Middle class workers of the Pacific Northwest, unite!
A Seattle union rally demonstrates that liberals and labor, once ambivalent about the middle class, have now embraced it as an endangered species – and democracy's savior.
On June 10, I attended a forum at Town Hall in Seattle called, "Is Puget Sound losing its middle class?" It wasn't an objective analysis of demographic or economic trends. It was a pep rally put on by locals of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. Last week, they headed into renewed negotiations with the big grocery chains and were rallying support for what they called their "Share the Success" campaign.
The gist of the meeting was to frame the union's agenda as a middle-class agenda and to place it within the context of struggling everyday families. It's about wages, yes, but also about family leave, health care, and flexible hours.
The audience was a sea of faces of the people who help you down at the grocery store – I recognized a clerk from my neighborhood Red Apple. These are folks feeling the crunch of Puget Sound's so-called prosperity, the prosperity that makes it impossible for people making $50,000 to buy a median-priced house. "Share the success" is just another way of saying "share the wealth," and it's a lot more polite than "eat the rich."
What really struck me was how far labor and liberals have come in getting over their ambivalence about the middle class.
I mean, this union rally wasn't about poverty, the working poor, or the working class. Type the word "proletariat" into the search on the UFCW website and you'll get zero hits. Labor radicalism is largely dead in this country; that's not news. Labor's move to the center has been long coming and was boosted here decades ago by Teamsters like Dave Beck and over time by Boeing's white-collar unions. It is boosted now by a labor movement seeing where its future is: in unionizing service workers, since factory work has been shipped overseas.
But time was when the political left disdained the middle class for bourgeois materialism, suburban sprawl, and nuclear families. That suspicion continues among some urban Democrats who sneer at middle American values, claiming the heartland is filled with rubes, fools, and hate-mongers. Many environmentalists routinely attack middle America's SUV selfishness and consumerism.
But courting – not excoriating – the middle class has been a winning strategy for Democrats, especially since the 1990s. Bill Clinton, aided by strategist James Carville, was elected in 1992 largely because of he appealed to "the forgotten middle class" and reminded them where their economic interests were. This undercut the usual GOP appeal to middle class fears by invoking God, gays, and guns.
What Clinton and Carville sussed out was that a growing number of Americans were getting screwed from both economic ends. Not only were the rich getting richer under Ronald Reagan and George Bush I, the middle class was having to carry the burden of the welfare state. The mood was captured in former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips' 1993 book Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity.
The Clinton path to saving the middle class lay down a Third Way centrism that tried to balance conservative policies, like a balanced budget and welfare reform, with progressive ones, like pushing universal health care and investment in education.
This centrist approach drove the left crazy, and they accused Clinton of pandering or worse.
But after six-plus years of George Bush II, with the economic gap between the haves and have-nots widening to pre-Depression levels, and New Gilded Age excess threatening the middle class' ability to tread water, the left is finally willing to embrace the middle class. The apostasy of the Clinton years is now conventional wisdom among liberals and labor. (It is also, still, the talk among more-conservative Democrats and populist independents, as evidenced by the "Lou Dobbs Democrat" phenomenon.)
In a 2005 USA Today guest column, former Clinton advisors Carville and Paul Begala argued:
... [W]e should place middle-class jobs and middle-class values at the heart of our economic policy. Middle-class Americans are working hard and playing by the rules, but they are being ripped off at every turn. They need economic reform.
It worked in '06 when Democratic moderates were elected in GOP-leaning districts and helped the party take Congress. The Iraq debacle helped, but so did a middle class centered economic populism.
So the winning theme of '92 is relevant 15 years later. In fact, more relevant. The middle class was split between Clinton, Bush I, and Ross Perot in the 1990s, the nation nearly evenly divided politically during the Gore vs. Bush II and Kerry vs. Bush II campaigns. But middle class attitudes have continued to shift significantly in ways that Democratic analysts believe make them more susceptible to liberal economic arguments about economic fairness and equity. In a word, it's pessimism.
Ruy Teixeira, in "Will the Real Middle Class Please Stand Up" in The Democratic Strategist, reports on the attitude shift:
... [A] June, 2006 Penn Schoen Berland poll for the Aspen Institute found 90 percent agreeing that "25 years ago, if you worked hard and played by the rules, you would be able to have a solid middle class life", compared to only 49 percent who agreed this characterization was true today. ... And perhaps most startling, 80 percent agreed that "Today, with the costs of housing, health care, education and self-financed retirement, a middle class life has become unaffordable for most people."
In other words, the middle class has placed itself on the endangered species list. No wonder liberals are paying attention.
A deeper look is offered in "Talking Past Each Other: What Everyday Americans Really Think (and Elites Don't Get) About the Economy," a December 2006 report by David Kusnet, Lawrence Mishel, and Teixeira for the progressive Economic Policy Institute:
Most people are pessimistic about how national economic trends are affecting people like them. They are concerned about insecurity, inequality, and the difficulty of attaining and maintaining a middle class standard of living. But, at the same time, most people are optimistic about their own economic prospects and their families' futures. They still believe that, if people study hard, work hard, and sacrifice for their families, they can achieve the American Dream.
In general, conservatives have been out of touch with American attitudes by under-estimating people's pessimism about the national economy. Meanwhile, liberals have been out of touch by under-estimating people's optimism about their own situations.
