This Labor Day, Is the World of Work a More Secure and Lawful Place?
America may finally be climbing out of a really nasty recession, but things are hardly going back to the old "normal." The way we think about our work lives is going to change in a profound way. This has less to do with legislation - although there will be new laws and regulations - than with the kind of day to day hopes, expectations, and fears that both employers and employees take to the office, store, or factory each morning.
Big economic meltdowns have a way of jolting off track old patterns of thought and action. It happened during the Great Depression when "security' became the watch word for a generation of Americans traumatized by massive and sustained unemployment; 40 years later another big shift came during the serial recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s when New Deal norms were shattered and a Reaganite appreciation of risk, reward, and rapid change came to the fore.
This time around, Americans, high, low and in between, want a set of rules that can make sure that they will not be swindled out of their home, robbed of their retirement savings, short changed by their insurance company, or see their wages and benefits literally stolen by supervisors desperate to keep labor costs in line. Early this year virtually every hard working American was outraged when some big financial institutions paid million dollar bonuses to executives who seemed responsible for bankrupting their firms and wrecking the economy. And though prospects for health care reform remain contentious, a genuinely bipartisan consensus has emerged that no insurance company should be permitted to deny coverage to someone because of their pre-existing medical condition or cut off benefits because a claimant has exceeded his or her lifetime payment cap.
Indeed, what has made this recession different from that of the dot.com bust in 2000 or most of the other postwar recessions is that no one thinks it was a product of just another turn in the business cycle or the mere bursting of a speculative bubble. Instead, Americans from Wall Street to the big box check out counter sense that trillions of dollars and millions of jobs disappeared because a lawless, rule less economy allowed a clever elite to game the system in a fundamentally un-American fashion.
That is why the state is going to play a much bigger role, not only in how we finance houses and health insurance, but in the work lives of tens of millions. Not withstanding the August cries of "socialism" from the tea party crowd, Americans expect the government to pay a role in setting the ground rules and establishing the standards upon which all work is based. We have not figured out a language for all this - President Obama speaks of a new era of "responsibility" but that has not caught on - but clearly the era of radical individualism at work and laissez faire in finance is over.
If the Bernie Madoff scam proved the kind of gut-wrenching scandal that sent thousands of well-off investors scurrying to the feds for compensation and protection, then an even more pervasive set of illegalities takes place in the American workplace every day. A new study, funded by Ford and other foundations, reports that a huge proportion of low wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay, are often paid less than the minimum wage, and are deprived of the tips and sick pay they are rightly due. In surveying more than 4,000 workers, researchers found that the typical employee had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations out of average weekly earnings of $339. That translates into a 15 percent loss in pay. A 2005 survey of New York City restaurant workers reported that roughly six out of ten worked without over time pay or through legally prescribed rest breaks. And a national survey the next year found about half of day laborers reported being stiffed out of their pay at least once in the previous two months.
This kind of "wage theft" - the phrase comes from a recent book by Kim Bobo - might well spark a note of kinship among more advantageously placed Americans, the kind of people who have watched in helpless despair as the value of their 401Ks turned South or as the selling price of their home cost them a big slice of their net worth. It has certainly gotten the Obama Administration's attention. Hilda Solis, the daughter of working-class Latinos, who is now Secretary of Labor, has declared "There is a new sheriff in town" when it comes to violations of the American labor law. She has announced that her department will hire 250 more wage and hour enforcement officers.
But it is not just the government that wants or expects new rules and new standards. Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private sector employer, with 1.4 million "associates," has begun to accommodate itself to the nation's new ethos. For years the company was an outright, court-proven violator of the wage and hour laws, routinely deleting minutes worked from pay records, forcing off-the-clock work on hundreds of thousands, and making many more labor through their lunch and rest breaks, a violation of state labor codes. When workers and unions complained, Wal-Mart fought back in the most vigorous and intransigent fashion, blaming selfish lawyers, intrusive courts, and company "enemies" who wanted to protect inefficient competitors.
