Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah
Labor Rights Are Civil Rights
“Those of us in the civil rights community know that the Employee Free Choice Act is more than a labor bill,” Henderson told colleagues. “Labor rights are civil rights.”
If the bill is painted as just a management-vs-unions issue, it loses, he warned.
“This is a simple fix to a loophole in labor law,” added Arlene Holt-Baker, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President and the highest-ranking African-American in the union federation. “It would let workers express their choice in an environment without intimidation” by bosses and their anti-union campaigns, she added.
“For African-Americans, we must make this a priority,” added Bill Lucy, AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer and head of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. A weakened union movement, which has been a key player in civil rights causes, diminishes the chance that African-Americans can achieve their other political goals, he pointed out.
UNIONS STEP UP MASS MOBILIZATION FOR EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE, ENLIST AFRICAN-AMERICAN LEADERS AS ALLIES, Friday, April 10, 2009
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the real progressive measure of the Obama administration’s fist stage is their commitment to the Employee Free Choice Act. There’s lots to be said about the first sixty or seventy days, good and bad, but the EFCA is the first attempt to change the game from the ground up.
I was listening to Cornell West yesterday on the Tavis Smiley show and he made a relevant comparison to Lincoln. Lincoln, like Obama, was a skilled but pragmatic politician. He became the Great Emancipator partly due to constant pressure from the left wing, that is, the abolitionists.
Obama is pragmatic and equally in need of lefty pressure. The public has to demand change– a single payer health care system, for example– or it’s not going to happen. That won’t happen unless we have the tools. Or, what amounts to the same thing, to take away impediments to their power.
The EFCA does both. In effect, it’s a kind of gamble. If employers are no longer able to punish union organizers, and if organizing is simpler, will people take the opportunity? The opinion polls as well as the unions all strongly suggest they will. That would mean a real shift in the way power works in the United States.
The Black Keys: Just Got to Be
Depression, Recession
The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who’d rather be working full time, it’s now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.
Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can’t find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can’t find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.
It’s a Depression, Robert Reich, Friday, April 03, 2009,
It’s hard to get a handle on what the economy is doing. I work in a sector–proprietary education– that is tailor-made for economic troubles, so I don’t have that feeling that things are going downhill. I am used to hearing about the travails of the working class, too, either from my family or from my students. So I can’t say that I have been hearing more of that sort of thing, either.
I don’t mean in any way to question his integrity, but Reich is a mainstream, liberal economist, and so has something like a vested interest in promoting the largest stimulus package possible. It’s not surprising that he favors the term depression. And, of course, the unemployment numbers are probably the best measure, as he suggests, of how poorly we are doing.
On the other hand, Doug Henwood, who is a very careful observer of the numbers, has a nuanced, if still bad, notion of the state what he calls “that abstraction The Economy.” He sees some signs of hope, although he seems to have little patience with the idea that the recovery is coming sooner rather than later; the stimulus money is not yet spent, after all.
What is a depression? According to Kimberly Amadeo on About.com we have a long way to go before we get to Great Depression levels: “unemployment was 25% and wages… fell 42%. …U.S. economic output fell from $103 to $55 billion and world trade plummeted 65%.” We are not there yet, but I don’t think the worst is over yet.