To deal with this, they suggest a smarter strategy for setting a progressive agenda in terms the middle class can understand and accept:
[F]or public officials, political candidates, and leaders of business, labor, and advocacy groups, the challenge in discussing economic issues is not only to be persuasive, but also to increase their political importance to the general public or segments of the population – or, as public opinion analysts often say, to "raise the salience" of these concerns.
This is especially important for advocates of the economic policies favored by liberals and the labor movement. For several decades, most public opinion surveys have found that a substantial majority of Americans favor raising the minimum wage, extending health insurance, increasing funding for public education, college opportunity and job training and retraining, and making the tax system more progressive. But these proposals–and the candidates who support them–have not always prevailed, often because their opponents have raised other issues that have seemed more urgent to many voters. Therefore, for those who favor many elements of a liberal economic agenda, the challenge is not simply to persuade people to support these proposals but also to make them more urgent to those who are already inclined to support these issues.
The UFCW rally in Seattle earlier this month was right out of this playbook. The question, "Is Puget Sound losing it middle class?" spoke to something many in the region are worried about and "raised the salience" of the union's agenda. Shouldn't Safeway be sharing rewards with workers like you and me who are getting crushed by health-care costs? Let's do something, because we're we're all spotted owls now.
Not only has the left jumped on the middle class bandwagon, but some are riding it toward the New Jerusalem.
Liberal radio host Thom Hartmann, who wrote Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class, lays out an agenda that will both secure the middle class – and save American democracy (and undoubtedly please many in the UFCW):
First, we must recognize and reclaim the government programs that create a middle class:
Return to the American people our ownership of the military, the prison system, and the ballot box.
Fight for free and public education that encourages critical thinking, historical knowledge, and a love of learning in each child. Combat the No Child Left Behind Act and the belief that education is a commodity that can be tested.
Fight for a national single-payer health-care system based on Medicare.
Fight for Social Security – do not let it be privatized or co-opted.
Fight for progressive taxation: reinstate a rate of 35 percent on corporations and a rate of 70 percent on the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans – and use the money to pay back the Social Security system and to fund an economic investment program.
Fight for a living wage and for the right of labor to organize.
Fight for a national energy program that puts people and the planet – not Big Oil – first.
When America has a strong middle class, democracy will follow.
Without a strong middle class, says Hartmann, we're "spiraling down toward serfdom."
So, in the new progressive thinking, it's not just the survival of the middle class that's important for its own sake, it's crucial to the survival of democracy itself. And for the middle class and democracy to survive, it needs labor. In fact, labor is the engine of middle class prosperity and quality of life, according to economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. What it can deliver is the ability to bargain on behalf of workers for the American Dream.
Who'd have thunk it. Saving the middle class is now Job 1 – a union job at that.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Jun 18, 7:52 a.m. inappropriate
Where Are the Fresh Faces and Ideas?: The progressive agenda promoted by Thom Hartmann is likely to appeal to the political left in its remaining enclaves in traditionally liberal cities, but I'm skeptical on its appeal to the broader political middle, not to mention the economic middle. Words such as "return" and "reclaim" and a "no tinkering" attitude toward programs such as Social Security suggest to me that the left has learned little in the past generation and may even have a reactionary streak. Modern middle-class workers, especially those with higher education who are courted with stock options and onsite day care, for example, are unlikely to be attracted to a labor-led movement that still relies on "soak-the-rich" and anti-corporate rhetoric. The growing income gap is a real problem, but will the programmer at Microsoft hopeful for wealth via Walll Street follow the UFCW and the SEIU into a middle-class paradise? I don't think so.
What struck me about the June 10 rally (which I would characterize as a "revival meeting") was the almost complete absence of new, galvanizing ideas that could connect with the palpable middle-class angst in this city and show the way toward workable solutions. And most of the political leadership at the event, as near as I could tell, was the usual suspects, many of whom have been discredited in the ideological marketplace. The one exception, for me, was Pramila Jayapal, executive director of Hate Free Zone Washington, who brought a quiet passion and a future-oriented articulateness that is missing from debate among Seattle's liberal ruling class. I'd like to hear more from her.
On the national scene, I see no one who is speaking about new or fresh ways of addressing the erosion of the middle class in an emotionally effective way. If progressives advance in the next election cycle, it will be due to voter exhaustion with the conservatives, not because of an opportunity to take the country in a new direction.
Posted Mon, Jun 18, 9:15 a.m. inappropriate
hopefully posting on the endangered list is not too late: The middle class should have been put on the endangered list the day they boxed up the first factory and sent it to China.
Since that day GREED has run rampant in this country, not only in the corporations but in the government. Our once constitutionally guaranteed Republican form of government has disintegrated into, well I don't even know what name to call it by these days. One thing is certain those in control of the current political agendas [perhaps at the behest of the Corporate factions] have assumed the position that the government should take upon itself the role of the strict, all knowing, all wise, all controlling parent and that the people need to be treated as their children, because children are incapable of making any decisions for themselves.
The middle class is taking the brunt of the bruising at every turn as the parent now indulges in what would be called child abuse in any other family situation, and yet CPS comes not to the rescue of these newly declared [abused] children nor does it put the abusive parents in jail where they belong.
If you are wondering why this is happening you need to delve into the dark side of social engineering, going back at least 100 years to see how it has slowly seeped into the daily lives of each of us.