But late last December the big retailer agreed to settle 63 wage and hour class-action law suites filed in 42 states. The cost: at least half a billion dollars. And it promised to put in place new policies that will prevent a recurrence of such violations. It is hard to say if Wal-Mart's concession signals a new sense of corporate respect for a governmental regulatory role at the workplace - the company has long been the high profile target of environmentalists, unionists, and some Democratic politicians, including Barrack Obama when he was on the campaign trail - but whatever the motivations, this Wal-Mart switch may well be a talisman for an era when the world of work moves toward becoming a more secure and lawful place.
It has happened before. The Great Depression was great not just because of 25% unemployment and a decade of underproduction. It was a turning point in American history because of the moral and ideological collapse of an old order that no longer seemed rational, productive or democratic. The same kind of scandals and blunders that have discredited executives at AIG, General Motors, Merrill Lynch, and Countrywide also destroyed the reputations of their early 20th century counterparts, men like the utilities monopolist Samuel Insull or the New York Stock Exchange President Richard Whitney, who ended up in Sing Sing on a charge of embezzlement.
In this world American workers sought a "moral capitalism" - the phrase is that of historian Lizabeth Cohen - that would not only keep the scoundrels out of high places, but more importantly, make their work lives predictable and orderly in an economic system that seemed to breed social and economic chaos all about them. That's why there was an enormous interest in work-sharing schemes in the early Depression years. They seemed fair, rational and moral because scarcity was now to be born in equal measure. In steel, auto, and electrical products executives put workers on a two or three day week; at Kellogg the six hour day was put in place in 1931 and lasted for more than two generations. Likewise, the end of the Saturday half-day of work in the 1930s finally created the weekend as most of us have known it. And the government codified this new world in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which created a set of work rules for industrial and office workers that for many years came to seem an inextricable part of the corporate order.
Even more important, the New Deal and the new unions that it encouraged sought to "constitutionalize" work in the nation's industrial economy, creating a structure of collective bargaining that not only boosted wages, but which created a system of industrial jurisprudence that mimicked the lawyers, courts, and judges which governed citizenship rights in the larger community. Grievance procedures, seniority lists, job definitions - all those "work rules" that managers found so offensive both then an now - emerged out of an effort by ordinary workers to live by a set of rules that seemed in insure a measure of workplace equity.
The government could not do it alone: then and now the feds will never have enough time, money or people to monitor the life of every factory and office. So in the New Deal system the unions filled the gap. As Walter Reuther, who would become the president of the United Auto Workers, told a government panel in the last years of the Depression, "We know that unless you have rules to govern the relationship of people, both Labor and Management, on the lower levels in the Agreement, unless these rules are explicit, you will revert back to where they pick this guy, not because he has potential, but because he lets the foreman run over him."
When it came to the world of work, the years from World War II through the early 1970s were a law abiding era. Unions, even in garment manufacturing and janitorial services, policed state and federal wage and hour laws; equally important, employers and workers, union or no, expected that adherence to these laws was just another cost of doing business, like paying taxes or the electric bill.
This system began to unravel in the two great recessions that made the 1970s and 1980s so miserable. It was not just that the union movement went into decline or that corporate executives wanted to get out from under what they considered a stifling set of work rules and fringe benefit obligations, but that worker expectations shifted rapidly in the decade that followed the onset of the great stagflation in 1973. Employees still wanted a set of work rules by which to labor, but these were increasingly seen as "rights" based on an appeal to gender, race, or age equality. This way of looking at the world of work filled a big gap that the white, male New Dealers had largely neglected, but it also opened the door to a new kind of lawlessness at the workplace when it came to more traditional labor standards and pay scales. Company executives, especially those hard pressed by competitors at home and abroad, were more than happy to take advantage of the deregulatory climate that both Democrats and Republicans fostered from the late 1970s onward.
Wal-Mart was just the sort of enterprise that flourished in this Reaganite era. It was a company, initially isolated in the Ozarks, in which worker expectations and executive decisions were based not on an effort to "constitutionalize" the world of work, but to make it a site of sociability, evangelical self-sacrifice, patriarchal authority, and visceral hostility to unions and to government regulation of wages or work practices. Managers wanted the flexibility to deploy their workers in the most efficient manner, even if it wrecked havoc with the work schedules of hard pressed clerks and stockers. In time virtually every company in the retail, hotel, and restaurant sectors of the economy would adopt employment norms that ran parallel to the Wal-Mart model.
