Weekend Economists View the Trojan Horse June 15-17, 2012

[Demeter]

83. Post-New Deal America Needs Unions

http://prospect.org/article/post-new-deal-america-needs-unions

Those who think workers only needed to organize in the bad old days need to face the hard truth: We're living in them...One of the most common arguments against unions is that they were necessary in the bad old days, when sweatshops abounded, wages were low, and the wage-and-hour legislation of the New Deal was yet to be enacted. They were needed in the pre-New Deal economy, but have been superfluous since. What the argument misses is that we’re now deep into a post-New Deal economy, and the low-wage work, wage theft, unpaid overtime and job insecurity—in the technical parlance of economists, the shit jobs—that abounded before the New Deal have returned in full force.

...According to a paper from the National Employment Law Project [April 2012 Issue Brief, “Slower Real Growth, Declining Real Wages Undermine Recovery], 30 percent of this decade’s job openings will have a median wage around $20,000. According to a report issued earlier this month by the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a survey of food workers—from farm workers to processing workers to kitchen workers to servers—found that just 13.5 percent made a wage that was at least 150 percent of the regional poverty threshold. And need I point out that the nation’s largest private-sector employer, with more than 1.4 million workers (excuse me, associates) based in the United States, is WalMart? And that many thousands more work in Wal-Mart’s low-wage supply chain, among them port truckers who struggle to break even and warehouse workers who make just over the minimum wage?

In short, shit jobs abound. The shit jobs that are often the only jobs that workers who’ve lost decent-paying jobs as American manufacturing can find. And for all we hear about American wages having to come down as a result of globalization and low-wage foreign competition, none of the jobs I’ve mentioned are subject to foreign competition. Alan Blinder, the Princeton economist who was deputy Chairman of the Federal Reserve during Bill Clinton’s presidency, has set the number of American jobs that can be offshored at a little over 40 million – meaning, roughly twice that number of jobs cannot. That’s one thing that happens when you shift from a manufacturing-dominated economy to a service-dominated one.

Have there been efforts to unionize these jobs? Many—and yet the vast majority have failed due to the dysfunctionality of the laws that nominally protect workers’ right to organize. Port truckers, for instance, lost their employee status and were rendered “independent contractors” by the deregulation of the trucking industry. Absent an employer of record, they barely get by. Wal-Mart has many thousands of warehouse workers who take the products off those trucks, sort and stack them on pallets bound for WalMarts all over the nation, but WalMart has arranged a system by which those workers are employed by a bewildering array of temporary employment agencies. Unions have been trying to organize the port truckers and the warehouse workers for years – in the case of the truckers, for decades – but the byzantine employment arrangements have proved too steep a climb.

MORE