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Star Tribune Editorial (organized labor)
So, the Minneapolis Star Tribune requires a name and password to read their articles. Although it is free, it is still annoying if you don't plan on regularly reading.
We loved their editorial today so we are posting it here in its entirety, but we'll also provide a link in case you do want to register and become a regular reader.
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Sometime in the last several decades, Americans decided that organized labor would cease to play a pivotal role in the nation's economic affairs. It might have been the day that President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air-traffic controllers and signaled that employers could get tough with unions. It might have been the tenure of President Jimmy Carter, who deregulated the airline and trucking industries and devastated the mighty Teamsters and Machinists organizations. It might have been the steady creep of foreign competition, which humbled America's automakers and steel companies, and the blue-collar aristocrats who toiled for them.
The causes are complicated but the results are clear: Union membership has fallen from 30 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to scarcely 14 percent last year.
So today many Americans will observe Labor Day by asking why workers ever joined unions in the first place. For an answer they should turn to the latest Census Bureau report on employment and income for 2003. The number of Americans without health insurance rose to a record 45 million, and the share with employer-sponsored coverage fell to the lowest level in more than a decade. The share of workers with pensions fell again, continuing a slide that began in the 1980s. The earnings of low-wage workers lagged well behind inflation, widening the gap between rich and poor. In other words, the economic expansion that began three years ago is leaving millions of workers behind.
A weakened labor movement isn't the only cause of these trends, but a stronger labor movement would have buffered them. In the middle of the last century labor unions brought pensions, health insurance and job security to Middle America. They sat across the bargaining table from management and played tug of war for a share of American profits. They narrowed the gap between rich and poor, and provided a ticket from the humblest of neighborhoods to the prosperous middle class. Jared Bernstein, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., estimates that 80 percent of the growth in corporate income went to worker compensation in most economic recoveries after World War II, while 20 percent went to corporate profits. In the current expansion, that ratio is almost exactly reversed.
We'll let historians decide whether the decline of labor ultimately made the United States a more or less prosperous nation. But free markets, for all their ingenuity and advantages, need mediating forces so that they don't utterly trample the least advantaged. Economic inequality in the United States now stands at its highest level since World War II, a trend that caused a task force of the American Political Science Association to observe recently: "Disparities of income, wealth and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed."
It would be naive to think that organized labor will ever return to the era embodied by Walter Reuther and George Meany, union leaders who could intimidate presidents and bring the economy to a standstill. But it would be sad to think that the United States cannot devise other mediating institutions to guarantee that the nation's great prosperity is widely and fairly shared.
LINK
We loved their editorial today so we are posting it here in its entirety, but we'll also provide a link in case you do want to register and become a regular reader.
------------------------------------------------------------
Sometime in the last several decades, Americans decided that organized labor would cease to play a pivotal role in the nation's economic affairs. It might have been the day that President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 air-traffic controllers and signaled that employers could get tough with unions. It might have been the tenure of President Jimmy Carter, who deregulated the airline and trucking industries and devastated the mighty Teamsters and Machinists organizations. It might have been the steady creep of foreign competition, which humbled America's automakers and steel companies, and the blue-collar aristocrats who toiled for them.
The causes are complicated but the results are clear: Union membership has fallen from 30 percent of the workforce in the 1950s to scarcely 14 percent last year.
So today many Americans will observe Labor Day by asking why workers ever joined unions in the first place. For an answer they should turn to the latest Census Bureau report on employment and income for 2003. The number of Americans without health insurance rose to a record 45 million, and the share with employer-sponsored coverage fell to the lowest level in more than a decade. The share of workers with pensions fell again, continuing a slide that began in the 1980s. The earnings of low-wage workers lagged well behind inflation, widening the gap between rich and poor. In other words, the economic expansion that began three years ago is leaving millions of workers behind.
A weakened labor movement isn't the only cause of these trends, but a stronger labor movement would have buffered them. In the middle of the last century labor unions brought pensions, health insurance and job security to Middle America. They sat across the bargaining table from management and played tug of war for a share of American profits. They narrowed the gap between rich and poor, and provided a ticket from the humblest of neighborhoods to the prosperous middle class. Jared Bernstein, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., estimates that 80 percent of the growth in corporate income went to worker compensation in most economic recoveries after World War II, while 20 percent went to corporate profits. In the current expansion, that ratio is almost exactly reversed.
We'll let historians decide whether the decline of labor ultimately made the United States a more or less prosperous nation. But free markets, for all their ingenuity and advantages, need mediating forces so that they don't utterly trample the least advantaged. Economic inequality in the United States now stands at its highest level since World War II, a trend that caused a task force of the American Political Science Association to observe recently: "Disparities of income, wealth and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed."
It would be naive to think that organized labor will ever return to the era embodied by Walter Reuther and George Meany, union leaders who could intimidate presidents and bring the economy to a standstill. But it would be sad to think that the United States cannot devise other mediating institutions to guarantee that the nation's great prosperity is widely and fairly shared.
LINK
posted by littleboxes at 11:15 AM
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