But that world is in disrepute today. Working Americans are not about to return to the kind of work-a-day world fostered by the New Deal, but they want the security, predictability, and income that the New Dealers understood was essential for both a productive economy and a vibrant democracy. It remains a fight, but on this Labor Day the battle has been engaged.
Nelson Lichtenstein, an historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (Metropolitan Books)
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Thank you for noting that the out-of-control gambling parlors called "hedge funds" are fundamentally unAmerican in nature.
Gambling was (rightly) outlawed in most of the country, before states found loopholes, and decided to support their school-and-other budget items with the proceeds. But what sometimes works to back up state governments in need, is a prescription for big-time failure, in the financial world.
This is the final disproof of Milton Freidman's uber-optimistic promotion of lasse-faire economics. If left to its own devices, exempted from societal controls, the "free" market invariably leads to such abuses as this.
Labor Day should be celebrated to commemorate the struggle for the eight hour day, public schools and worker's right to organize. Instead it is now considered another excuse to run sales at local retail stores.
Locally hotel workers at the Grand Hyatt in downtown San Antonio are in a fight to form a union with UNITE HERE. Despite the fact that 62% of the workforce signed union cards, management will not recognize the union and has begun firing the more visible labor activists! So where is their protection to organize?
The NLRB became quite useless years ago. Today the bosses have total control of the government that at one time was supposed to protect us.
In the U.S. a very small percentage of the population (3-5%) control the government, the economy, the school systems, the news media, the entertainment industry and even a lot of the churches.
Is this a true democracy? Think about it. Those that rant and rave about the virtues of capitalism are those who profit from our sweat, our blood and our tears! Over a hundred and thrty five years ago plantation owners in the South used to rant and rave about the virtues of slavery! Do you see the parallel?
It is in my understanding that Wal-Mart uses a loophole that ONLY requires full-time employees get health insurance, but not part-time employees, to further allow bad intent based choiced behaviors onto their employees lives, well, some of their employees (part-time). It is not nice, and probably immoral.
Love
Bette
I presume it's a rhetorical question, but the answer in no.
I pretty much ignore any article which begins with the words "America may be coming out of a recession....." I stop reading and try to stop hyperventilating. There is so much still to collapse in the high rolling mortgage industry that there is no way we are remotely close to ending this depression. So many more houses to foreclose, so many more jobs to lose, so many losing their jobless benefits, so many uninsured. Where's the paper bag? The only people who say we are coming out of this are either getting paid to do so, are blind optimists, bankers and the otherwise very rich. Spinners spinning the spin. America is proving to be a great failed democracy. Name one area, we excel in--besides telling ourselves how great we are. Our potential is being crushed by corporate interests and their kowtowing politicians. Our wealth has been squandered by the same interests and our youth are being led to their deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan by--I'll let you guess. We are standing on the edge. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are about to implode. Who is going to bail out the taxpayer? I guess I don't have to worry because at this rate there won't be any taxpayers to bail out.
I have news for the author - it's not just the low end of the wage market that is being screwed by the employers. Some of the worst wage thefts are occurring under state and federal jobs - where police, teachers, professors, social workers, etc. are being forced to work far more hours than their contracts specified, frequently with tasks well out of their job descriptions in their contracts and without any additional compensation, or even a cost of living wage increases - sometimes with cuts in their base salary. I suggest the gov. start looking for labor and wage violations in its own ranks first and once they have conformity to the labor and contract laws there, then use that success to move on to the private sector.
The problem is, government is forced into this position by anti-tax zealots. The most glaring example of the conditions you cite are in California caused by the passage of proposition 13.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_%281978%29
I very much like the idea of “moral capitalism” Mr. Lichtenstein attributes here to Lizabeth Cohen, thank you for the historical romp. It seems like an oxymoron, and is, in fact, opposite of what America has become as a capitalist nation. Historically immigrants came to America wanting the American dream of owning a “moral” or honest business and a home to raise their children in with freedom of/from religious dictation, this is also a look at the history of America. Government became immoral in 1913; and the dream further dissolved when American business sold innovations outright to foreign nationals for manufacture in foreign nations. Those choices, easily followed to when “moral capitalism” died in the American Dream, killed any morality in the capitalism in our reality today. It seems like the concept is to come here to take advantage rather than to become part of the dream, it has turned into a nightmare for Americans, in my opinion.