Those few who first planned for what George Bush Senior called The New World Order knew the American middle class would be a formidable enemy, not easily overcome, especially since it held within its grasp ultimate political power. A fact too few seem to realize these days, even though that fact is written in the very first part of our own Washington State Constitution, a document far too few have bothered to read since high school and the required Washington State history class.
The slow undermining and destruction of the great middle class has been long and methodical in the making or should I say undoing of what has always been the backbone of this country.
But now their jobs as makers and builders of the best are long gone. What they have left to eek out a living with are lowly service jobs, clerks, cooks, janitors, or they find themselves strapped to a computer as their forced upon future salvation, and each year inflation shoves them farther back from the American dream. Each year their hard earned money buys less and less, except of course for electronics from China. It is a dark and terrible storm looming on the horizon for the middle class these days.
The only good news is they are finally starting to wake up, to look around and they are beginning to ask questions, sometimes very pointed questions, for which they are getting no answers. If they write to their elected representatives in government, no one takes their phone calls and personal meetings are out of the question, all they get back are generic form letters that more often than not don't even mention what they wrote about in the first place yet alone answer any of their questions.
Some have attempted to exercise their first amendment right to petition for a redress of grievances, only to be told by the courts when they were forced to sue for answers, that the first amendment says nothing about the government being required to answer those petitions.
The kettle is beginning to simmer and it won't be long before it goes to full boil and becomes as dangerous as an untended pressure cooker.
For now the middle class is lacking just one thing, leadership with a real plan.
That job is wide open for the moment. There is someone out there fit to fill that position they just haven't chosen to stand up and be recognized.
But they will come to make that decision before long.
And when that day comes a collective voice will rise, it will roar loud and clear with its intent.
Sorry, no room left to finish
Posted Mon, Jun 18, 10:27 a.m. inappropriate
Democrats preside over 30 years of middle class destruction in Washington.: While profiting from massive contributions from the unions the Democrats have aided in the destruction of the very class that they pretend to care about. Here in Washington you need not look any further than the IBP plant in Tri-Cities to see the truth in action. No Real wage growth in the meat packing jobs with union representation in over two decades. Is it because the majority of the workers are minorities of questionable legal status and they are afraid to complain? Same thing in home health care, what is their real Net after dues now that it is mandated that they join? If "middle Class" is $50,000 a year who is really to blame for erroding their purchasing power more, the State and Local governments who's demand for tax dollars and fees have grown at better than inflation or the Federal government? I would say that the State and Local governments have done more to destroy the Middle Class than any other level of Government. To encourage more Big Government control over our everyday lives is counter productive for the Middle Class.
I still remember Bill Clinton's famous speech telling the "MIddle Class" why he refused to fulfill his pledge to them. "Oh sure I could give you the targeted Middle Class tax cuts I promised you, but you would not be able to spend it as effectively as the Government can."
Posted Mon, Jun 18, 5:06 p.m. inappropriate
_: While the rich/poor divide is widening, I disagree that most can't afford to be middle class. The key is worrying less about LOOKING middle class, and focusing intead on one's economic security. This means buying less stuff (except stuff that keeps/gains value), and saving like hell. You might say this is pure semantics -- changing the definition to match the new normal. But it's also a reaction to the expanding houses, vacations, and dinners that people think they "need".
It would be nice if grocery workers made higher wages. The key ingredient is the public needs to stop penny pinching, because that's what forces retailers to slash their labor costs. (And to ship production off-shore, and reduce quality...I'll stop now.)
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 12:40 a.m. inappropriate
Several forces have swept away the old middle class...: 1. Jobs off to China. High-paying manufacturing jobs used to exist. Most have gone to China. Good article by Fallows in this month's Atlantic on China's growth particularly in Shenzhen where practically all high tech products seem to be produced. (See this slide show for more.)
2. Little negotiating leverage. With the jobs that disappeared also went much of the leverage that unions used to have. The threat of disappearing jobs has been enough to lower the wages of many jobs or to force them to stagnate. In general there's always a force at work within a company and an industry to lower the cost of production of products through automation or finding lower-cost labor that can build products at equivalent or better quality, thus China.
3. Cherry picking profits. Stock options (and now private equity) have concentrated nearly all significant increases in wealth in a company on those granted equity or stock options. Thus you get lots of billionaires and lots of people with net worths in the tens and hundreds of millions rather than wealth spread across the middle class. In some industries, such as the software industry, there's a strata of rich and super-rich numbering in the tens of thousands that is ridiculously taxed at the same rate as the grocery store clerk due to the nature of capital gains. Thus a lot of tax revenue "escapes" so that these guys and gals can bask in luxury.
4. Health care hyperinflation. I tried a while back to ferret out the different contributors to growth in healthcare; many are inter-related. Don't hold me to it, but I recalll that the net result is that when the average worker puts in $1.00 only about $.30 goes to doctors and nurses. Everything else goes to insurance companies, drug companies, corporate profits, paperwork and administrative costs, lawyers, malpractice settlements, and subsidized healthcare for people without insurance. This is a huge transfer of wealth from the middle class to these various parasitic agents. Pretty sad.
5. Pensions and 401K's. Because pensions have grown to accommodate a population that is enjoying longer lives and in some cases more expensive health care plans than anticipated, corporations such as GM and Ford now have an enormous pension burden that has rendered their companies uncompetitive. This means that corporations are shifting healthcare and pension burdens as much as they can to employees, particularly with 401K plans so that the companies can avoid the time-bomb that pensions represent.
