Last week in downtown
Chicago, four lads break-danced on the Federal Plaza to exhibit why this year’s
Labor Day provides opportunity for both merriment and dissent.
The dancers — black,
Latino, white, all giving a fabulous performance — were fast-food and retail
employees on strike on August 29 for $15-an-hour pay demand and the privilege
to put up a union without reprisal. They were joined by about 400 other
low-salary workers from over 60 businesses
assembling for a festivity after a day of expressing their chief demands — with
particular added corresponding demands for each workplace — to their companies,
which, from McDonald’s to Sears, form a Who’s Who of trademark fast-food and
retail firms.
It was the third wave for
several workers involved in the protracted strike which started last November
in New York, with Chicago conducting protest marches late in 2012 as well, and
stretched into July to five other traditional union capitals. On Thursday —
immediately after the 50th commemoration of the March on Washington for Jobs
and Freedom — thousands of workers from a total of about 60 cities participated
in a national day of demonstration, the biggest so far. Strikes flashed in the
South, in such cities as Raleigh, N.C. and Memphis, Tenn., and in minor
Northern cities, such as Bloomington and Peoria, Ill. In tiny Ellsworth, Maine,
a town-labor crowd showed support for higher pay for fast-food workers although
no one went on strike. In a few instances, workers seemed to have assembled
after getting wind of the prior actions, calling everyone they knew to ask how
they could join in the succeeding strike.
The motive behind this
euphoric rush of activity consists of several reasons why it is badly needed —
slow job-growth, underemployment, fixed or decreasing wages, weak labor
standards, a hindered union progress, growing inequality, a work-related
arrangement shifting toward more low-salary service jobs, and prevalent abuse
of power by the very wealthy few.
The decrease in the
official rate of unemployment hides the level at which American employees face
a very bleak future in labor. A big part of the improvement in the unemployment
rate merely shows an increase in the number of disheartened or “marginally
attached” workers (people seeking jobs who have ceased doing so). The portion
of the workforce holding part-time jobs involuntarily has also grown.
Such drop in the demand for
labor, besides the waning power of unions and the slashes in salary demanded by
both public and private employers (frequently associated with outsourcing or,
at public employers, privatizing), keeps down — or further depresses — incomes
that had not improved much even from 2000 to 2007, when the recession set in.
Between 2007 and 2012, while productivity improved by 7.7 percent, salaries
dipped for the lowest 70 percent of the workforce, according to a report
released recently by the Economic
Policy Institute through its researchers Lawrence Mishel and Heidi
Shierholz.
The weakness of the labor
movement, particularly in rising, low-income sectors like retail and fast-food,
is responsible for much of the decline; but the waning value of the minimum
wage holds a big role. According to another recent EPI study, by Sylvia
Allegretto and Steven C. Pitts, if the federal government
reinstituted the minimum salary to its maximum rate in 1968, the minimum salary
would be $9.44 at present in inflation-adjusted dollars, not $7.25. And if it
corresponded in real terms the $2.00 minimum salary demanded 50 years ago by
the March on Washington, the minimum wage would be $13.39 — close to the
striking fast-food workers’ demand and to the minimum in many advanced
countries (about $12 per hour in France and $15 per hour in Australia, for cite
a few). If the minimum salary had increased as much as labor productivity since
1968, it would be $22 per hour.
Any increase in the federal
minimum would principally aid people of color and women, Allegretto and Pitts
say. Contrary to stereotypes of low-income employees such as teenagers, a hike
would benefit many adult, family-earning workers. In a report for EPI published
in March, David Cooper and Dan Essrow estimated that with even the slight
$10.10 minimum proposed by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller
(D-Calif.), the mean age of low-wage employees whose wage would likely increase
is 35. Eighty-eight percent are above 20 years old, and 35.5 percent are 40
years old or more. Moreover, 44 percent of the beneficiaries would be employees
with some college schooling, and 28 percent with offspring.
The predicament of
low-salary workers is turning into an even more severe problem as the country’s
occupational structure, that is, the types of jobs being created or maintained,
has altered. According to Daniel Alpert of the Century Foundation, 70 percent
of the jobs created in the second quarter of 2013 were low-salary, such as
retail and hospitality jobs, about twice the percentage of such jobs in the
general workforce. And over 50 percent of all fresh jobs in the first semester
of 2013 were part-time.
Incomes have grown for the
highest 5 percent, however, chiefly, the wealthiest. The top 1 percent — principally, executives and
financial managers — garnered 121 percent of the country’s new income within
the first two years of the recovery, according to University of California,
Berkeley economist Emanuel Saez. How do they do that? Essentially, they siphon
all national income proceeds to themselves while concurrently capturing more
from the 99 percent.
Observing more closely
shows an even uglier picture. The success of the very rich frequently involves
large components of chicanery, deception and misuse of public resources,
according to a fresh study, “Bailed Out, Booted, Busted,” the 20th yearly Labor
Day publication of the Executive Excess reports from the Institute for Policy
Studies. The researchers gathered information from 20 years of their studies,
which depended on yearly Wall Street Journal surveys of CEO compensation.
Their ultimate survey
involved 500 CEOS — the 25 highest-paid CEOs annually for twenty years. IPS
reports that 38 percent of these CEOs had performed very badly as executives of
their companies. Of those poor performers, 22 percent of the top salary leaders
brought their companies into bankruptcy or bailout; 8 percent were fired (but
received golden parachutes worth an average of $38 million); and 8 percent were
convicted of fraud.
Then there are plainly the
outrageously over-paid, raking in above $1 billion during their term, and other
executives who served themselves from the “taxpayer trough,” collecting top
salary while their firms gained from major
government contracts.
Any shift toward equal
opportunity will have to stop the excess at the peak as well as uplift the
bottom. But more than achieving essential justice, society would gain more benefits
— quicker and more solid growth (and therefore a faster, more healthful
recovery); lower crime rates; lesser social tension; a more stable democracy;
and better health, longer life and lower medical expenses, to mention only a
few. (See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level.)
U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky,
co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was not mouthing hollow words,
but rather practical wisdom, when she spoke to strikers in Chicago, “These
workers are among thousands and thousands of low-income workers around the
nation, who have a truly reasonable and simple demand, which is to be given a
living wage. …These are the producers; they are the takers. I want to thank
these courageous workers who walked out. They are doing it for themselves and
they are doing it also for America.”
And it appears the strikers
are doing it their way, with people volunteering and reaching out to other
employees to pass on the word. Most activities involve raps composed by
strikers about their work, and protest methods color their choices. For
example, in Chicago, the protesters this time aimed to take action at every
store where somebody walked out, not merely a couple of chosen special targets,
as in the July strike. And they wanted to hold a celebration at the final
moment. If the fast-food struggle succeeds, it will be a product of that
radical attitude.
The spirit was present in
the break-dance — introduced in Spanish and English, as all the events were
presented before the crowd of balance-mixed ethnicities, performed under a
streamer declaring, “Fight for 15, Valemos Mas.” Dancing to Michael Jackson’s
“Beat It,” a couple of mock-suited “CEO” dancers faced off with two other
workers from Potbelly’s.
The workers triumphed, of
course! No, it was not Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers performing “Roll the
Union On” this time. But Pete would have certainly approved.
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