Love
Bette
What happened in 1913?
"Moral capitalism" sounds like a textbook concept. The players can choose to be moral, but there's nothing in capitalism that enforces morality, unless you're looking at a village of 50 people.
Speaking of "day to day hopes, expectations, and fears", I think more people FEAR what Obama is/isn't doing than they have feared any other president.
No, it's only you 29 percenters who thought Bush was the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's going to take a decade at least of Democratic control to fix the problems Republicans created.
The Republican and Democrats are selling the American people down the river. Their hands are so deep in Corporation pockets. We have no choice. We need a strong third and fourth party in this country
to give the working man a voice. If unhappy with one party, what choice does one have. The choice is
either stay in the "frying pan" or jump into the fire. This is not choice. We need a third and fourth party to give the American people a real choice and not the choices that the Corporations want us to have.
The two-party system has morphed into one and "We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the world - no longer a Government of free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men." - Woodrow Wilson
DO WE REALLY, "Hold these truths to be self-evident?
"That all men are created equal and governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; and, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." -July 4, 1776. The Declaration of Independence
"Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains"- Karl Marx
BTW, i am a Christian Anarchist Socialist who LOVES what America was founded upon-NOT what we have become: A nation filled with un-compassionate capitalists without COMMON SENSE!
"Soon after I had published the pamphlet "Common Sense" [on Feb. 14, 1776] in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion... The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."-Tom Paine
Good post eileenflemingWAWA.
Love
Bette
Fired-up, ready to go...fired-up ready to go. We'll see if that only applies in front of a pro labor gathering. Wednesday talks.
Yeah, today's speech just makes me want to hear what he says on Wed. more, as was intended. He did say that for-profit health insurance (money=probably health) isn't going away, only that their profits would be somewhat controlled, in today's labor speech. Not enough, in my opinion, but a start at least (at the very least). For-profit health care is one thing "ruining" America, devolving the quality of America. It really is "the" problem today.
Love
Bette
The government caused this by allowing its self to become controlled by corporate and special interests. Those special interests are still embedded in the bureaucracy and nothing is going to change. Their intervention in a free market via the government has destroyed virtually every industry in this country along with with social services including health care. In a free market unhampered by government controls employers pay well because they don't want to lose their employees and they keep their work place safe because they can't afford the down time. The work place is safe because your job is safe from being lost to illegal aliens willing to work for lower wages in more dangerous working environments. who were allowed into the country by a corporate run government wanting to reduce labor costs. Rather than offering the same opportunity to immigrants, they are exploited and expendable. 40% of African American working age men are now out of work as a result and they and their families are not safe. They have been thrown under the bus.
"...Americans from Wall Street to the big box check out counter sense that trillions of dollars and millions of jobs disappeared because a lawless, rule less economy allowed a clever elite to game the system in a fundamentally un-American fashion."
I'm afraid that is more wishful thinking than reality.
When Bill Maher said this is a stupid country, he had a point.
But there is hope.
If Obama goes beyond the nuts and bolts of health care reform and speaks broadly to the American people.
If he remembers that barn-burner speech he gave at the 2004 convention.
If he makes clear to the American people that government is the solution and NOT the problem.
In short redirect the nation in a new more regulated direction and explains that this actually makes capitalism stronger.
And the American people listen and respond.
Then we can "rise together".
This week it was announced that FL will receive 58 million dollars as a part of a Federal settlement with Pfizer for essentially bribing Drs. to use their drugs over other companies. I'm sure FL will never see a dime of these proceeds because the appeal process will go on forever. While this settlement might be considered a step in the right direction, those are very big "if" that you list above. As an Obama supporter - I'm not seeing any actions on his part that suggests he remembers any of campaign promises regarding health care competition. Political Alzheimer's is a very common condition in both parties - post election. We already have some bad signs. Obama has already signed a non-compete agreement with big Pharma not requiring them to compete with drugs from Canada an or countries overseas - even if it's made by the same US company and or if the drug discovery was supported by US tax payers research dollars. Competition is the key to lowering both insurance and health care - and I see the same kind of deals happening that Bush made before Obama. This has got to stop - even if we have through every Democrat and Republican out of office to do it. Clearly, neither the Republicans or the Democrats are focusing on what is best for the people, just that next election in Karl Rove's strategy of a permanent campaign mode. This too has to stop.