6. Immigration. In many construction sectors Mexicans -- legal or illegal -- have replaced those locals who had what were at one time high paying jobs. Also, at the high-income end of the high-tech market, Indians and Asians have entered the country and this state to take many of the higher paying high-tech jobs. The world is flat and tilted towards the Eastside.
7. Outsourcing of support to India or Nevada. Many entry-level jobs have migrated out of state or to India. This means, for example, that those wanting to supplement family earnings with a second-income are likely going to have to settle for minimum or near-minimum wage jobs. Note that our minimum wage jobs are roughly equivalent to the jobs of workers in China who make $120 a month because the Chinese jobs include free room and board.
The upshot is that a middle-class still exists that includes the high-tech sector, Boeing, and the government sector. The last remaining middle-class redoubt of unproductivity and inefficiency remains government , which has set itself up as a self-perpetuating monopoly and a union at the same time, not unlike the forced mating of the Politburo and the Teamsters Union. But that's a different story...
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 10:14 a.m. inappropriate
I'm the Fresh Face of the New Middle Class and Here's My Plan: In January, I met with a Pierce County congressman who told me that to buy a house in King County these days required an income of $120,000 a year, a price that is unaffordable to many people. Since I'd been working in the mental health field making $13.53 (after four years of experience and a $50,000 Master's Degree) I could sympathize with folks in King County. I figure right now I'm a better example of America's Up and Coming Middle Class than an SUV-driving-Microsoft Employee with onsite daycare, since I have no health insurance, live in a studio apartment (okay, it has a view), and debt up the wazzu.
Here is my idea: I figure in a capitalist society we fight with our dollars. So to secure my location in the "haves" I'm planning a hostile takeover of a certain major credit card company. I'm investing in $25.00 a month in their stock, with the plan that in about 6 1/2 million years I can take over their company. Anyone want to join me?
And I'll happily March to a Union drumbeat promising nationalized healthcare, regulations on student loan lending, and a slow, painful revenge on the major credit card companies. And together we'll slap that invisable hand of the market with some regulations that benefit the common woman.
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 10:24 a.m. inappropriate
RE: I'm the Fresh Face of the New Middle Class and Here's My Plan: Did this story remind anyone else of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 1:49 p.m. inappropriate
RE: I'm the Fresh Face of the New Middle Class and Here's My Plan: Perhaps I tried too hard to be ironic and funny. But I'm serious about the regulations point. I've been reading Elizabeth Warren's report on the middle class and getting quite upset.
Here is a link to her article about regulation:
linked text
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 3:40 p.m. inappropriate
RE: I'm the Fresh Face of the New Middle Class and Here's My Plan: Your situation only highlights the travesty of the Real Estate Wealth Growth Management Act (aka "the GMA") which undeservedly rewards property owners with double and tripling of the value of their homes through constraint of land supply. Thus the rich get richer and everyone else can have "growth pay for growth" because obviously newcomers are coming to rape the land while all current residents are as green as God's green earth.
By the way, realize that your average SALMON is treated better than your average lower income resident in King County. Government will subsidize and assure that salmon have habitat and will build that habitat so that current residents can SLAUGHTER and EAT them in perpetuity.
What will Government do for you? Tax you, enforce the credit card laws ruthlessly if you should ever seek to default on your student loan, and fool you into thinking that $13.53/hr is a middle class wage that you can live on. Welcome to the Gulag, Ms. Gbvik! Government can drive you crazy. So keep yourself in mind as you provide mental health care to society's down-trodden! And get a higher paying job as quickly as possible so you can mortgage your life to a bank for a whole-in-the-wall condo 50 miles from your work. But don't worry, you'll only spend $30,000 or so in the next 50 yrs building light rail for rich people to use to commute to the airport and to Bellevue and to Microsoft and to the UW where you can pay $50k to get a Master's degree so that you can make as much as a barista. But don't get cynical. Still, all-in-all, this is a great area!
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 8:48 p.m. inappropriate
I was wrong. After reading his attempt to understand the middle-class, I'm convinced that he's no bear; he's the reincarnation and spitting image of Karl Marx.
CAVEAT: From 1978 to 1981, I served as a business agent/organizer for long since defunct SEIU, Local #38 in Tacoma, so this stuff is personal with me.
As I read his words, my jaw dropped! The UFCW middle-class? I don't think so! Most middle class people I know - left, right, and center - guffaw at the notion that organized labor understands their issues and life. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the percentage of the U.S. workforce unionized in 2006 was 12%, down from 30% in 1977.
Many factors play into this decline, but no one can discount the fact that the union bill of goods doesn't appeal to the average American worker. Of course, some old-line unions still have a tight lock on their jurisdictions, which aren't expanding, and they do well. The average longshoreman pulls in $100,000, and union carpenters make $30.30/hour. Talk about your middle class!
But Mossback trots out clichéd leftist rhetoric about how downtrodden everyone is and how labor can hit the mother lode if only it spins its message ever so cleverly. Yet, even the data he cites refutes this. People may be insecure generally, but they're optimistic specifically. What that tells me is that an essential middle-class value of individualism, which is antithetical to collective unionism, is alive and well and out there looking for opportunity.
What creates middle-class jobs and middle-class friendly communities aren't the government programs Mossback's Thom Hartmann contends, but low-tax, pro-development (not high-rise, million-dollar condo development, but single-family homes on land that's now foreclosed to development), pro-economic growth policies that minimize government screwing up the economy and maximize the ability of individuals and entrepreneurs to freely participate in the marketplace.
