In recent years, our nation’s social contract has been radically re-written. Despite growth in productivity and the overall size of the economy, most of us aren’t seeing our share of U.S. prosperity. Economic health has been redefined as corporate health. The result is that the economy as we know it is broken.
Fixing it starts with empowering workers.
This week, the Roosevelt Institution sponsored an all-day conference, “Toward a New New Deal,” where scholars and activists talked about the challenges facing the country and the policies needed to turn it around.
One of the conference’s several great sessions, “Employment, Wages and Unions in an Era of Immigration and Globalization,” included such panelists as Mary Beth Maxwell, executive director of American Rights at Work. Maxwell says economic inequality is based on the increasing inability of workers to form unions. Empowering workers in the labor market doesn’t only benefit workers in unions, she says. It raises standards for all workers.
Working families need unions. We’ve got to say the “u” word. We have a 1930s labor policy that’s not up to scale to our 21st century economy. If we’re going to restore the middle class, we have to restore workers’ freedom to form unions.
Maxwell says that momentum is building for the Employee Free Choice Act, a necessary reform of federal labor laws that will restore workers’ rights. Maxwell describes the current economic crisis as an “FDR moment,” with an opportunity to update labor law and improve workers’ lives as profoundly as Roosevelt did.
They did not do this because it was easy. They had to fight hard to secure democracy and some semblance of economic justice. We have to have as much vision and as much courage as FDR.
Eddie Costa, an organizer with the AFL-CIO’s Immigrant Worker Program, says the inequalities in the labor market show the need to expand unions and lift up all workers and the need to enforce laws meant to protect workers. He points to the Community-Labor-Environmental-Action Network (CLEAN) campaign (see video above), an effort to get car washes in the Los Angeles area to pay fair wages, as an example of the ground-up organizing needed to improve workers’ lives.
It’s about the kind of society we want to have. In any society where you have a healthy, strong union movement, you have a healthier society.
Larry Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, says unions long have been the key to sustainable economic growth and shared prosperity.
There’s no solution to our economic problems that doesn’t involve a stronger labor movement. It’s necessary for workplace democracy, it’s necessary for wage-led growth.
Mishel pointed to a pattern in public policy that cast high-wage jobs as a problem, a source of economic inefficiency rather than strength. Offshoring, privatizing of government jobs, the failure to raise the minimum wage and deregulation are all part of this pattern. It’s the pattern that has disconnected wages from productivity and generated enormous growth in the incomes of the wealthiest top 1 percent along with stagnation for nearly everyone else.
The breaking of the social contract in recent years was no accident, says Miles Rapoport, the president of Demos. Just like Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was the result of intentional political choices. And, in the same way, progressive activists must make intentional, imaginative and ambitious policy changes. Rather than being a generation that leaves its children poorer, Rapoport says, there’s an opportunity to make life better through investing in our future.
The table has been set for a different conversation based on the total, abject failure of 30 years of right-wing policy.
Chief among the changes needed is remaking the social contract so that workers get to share in the profits they’re responsible for creating, Maxwell says. The way to ensure a fair share for workers is to empower them through the Employee Free Choice Act.