Great post and I think Nelson hit the nail on the head when he said:
... "This time around, Americans, high, low and in between, want a set of rules that can make sure that they will not be swindled out of their home, robbed of their retirement savings, short changed by their insurance company, or see their wages and benefits literally stolen by supervisors desperate to keep labor costs in line. Early this year virtually every hard working American was outraged when some big financial institutions paid million dollar bonuses to executives who seemed responsible for bankrupting their firms and wrecking the economy. And though prospects for health care reform remain contentious, a genuinely bipartisan consensus has emerged that no insurance company should be permitted to deny coverage to someone because of their pre-existing medical condition or cut off benefits because a claimant has exceeded his or her lifetime payment cap."....
And: "Instead, Americans from Wall Street to the big box check out counter sense that trillions of dollars and millions of jobs disappeared because a lawless, rule less economy allowed a clever elite to game the system in a fundamentally un-American fashion." I couldn't say this any clearer so I quoted the post above. I hope Obama will fix this, as it IS the reason America almost went down the tube.
The short answer? No.
The attitude of Walmart, described as a visceral anti-union, patriachical corporation, could well be applied to almost all American companies, and it's lessening of punitive behavor towards it's employees is only because of the win of a liberal president, the first in over 30 yrs. It also could be that the Ameircan capitalist is failing at competing with the world at large. We are now on a global economy and as such American CEO's have to compete against CEO's from China, Russia, etc., and it looks like the American model of doing business if failing miserably. The solution may be more capitalism. Allow unions to form investment co-ops out of failing businesses and in the process, the workers at the failing company keep their jobs, provide the labor, mental capital, and in time provide the profit incentive for investors. It's time for new rules.
"The Great Depression saw the moral and ideological collapse."
It would be more accurate to say a failure of the Federal Government as to when to stay out of the way and when to intervene.
"the new unions that it encouraged sought to "constitutionalize" work in the nation's industrial economy," That may have been the goal, but the real effect has been to restrict a citizens, right to work and right to contract, without third party, especially the Federal Government, interference or restriction.
The Fed was already "out of the way". There was no Labor law in effect and none of the labor laws enjoyed today by workers. Essentially, it was a free-for-all with no government regulation or interference of any kind. There was no minimum wage, they could and did hire children to work at factories, they underpaid without consequence, there was no safety rules, no weekends, they could and did work laborers 80-90 hours/week, etc. This environment, by the way, is found aplenty in most 3rd world countries today. When it comes to your right to work you sound confused. In any state in America you can apply to work without being a union member. Now it may be that you are applying at companies that pay well, that have good benefits and that have a safe working environment and that, alas for you, employ union members. Well, that didn't just come about for free, it took negotiating, bargaining, and give-and-take to "constitutionalize" the work environment such that the job now is a prized possession, something many people, like you, want. Only in your case you think you are owed this job simply because......why?......because you say so? Ha !
Oh sure. Invert reality through the pretense of "concern" about the "freedom" of workers. To be individuals with nothing but their labor by which to deal with multinationals.
Without intervention, the system would have collapsed. Like the present situation, all the evidence is there, but the idealogues refuse to see what is clear to the rest of us-- the game is rigged.
We don't have free enterprise, we have capitalism; dominance by the extractive financial sector. Also known as supply side, where it is assumed that manufacturing, merchants, and labor are are simply not important. This is not the immutable outcome of nature or deity, but political influence encoded in law.
Where corporations, artificial persons, have all of the protection of the Bill of Rights, but workers lose 'em at the front door of the factory and waive 'em at Wal-Mart. Yet this economy is still dedendent on consumers. And who are consumers other than workers? Without decent wages, the system breaks down. As we are seeing once again.
The American Dream was defended by collective action in WWII. And by the collective action, economically and politically, of working people to defend themselves. To be treated as dignified citizens who are the foundation of this country. We who know what it means that an injury to one is an injury to all. Labor omnia vincit.
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