Thread: Working American families losing ground

FROM THE EDITOR: Working American families losing ground
September 02, 2007 6:00 AM
The year I was born, my father and his Teamster brothers — World War II vets come home to claim what was theirs — fought for nearly 100 days against company-hired goons for health insurance and better wages at a New York City brewery. They would win, and for Dad the job meant a steady paycheck for 30 years. Eighteen years later, it meant work for his only son, who was paying his way through college and becoming the first member of this immigrant family to get a university degree.

Labor Day was the only holiday most Teamsters members wouldn't work even for double time back then, because it meant something. It marked the bargain they had made with ownership: decent wages and benefits for hard, hard work, and at the end, a pension for their old age.

But New York City and New Bedford will mark Labor Day on Monday much as it has been marked for years now: without much fanfare, without an upswelling of collective pride by working men and women, and without much of a promise that better days are ahead.

The old bargain between ownership and labor is broken, and unless a new one is struck, the United States could find itself more or less where it was in the 1930s, when we flirted with socialism, and newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt confronted a nation on the verge of wholesale civil disorder. It would take the promise of a New Deal to postpone worse trouble, and it would take a world war to bring prosperity to ordinary Americans.

But the scale has tilted so badly today that it is hard to imagine a new deal for the working men and women of this country, where the wage gap between the top management of U.S. businesses and the people who work for them is wider than it has ever been, and where competition from workers around the globe means that job security like that my dad and his contemporaries worked so hard for is all but gone.

Further, despite immense efforts by President Bush and many in Congress, the Senate was unable to pass an immigration reform bill, and perhaps 12 million people are here illegally, taking jobs from U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, driving down wages overall as they continue to pour across our porous borders by the hundreds of thousands each year.

The gross anger directed at the illegals, exploited both at home and here, might be better directed at business owners who cavalierly break the law because they are confident that they will never face serious punishment even if they are caught. However, the source of that anger by U.S. workers should be understandable to anyone paying attention this Labor Day.

The working class understands that tax laws are written by and for the wealthiest people to protect what they have, and the wealthiest Americans pay the smallest percentage of their income in taxes than at any time since the institution of the federal income tax.

Big business can move its operations to other countries where labor is cheaper and where it can protect profits from the Internal Revenue Service. As we in New Bedford learned in March, it is possible even to own a business that can win federal defense contracts using illegal immigrants because the Department of Defense doesn't care if that military backpack is made legally, only that it is made cheaply.

What was sad about the Michael Bianco Inc. raid in New Bedford, where 361 illegal immigrants were rounded up and arrested for deportation, was that the anger of too many people was turned not against the alleged crooks who ran the company and intentionally broke the law, or against the government that allowed an outfit like Bianco to make millions of dollars exploiting illegals and betraying U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who should have had the jobs the factory's owners got rich from. Instead, that anger was turned against the illegals, those politicians and church leaders who tried to help them, and this very newspaper for having the gall to show pictures of what our failed immigration policy in fact is doing to real people.

You want to talk about why the American worker is getting a screwing like never before? Look to those of both parties who have blocked any chance to pass an immigration bill that would defend our national security, protect our economic structure and have any chance at all of getting passed.

Those who deserve the blame are the liberal Democrats who don't want illegals to have to pay a fine for having entered our country illegally and who hate the idea of a fence between the United States and Mexico, and the conservative Republicans who are the contemporary equivalent of the 19th century's Know Nothings and who insist that the only acceptable resolution to this crisis is the arrest and forced deportation of 12 million people — something that the overwhelmingly decent American people will never allow to happen no matter how much the ultra-right clamors for it.

And so Labor Day 2007 comes without a new deal for the American worker, who is going to get stuck with the trillion-dollar tab for the Iraq war and the Bush administration's tax cuts for the powerful and the privileged. That American worker will be competing for more and more jobs against workers in the Third World and illegal workers here who drive down everyone's standard of living because what they can earn here is still better than what they can earn at home.

The working man and woman's employer will be less likely to pick up even part of the cost of employee health insurance.

The working man and woman will watch low-level customer service jobs outsourced to India and the Philippines and watch the value of their homes fall because the Republican-led government doesn't like regulating things much, even if it's the crooked mortgage lenders that have all but destroyed the housing market and put the nation on the brink of another recession.

And if the working man ends up unable to pay his bills and has to declare bankruptcy, his representatives in Washington — once again, prompted by this president and his friends in the banking and credit card companies — have made sure that he won't be able to walk away from his credit card debts.

Washington didn't want the banks and credit card companies to suffer for their eagerness to extend credit even to those without financial resources to pay back what they borrowed. But the poor slob who ran up that credit card debt for reasons good or bad shouldn't look to his leaders for help. He's ruined and he's on his own.

It's enough to make you burn inside a bit, isn't it?

Let's hope it's enough to convince the candidates we elect to Congress and the White House next year that it is time to put the working American family first for a change.

If so, maybe we'll someday have something to celebrate again on Labor Day.

For now, though, it's a day to mourn what has happened and is happening to millions of people who have lost faith not only in their government, but in an economic system that is supposed to see to it that goods are distributed with some fairness and to prevent the violent spasms that periodically shake other nations whose economic and political systems have broken faith with the people.

It isn't too late, but I fear that in many parts of America, from border towns in Arizona to port cities in New England, the time is coming when promises of better days ahead will no longer be enough.

Bob Unger is editor of The Standard-Times. He can be reached by e-mail at runger@s-t.com or by phone at (50 979-4430.


http://www.southcoasttoday.com/apps/pbc ... /709020305

I agree with 95% of this. the author has bought into the simplistic solution of comprehensive immigration reform. (can we call it cir?) Other than that Dead on

This guy seems to be playing both sides of the fence. In swelling the ranks of potential workers (something favored by both parties, it seems) and artificially priming the economy with spectaculalrly cheap money we have been set up for a fall.

Can't send 10 or 12 million back? When the eonomy slows we certainly won't need them but they will be here anyway. I heard over ten years ago that the phrase "working families," as used in many political commercials, was merely a Democratic euphemism for illegal immigrants.

I remember how slow the 1980's were, especially in this part of the country and in my trade. DOA. That was also the era of a 100 million strong nation, Japan, challenging our cherished industries. It was the beginning of the phrase "Rust Belt" when many areas suffered from the increased competition. Now we are face to face with a similar challenge--this time from 2 Billion people. Low skilled workers are the lowest priority for our survival.