Middle-class Americans are more likely to be gun owners, SUV drivers, families with kids, sports league members, church goers (not that prevalent in the PNW but common nationwide, something people up here don't understand but need to), and increasingly likely to scrimp and save in order to send their kids to non-governmental private schools. They aspire to own property and small businesses, and once they do the taxman becomes their enemy. They're ambitious and upwardly mobile, understanding that career or job advancement is their responsibility, not the government's, the union's, or even the boss'.
They want security, but they know that in a fluid culture, the only security they have is that which they make for themselves. It used to be that dad (NOTE: I said used to be) worked for the same firm from day one until retirement. Now, the average number of job changes in a career hovers between eight to 10, a number I consider low. The next major shift will be the increase in the average number of career changes during a work life. How many work in an industry that didn't exist 10-years ago, or used to work in an industry that died within the past 10-years?
Government and unions are institutionally incapable of keeping up with the rapid pace of economic change in an information and technology driven society. Government because it can't do anything in less than a millennia, and unions because they're in the business of saying, "NO!" to anything that might result in the loss of jobs for members.
The Piper
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 9:55 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Wobblies wobble and they always fall down...: Piper, man, I will let the blood libel of saying I'm the reincarnation of Karl Marx pass because I 1) love bagpipe music and 2) because it is off the charts on the ludicrous scale and 3) Crosscut doesn't allow four-letter responses. Please don't confuse a political phenomenon I observed and reported on as my special personal manifesto. I do believe the middle class in this country is getting screwed--and many conservatives, liberals, and in fact most Americans agree with me--but if you have a beef with unions co-opting middle class angst with "cliched leftist rhetoric," your argument is with them. As for your argument that government regulation is simply a helpless girly-man because of the "rapid pace of economic change in an information and technology driven society," what's the alternative to regulation? Anarchy? Hmmm. Which of us is the Wobbly now?
Posted Tue, Jun 19, 11:07 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Wobblies wobble and they always fall down...: Whichever one of you chuckleheads decides to get himself killed rioting for universal workers rights first can be the Wobbly... and preferably in Centrailia.
Posted Wed, Jun 20, 1:07 p.m. inappropriate
My Karl Marx Wobble-Head and Steve Schwarzman Bauble-Head Dolls: The Wobblies died fighting injustices and created a work environment that we now take for granted. That's the nature of progress. As time elapses, the injustices change, but INJUSTICE will always need to be fought.
In the sense that Karl Marx fought injustice, he was a Saint. In some ways I think of him as the grandfather of Social Security, Medicare, Workman's Compensation, and the Minimum Wage. On the other hand, his thinking leads to little things like Atheism, Central Planning, Communism, Stalinism, and Gulag archipeligos.
On the other hand, in case you hadn't noticed, Stephen Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, is about to take his non-Marxist private equity company public. (This is a bit confusing because this means his new company will be a public company that takes public companies private.) His expected reward for buying companies and laying off huge swaths of employees in the companies he buys will be $7.5 billion. That seems outrageous to me. On the other hand, he typically buys companies by combining his buying power with pension funds, who profit even more than has Mr. Schwarzman. Thus he has probably put $20B to $30B in the pockets of those retiring who will live on the pensions he has helped to grow. In this sense HE is a bit of a quasi-Saint, both for helping these people and for restructuring businesses to realize greater profit. But don't ask the laid off employees if they like him.
In any event, the spirits of both Karl and Steve are very much alive in the middle class. The cognitive dissonance thus created produces the middle class that Piper describes where God, Family, Country, Work, Home and Apple Pie don't seem bad at all.
Posted Wed, Jun 20, 1:59 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Wobblies wobble and they always fall down...: Here is the deal. Monopoloy Capitol is the alternative without regulation, which we all already know. (For example, history teaches this) We know without government reguation the world runs on the frantic boom and bust cycle (think diamond mines in Africa where the corporation comes in, pays people dirt wages, makes a huge profit, and then runs out of the ecosystem it has now destroyed.) Government regulation already controls these cycles. Society already decides how the game is played and how the cards are stacked. And there is nothing inherent about these rules. They are made up. By humans. They can be changed. I don't understand Piper's comment that the rapidly changing techonology sector makes government and unions ineffective ("girly-men" - says Mossback, which I resent, since I happen to have a long history of dating some very nice girly-men.).
If it is unions who have the power to throw the lifering to the sinking middle class, and if they throw it, will individualistic Americans grab it? Piper says, no, but I disagree. The middle class are greedy just like everybody else. If they see an effective real way to get a little more on their plate they'll go for it. The Union talking point on this is that there is more power in the collective and we deserve a bigger piece of the pie. To which, I have to say, let's get this party STARTED.
So Piper, here's a link to the music for the Internationale linked text in case you want to get ready for the next wobblie rally (at Hangman's Bridge in Centralia, they'll read the Mossback Manifesto (which is probably a detailed history of Seattle) and light sparklers.)
