Paul Ryan's budget ideas may be a path to prosperity for some ... but mostly those who are already plenty prosperous.
While Walmart (and McDonald's and Burger King and ...) is responsible for its decision to pay low wages, Dean Baker points out that
policy is also to blame. In addition to trade policy that's cost the United States manufacturing jobs, he points to the federal budget:
We talk about stimulus as a conscious policy to boost growth and create jobs. While this is true, it often leaves the implication that the budget policy we pursue when we are not deliberately trying to stimulate the economy is somehow natural.
This is absurd. People like Paul Ryan and Max Baucus are setting tax and spending policy; it is not handed down to us by the gods or nature. If we are stuck with an economy that is operating well below its potential, with tens of millions of people unemployed or underemployed, this is due to the fact that we have a budget policy that does not create enough demand in the economy. Whether our budgeteers thought through the consequences of their policy or not doesn’t really matter. They gave us budgets that were inconsistent with full employment.
High unemployment not only reduces the number of job openings, it puts downward pressure on the wages of workers with jobs. [...]
This means that when Congress decides to give us a budget that unnecessarily raises the unemployment rate, it is also deciding to put downward pressure on the wages of low-paid workers. This is a policy decision to redistribute income upward, even if the people in Congress have no clue what they are doing.
For many members of Congress, that upward redistribution is very intentional, though the Republican Party certainly has a number of members too stupid to understand just what it is that they're doing. Either way, it's important to understand that policy not only allows but often encourages corporations to race toward the bottom.
Continue reading for more of the week's labor news.
Miscellaneous
- If anyone ever tries to convince you that Nelson Mandela was really in his heart of hearts a conservative (crazy, I know, but they've tried to do it with Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, so I'm taking nothing for granted), refer them to this picture of Mandela for his views on unions. Also, remind them about the armed struggle for freedom thing, obviously.
- Here's an interesting development in the relationship between unions and the Democratic Party that often takes them for granted:
Union-dense Lorain County, Ohio, is now home to an independent labor slate of two dozen newly elected city councilors—recruited and run by the central labor council there. All labor’s candidates had strong showings last month, and all but two were elected.
“This was a step we took reluctantly,” said Lorain County AFL-CIO President Harry Williamson. “When the leaders of the [Democratic] Party just took us for granted and tried to roll over the rights of working people here, we had to stand up.”
It's not something that can likely be replicated in many other places, or for higher office, but it serves notice of a sort.
A fair day's wage
- While the people we generally refer to as bankers make piles of money, lots of bank employees are not well paid or well treated. They don't just come in for abuse from their bosses, but from customers frustrated at dealing with bank fees and angry with the banks' role in the economy. But, Sarah Jaffe reports:
The New-York-based Committee for Better Banks is aiming to change all that. As I reported in November, the coalition of community and labor groups has set out to improve the finance industry by improving conditions for its frontline workers. The hope is that empowered tellers and customer service representatives, who live in the communities where they work and know the customers they regularly serve, will help create more community-friendly banks.
- So, wow. The Department of Labor has a new rule promoting the hiring of veterans and disabled workers, and Associated Builders and Contractors—a group sometimes described as "the ALEC of the construction industry"—is trying to get an injunction against it. ABC said in a statement that it has no problem with hiring veterans and disabled people:
“However,” Burr added, “this rule will do nothing to increase employment opportunities for individuals with disabilities.
“Instead, the new burdens it imposes mean many construction contractors are likely to stop pursuing government construction projects—particularly small businesses that currently provide services, but lack the resources to meet the rule’s new burdensome requirements.”
Um, right. So you support it, just not to the point of, you know, supporting it.
- It's always nice when anti-worker campaigns are just comically awful.
- From the Department of Labor: 100 books that shaped work in America.
- More on pension cuts in Illinois.
- Duke Energy, union's contract talks raise safety concerns at nuke plant. (Via @Blogwood)
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That graph, via Paul Krugman, seems like an "enough said" situation.
- More on the Black Friday Walmart protests and how Chicago Whole Foods workers got their Thanksgiving.
- It's not just Detroit: More Michigan cities and schools in financial emergency under Rick Snyder than all other governors combined.
- The minimum we can do.