class than they had been at creating it… Declining union membership and power is, however, only one variable in the equation that has brought us to the white hot economic and political meltdown now dominating our news and our lives. Another critical variable is this: as the wallets of workers held fewer and fewer union cards, credit cards were filling up those very same wallets. Workers were in effect trading union cards for MasterCard's… credit, not wages, came to drive purchasing and consumption. For workers, debt came from all over: credit cards; longer and longer terms for auto loans; huge college loans; "creative" financing for mortgages. A whole kit and caboodle of financial entanglements enmeshed workers, students, just about everybody. The "middle" class became the debtor class. Between 1970 and 2000, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Federal Reserve Bank, household debt relative to disposable personal income nearly doubled. In 2006, David A. Gaffen reported in the Wall Street Journal that "households'...debt-to-income ratio reached an all time high 131.1%." … That debt is bondage is a profound moral truth. More
LABOR DAY: HOW TO SAVE AMERICA’S UNIONS
The Center for American Progress (CAP), one of Washington, DC’s most influential liberal think tanks with deep ties to the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign, has proposed a big idea for raising Americans’ wages. A paper by CAP’s David Madland calls for the creation of national wage boards, tasked with setting minimum wage and benefit standards for specific industries. Fast-food companies, say, would send representatives to meet with union officials and other worker representatives, and hammer out a deal that ensures workers get a fair shake. Same goes for nurses, or retail workers, or home health aides, or accountants. Labor unions in America today are in crisis. In the mid-1950s, a third of Americans belonged to a labor union. Now, only 10.7 percent do, including a minuscule 6.4 percent of private sector workers. The decline of union membership explains as much as a third of the increase in inequality in the US, has caused voter turnout among low-income workers to crater, and has weakened labor’s ability to check corporate influence in DC and state capitals… Unions get higher pay for their members by demanding money that would otherwise go to shareholders and executives, and so the latter have every reason to fight union drives. More
Five Lessons From the History of Public Sector Unions
As public sector unions contemplate losing key rights under the law, it’s worth remembering that for much of their history, such unions organized with no rights at all. It wasn’t till 1958 that New York became the first city to authorize collective bargaining for city employees. Wisconsin did the same for state employees in 1959, and federal workers got bargaining rights in 1962… Public workers formed unions without waiting for legal recognition. For instance, letter carriers established the first postal union in 1889. The American Federation of Teachers formed in 1918, the same year that several independent unions of firefighters merged to form a national union. AFSCME was born in Wisconsin in 1932, the same year as the American Federation of Government Employees, a union of federal workers. So take heart—history shows that workers can mobilize and organize even without cover of law. Public workers have done it time and again. Of course labor law matters, but it’s not the only thing that matters. More
TRUMP TO WORKERS: 'DROP DEAD'
In the week leading up to Labor Day, President Donald Trump's vicious anti-worker agenda has been on full display: In addition to abruptly canceling a modest pay raise for around two million public employees on Thursday, Trump also signed a retirement savings executive order that was denounced as a gift to Wall Street and "a cruel joke on American workers" facing a retirement income crisis.
Yet, as if none of these latest attacks on American workers took place, the White House issued its annual Presidential Labor Day Proclamation late Friday, touting what it describes as Trump's "historic action to advance prosperity for the American worker."
But while the Trump administration may be working hard to obscure its own disastrous anti-worker record—conveniently ignoring the fact that wages for most workers are declining as the obscenely rich continue to get richer—a new Labor Day report by Public Citizen out this week provides uncomfortable truths that Trump and his plutocratic advisers are attempting to erase from history… As the consumer advocacy group's new report (pdf) details, Trump has effectively made the anti-worker agenda of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce official administration policy. More
Here Comes Tax Scam 2.0:
As Wages Fall and Corporate Profits Soar, GOP Readies $600 Billion Tax Giveaway for the Rich
Version one of the GOP's deeply unpopular tax scam produced results nearly everyone—including, in his rare moments of honesty, President Donald Trump himself—predicted: Record-shattering profits for Wall Street, massive pay-outs for the wealthiest Americans, and little to nothing for the working class, whose wages are either stagnant or falling. As The Hill reported on Thursday, House Republicans are expected to unveil the full text of their latest round of proposed tax breaks for the wealthy as early as next week, and a floor vote on the legislation could come as soon as the end of the month. While the full details of the plan are not yet known, The Hill notes that the bill is expected to consist primarily of "a permanent extension of tax changes for individuals that Republicans passed last year." … While the GOP has not explained how they plan to pay for this massive giveaway to the rich, some Republicans have been quite explicit about their desire to slash life-saving social programs like Medicare and Medicaid to offset the deficit-exploding effects of their tax cuts. More
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