Posted Thu, Jun 21, 9:25 a.m. inappropriate
last but not least i too weigh in on this weighty shibboleth..: seattle bus driver and grocery story workers are some of the nicest. they have little choice. they constitute the lower lower middle class, earning about $ 20.00 per hour driving a bus, about $ 17 checking you out. and the great majority commute from the sub-sub-urbs.
there was a time, so i am told, when QFC, when independent, gave x-mas bonuses of 10 to 20 k to the head managers of its stores, and between 500 dollars to 1 k to regular employees. this generosity diminished severely upon QFC's acquisition by Fred Meyers, and now that KROGER owns the whole shebang, the regular employees get a $ 10 x-mas certificate which they must spend at the Kroger stores. Thus is indebtedness incurred by these conglomerizations paid for, and who knows what the CEO's x-mas bonus is? Debt service on the backs of these employees, few if any will graduate to what is known as the middle class, that great illusion that each and everyone can make it, which keeps one and all competing with each other, so that that one out of a hundred can. You can presume that KROGER and their ilk are looking foward to paying WALMART type wages to the ten million mexicans whom Nafta threw off their little farms in Mexico. Hey, but there's a bright side to things, the BioFuel explosion will drive the price of corn so high that the peons, the gardeners will return once it pays to grow corn in Mexico again.
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 10:33 a.m. inappropriate
Methinks I have riled his behemothness.
First, I said you were the reincarnation AND SPITTING IMAGE of old Karl much in the same way I compared you with bears a few weeks ago. With respect, Mossback, you and Karl? Yours is a...unique physique, and the drama of it adds to your mystique.
If you ever pen a Little House on the Prairie retrospective, I just might compare you to Mr. French.
Whether you subscribe whole hog to Karl's creed isn't something I sought to infer. But I was a bit bemused by what I saw as an uncritical acceptance of the so-called "progressive" agenda propounded by these new-found converts to middle-class living. Save for the well deserved slap you gave to the editors of The Stranger for what seemed to be an envisioning of and wishful thinking for a chain of Gulags to Go in which to pen up all who aren't progressive enough, I searched in vain for your peeling back and critically examining the phenomenon you observed and upon which you reported.
A few points...
Middle-class has multiple meanings. On the one hand, it connotes an economic standard of living, though exactly what that is seems to be open to definition. Nevertheless, my $100K longshoreman and the dual-income technology professionals making $150K plus consider themselves to be middle class, as does your Red Apple clerk. It's a broad spread.
On the other hand, middle-class has also historically referred to a set of values that exist apart from income and include a high regard for education, a strong work ethic, respect for the nuclear family, patriotism, respect for the institutions of government, faith, respect for private property, ambition, and the belief that the future isn't something to be made good or pleasant by the government or anyone but the person to whom it belongs.
The leftist thinkers and union activists you cite are disconnected from all this.
Much of what you cited as "new thinking" is a re-hash of what's been kicked around academia and the hiring halls and labor temples of America for generations. I didn't get a sense that progressives and unionists have a plan to increase the pie they seek to slice in their redistributed, "soak the rich" sort of way.
Thom Hartmann's little list is a great example. Government programs didn't create the middle class, individual hard work and economic growth through private enterprise did. Whether you're a small business owner or a wage earner, your income is dependent upon the economic health of the enterprise with which you're associated, not a government program. That is unless you're a public employee.
Sounds like Hartmann wrote that stuff wrapped in a gigantic red flag with a quill pen in one hand and Das Kapital in another. His isn't an agenda for middle class revival; it's for a dictatorship of the proletariat!
Sure, middle class families face uncertain futures! They've always faced uncertain futures; that's the nature of futures. But they want educational excellence for their kids, and that's measured through testing, Hartmann's denial notwithstanding. It is a competitive world, after all. And while they're concerned about medical costs and insurance affordability, they're also deeply suspicious that a government that botched Hurricane Katrina relief and can't secure the nation's borders will do a good job of providing health care services. Will a Brownie be placed in charge of the National Health?
End of Part I...
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 10:35 a.m. inappropriate
Again...the percentage of unionized employees in the workforce hovers at about 12%, down from around 30% in the late 70's. To get even punier, the unionized percentage in the private sector of the economy is just under 8%. This is the engine of middle class prosperity??? Sounds more like making the engine of Boeing's 787 out of a single old and quite dried up rubber band attached to a plastic propeller.
In the speech of his you linked in your article, does Krugman assert anything about engines at all? Or is his discussion focused on what he perceives as the unequal distribution of income? And doesn't his argument about unions center not so much on how the increase wages at the bottom, but how they prevent increases at the top? Doesn't his main gripe center not on an absence of equality of opportunity to participate in the marketplace, but on equality of results?
Krugman makes some bald assertions that are disconnects from reality. One is that the decline in private sector unions comes as the result of union busting, a totally bogus and unfounded assertion. The other is that there's no earthly reason why the service sector of the economy (he uses Wal-Mart and big-box stores as an example) shouldn't simply "go union."
Makes me wonder when the guy was last in a manufacturing plant or the lunchroom of a retail outfit. In the first instance, unions have been unsuccessful selling their program to those manufacturing sector employees they seek to organize. Why? Checked the latest employment statistics out of the Big Three automakers lately? What's cited in the paper and on the nightly news for the lousy health of the auto industry are cost prohibitive union contracts. The so-called "engine" of the middle-class has thrown a rod.
Couple with that the fact that not all non-union employers are ogres. Most provide competitive wages and benefits within their industry. They have to in order to attract and retain employees in an economy where the unemployment rate is at 4.5%, down from this time a year ago.
And his service sector analysis presumes that workers at Wal-Mart or big box stores see themselves staying there throughout their careers. My daughter, a 22-year old super-star senior at the University of Washington was hired not long ago at a major big-box retailer for $11.50 per hour, which isn't bad for someone with zero experience in that line of work. She plans on working there until mid-August when she leaves for three months in France (she's a French major). Her job isn't an end, as Krugman presumes, but a means to an end.
