Public Employee Press

The World of Work
Big Squeeze

By GREGORY N. HEIRES

“Labor unions once were, and could be again, the most effective tool to improve the lot of the American worker.”
—Steven Greenhouse

Once upon a time, American workers could reasonably expect to have a secure job with health insurance and a guaranteed retirement income.

But the relative prosperity enjoyed by our country’s post-World War II generation seems like a utopian dream nowadays to all but the superrich.

For the first time in the nation’s history, a majority of parents fear their children face downward mobility.

But that shattering of American optimism is hardly surprising. Working people have suffered for three decades as their real wages fell, their pensions and health benefits deteriorated and their jobs went overseas.

Steven Greenhouse, the labor and workplace correspondent of The New York Times, chronicles the political and economic factors behind the assault on American workers in his recently published book “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker.”

As Greenhouse points out, a contributing factor to the shift of the playing field against labor occurred when President Ronald Reagan fired 11,500 air traffic controllers in 1981.

For public employees, the firing helped usher in an era of attacks on governmentservices through downsizing, budget cuts and contracting out that still affects us today.

For public employee unions like DC 37, the anti-labor climate described by Greenhouse has meant they must be always on guard to aggressively counter proposals to slash budgets and farm out services.

On May 8, a forum at the City University’s Murphy Institute examined the themes of the book. The forum, moderated by Gene Carroll of Cornell University, included Jonathan Tasini, executive director of the Labor Research Association, Hector Figueroa, secretary-treasurer of SEIU Local 32-BJ, and Greenhouse.

Life is out of whack for workers
“Something is fundamentally out of whack for today’s workers,” said Greenhouse, contrasting today’s harsh economy to the 1950s and 1960s, when about a third of the workforce was unionized and workers could count on negotiating with their employers for good health care protection and traditional pensions that provide a comfortable retirement.

These days, Greenhouse said, workers have become invisible. He said he decided to write his first book because he wanted to share what he has learned about their plight while traveling the country to cover labor issues.

The chapter titles — including “Workplace Hell,” “The Vise Tightens,” “Wal-Mart, the Low-Wage Colossus,” “Overstressed and Overstretched,” and “Outsourced and Out of Luck” — speak to the economic warfare employers are waging against American workers.

Filled with poignant stories about individual struggling workers, the book highlights the ugly consequences of the breakdown of the social compact between capital and labor. And it’s not a pretty picture:

• Corporate profits doubled and productivity went up 15 percent since the last recession ended in November 2001, but the average pay of the typical worker increased by only 1 percent.
  
  
• The number of Americans without health insurance rose by 8.2 million to 47 million from 2000 to 2006.
  
  
• Inequality is returning to Great Depression levels, with the income of the top 1 percent of Americans tripling from 1979 to 2005 while the bottom fifth of households gained only 6 percent.
  
  
• At companies with over 100 employees, traditional pensions cover only 33 percent of workers today, compared with 84 percent in 1984.

American workers face a corporate culture known for its meanness in the only advanced industrialized country that does not guarantee workers sick days, paid vacation and paid maternity leave, Greenhouse noted in his talk.

In their comments, Tasini and Figueroa suggested that the assault on American workers will continue unless the labor movement regains its strength, a pro-worker mass movement develops and fairer trade policies are adopted.

“We too often talk about globalization, declining wages and inequality as abstract forces,” Figueroa said. A labor movement truly committed to changing the politics of the country can address the devastation unleashed by those trends, he said.