Furthermore, Krugman ignores the real growth sector in unionization: public employees, which are an entirely different kettle of fish. Their rise into the ranks of the middle-class comes at the expense of middle-class taxpayers. It's only in looking at public sector unionization that his income compression analysis pans out since the more unionized public sector employees make, the less their employers - that would be us private sector middle class taxpayer types - make.
End of Part II...
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 10:38 a.m. inappropriate
The UFCW, organizer of the rally you attended, Mossback, together with my old alma mater, the SEIU, the Teamsters, and several other international unions broke away from the AFL-CIO a couple years ago to create the Change to Win Coalition. Dissatisfied with the leadership of AFL-CIO president, John Sweeny (himself a former SEIU international president and whose comments you linked at the end of your article), the breakaway unions wanted to chart a more aggressive, more radical organizing effort, the rally you attended no doubt a result.
But this fissure in organized labor evidences tension and ambivalence in the very engine of middle-class survival. Which end of labor's stick is up? What will this mean long-term to organizing efforts? What about raiding by one union in one group of a bargaining unit belonging to another union in another group?
If you think dirtybadnastymultinational corporations are the ultimate in cutthroat and ruthless, you haven't participated in a competitive organizing campaign pitting two unions against each other. It's a missing chapter from Lord of the Flies!
What unions can no longer achieve in the market place via organizing and bargaining wages, hours, and conditions, they seek to get legislatively. A couple examples, including one from our own state...Last week, the United States Supreme Court slapped down the Washington Supreme Court and the Washington Education Association in a landmark decision involving the use of non-union workers' dues for political advocacy purposes. The high court held that a Washington law then in effect requiring a union to seek the employee's written permission before using her dues money for political purposes wasn't an infringement upon the union's free speech or free association rights.
Expecting this outcome, labor exercised its muscle in Olympia to repeal the law the Supreme Court upheld replacing it with one requiring an employee to specifically opt out if she objects to political uses of her dues money. How sleazy is that?
Another example is the effort underway in Washington, D.C. to eliminate the right of employees to a secret ballot election to determine if a union is to represent them at the workplace. Labor is hot to trot to get Congress to pass legislation allowing card-checks to be the means by which majority status is measured.
Speaking as an old organizer, it's a piece of cake to get someone at a worksite, in a parking lot, or over a kitchen table to sign a union authorization card. Nothing like employing the high-pressure tactics of your average used-car salesman! Gone will be the sanctity of the secret ballot, replaced by a piece of paper signed oft times in haste with a less than candid explanation of its significance and secured by an organizer paid by the number of cards signed. And you thought Tim Eyman's paid initiative signature gatherers were bad!
Pimping the so-called Employee Free Choice Act is the main theme of the AFL-CIO "editorial" by John Sweeny referenced above.
At this rate, look for there to be interest in this state to be the 23rd to implement Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, which outlaws compulsory union membership. After all, isn't freedom of choice a middle-class value?
End of Part III...
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 10:40 a.m. inappropriate
Saying that government and unions are incapable of keeping up with the turn-on-a-dime nature of today's workplace and workforce belabors the obvious. By the time Washington or Olympia study, re-study, debate, deliberate, debate some more, draft legislation, debate the drafts, send same to conference committees, hold press conferences touting their achievements, go to fundraisers, finally pass an underfunded law, and have it signed by the president or governor, entire sectors of the economy are extinguished or created, and middle-class employees changed jobs several times.
Information and technology move, change, and shift faster than government and unions can keep up. Even in non-technology based industries (your Red Apple supermarket, for example), change can be instantaneous, government and unions aren't.
Union thinking leans toward a fixed-sum analysis of everything. The size of the pie is constant, growth is an unknown, and everything is a battle of take-aways. What the union gets for itself and its members comes from take-aways from the boss. What the union can't get or loses during bargaining isn't seen as a necessary concession, but as a take-away. Classic us versus them thinking.
Unions can and do perform a valuable service, and any company these days that loses a National Labor Relations Board certification election deserves it. I welcome their participation in the marketplace, but in order for them to participate, they must compete just like everyone else. In the immortal words of Rod Tidwell, "Show me the money!" If a union is to be an effective player in the economic game, then it has to produce results, not rhetoric. The manhole-cover-in-a-lake nature of the sinking membership of unions nationwide indicate that that not only are customers not buying, but they're not buying in numbers sufficient that if they were private businesses, shareholders would be in open revolt and the bankruptcy courts would be clogged with filings.
But since unions, for the most part, can continue to check off dues through deduction from members' paychecks irrespective of the quality of the service or product they provide, competitive innovation, customer service, and responsibility won't matter. Even so, with membership numbers dropping at the rate of .5% per year (12.5% in 2005, 12% in 2006), by the middle of the next decade the only place you'll find a union is either in a museum or on a government payroll.
End of Part IV...
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 11:19 a.m. inappropriate
When government recognizes that its role isn't as a player in the economic game, it's not, Mossback, what you call a girly-man, it's a manly-man. Government should neither be active participant nor passive spectator; it referees the game to make sure that the rules are followed. Legal enforcement of private contracts is an excellent example. Without that, there can be no safe, predictable risk to reward economic activity.
In a capitalistic, free-market economy, government serves best when it creates a framework of rules that define acceptable behavior and then fairly polices the players to ensure that they adhere to the rules. It's not good policy for government to decide what end results or final scores should be.
Whenever it forgets its proper role and begins tweaking with the scoreboard, then the whole game gets fouled up. A seven-run mercy rule may be OK in Little League, but in the majors you play nine full innings no matter the score; that's what adults do.
For government to say that this worker is underpaid or that CEO is overpaid is to beg the question, according to whom? Whose definitions are we to use? Anyone making more than me is overpaid and should give me some of theirs. Anyone making less than me who asks me for some of mine is a thief. What's it to be? As long as someone must decide, it might as well be me.
The P-I on June 19th reprinted a great article from The Economist that identified "four biases that prompt voters systematically to demand policies that make them worse off.
"First, people do not understand how the pursuit of private profits often yields public benefits: They have an anti- market bias. Second, they underestimate the benefits of interactions with foreigners: They have an anti-foreign bias. Third, they equate prosperity with employment rather than production: (George Mason University economist Bruce) Caplan calls this the "make-work bias." Finally, they tend to think economic conditions are worse than they are, a bias toward pessimism."
Without going into detail, The Economist piece emphasizes the superiority of market-driven and free economies over hyper-regulated ones; private choice is superior to government control.
End of Part V...
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 11:20 a.m. inappropriate
When you asked me what the alternative is to government regulation, you propounded but one suggestion of your own: anarchy. I submit that the alternative to government regulation is freedom, liberty, and unlimited opportunity, all of which are middle-class values. I further submit that these values are antithetical to the constraints placed upon someone by a union, especially when the union offers nothing but the same re-tread arguments it's flogged since well before the days of Jimmy Hoffa, albeit packaged in appealing prose.
The survival of the middle class really is something for members of the middle class to resolve. Looking to government or unions or any other third party "savior" will eventually result in its demise. The middle class, through its participation in a free market, created itself, and it is in the best position to ensure its survival be remaining flexible, adaptable, innovative, and energetic.
This exercise won't be without its problems - all life has its problems †? but they will be for the middle class to resolve, not someone else. My guess? I have faith in middle class people; they are me and I am them, and I'm confident we'll not only figure a way out of whatever morass we're in, but we'll thrive and prosper in the process.
The Piper
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 11:26 a.m. inappropriate
The Piper
Posted Fri, Jun 22, 7:48 p.m. inappropriate
The Economies of the Self: As a social worker, I've had opportunity to witness the stark crisis of American lives first hand. And I'll tell you this, its worse than you think. I've always considered myself a leftie liberal, a good Seattle girl with an expensive education. But I'll tell you, the view I have had of the low income middle class, the good, hard-working people whose children are diagnosed with ADHD, who subscribe to the values that Piper describes, God, patriotism, the whole thing, and the values of materialism face and unfriendly economic climate. Both parents working, and they still qualitfy for low income housing, for which there is a seven year waiting list in Whatcom County. These people are stretched to their limit, man. Its stressful to be poor and worry about money. To have your children undergo diagnostic testing for a "brain disorder." I've stood by these good people as they break under the stress. They come and talk to me because they've lost their temper with their kids, or they've drank too much, or tried to take their own life, or even someone else's. Invariably, they blame their failure to get ahead on themselves, they personalize it. But certainly, at least a part of their stress is pure economics. The idea that they can do something about their situation turns out to be an illusion. The idea that we have some measure of control over our destinies turns out to be a important one for psychological stability. They are sold on the capitolism=democracy rhetoric of the Reagan era, and so frantically work on the low income, going no-where, hamster wheel of low paying jobs, in hopes for reaching for a better future that doesn't statistically exist.
John Ralston Saul comments on the rhetorical frame of the debate regarding the linking of free enterprise with free man. I've spent many hours thinking about liberation, about how we can liberate ourselves from our emotional complexes, how therapy can help identify our sphere of influence, and have a sense of control over the things we can do something about. Our collective economic language seeps into the moral language we use in our inner dialogues with the self. And the confusion between capitalism and democracy shows itself in this quiet value-laden conversation. And it blooms in the field of mental health.
I share Piper's optimistic outlook, that we have the power to make changes, but I'm filled with an outrage that feels personal and intimate after working so closely with the hearts and minds of people who face unrelenting stress in their economic lives. Its a stress that seems frustratingly familiar. I'm stranglely gratefull for this odd blog of conversation. It matters to me that people take this topic so seriously.
Posted Sat, Jun 23, 9:11 a.m. inappropriate
The Piper
[June 21, 2007] http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/06/21/2730465.htm
Some Boeing Wichita workers vote to kick out SPEEA
(News Tribune, The (Tacoma, WA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jun. 21--Posted online at 9:37 a.m. Wednesday
Technical and professional employees at Boeing's Wichita, Kan., plant have voted to decertify a Seattle-based union as their representative.
The Tuesday vote was 353 to retain the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace and 408 to decertify the union.
The main issue in the election appeared to be the failure of the union to obtain participation in Boeing's Employee Incentive Plan for union members in the last contract.
The plan pays bonuses based on the company's financial performance. Employees in the plan in recent years have received thousands of dollars in payments because of Boeing's rising fortunes.
SPEEA still represents 740 engineers at Boeing's Wichita plant.
SPEEA-represented employees in the Puget Sound area participate in the incentive plan.
John Gillie, The News Tribune
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