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job crisis
At a Detroit gathering organized by that city’s civic elite, AFL-CIO
chieftain John J. Sweeney lamented on Sept. 3 that “15 million U.S.
workers
were either unemployed, too discouraged to job-hunt, or working
part-time.”
“It’s the worst job market since the Great Depression,” he railed. “The
damage to human lives as well as to our economic stability is
devastating.”
The jobs crisis is Washington’s fault, Sweeney declared. “Our crisis
was
created by the hands of men and women, members of the U.S. Congress,
and
more than abetted by Mr. Bush.”
Moreover, he said, those elected Washington officials “are more
influenced
by corporate power—corporate campaign contributions and corporate
lobbyists—than they are by political party ideology or conservative or
liberal philosophy.” “And believe me,” he asserted, “it has been a
decidedly, dastardly, non-partisan [sic] affair.”
Sweeney also complained that it’s harder to find “corporations that
care
about partnerships with labor and value the national interest along
with
their own interest.” (However, he allowed that some corporations that
care
about partnerships with labor were to be found in the Motor City,
though he
didn’t single out the Big Three auto corporations one way or the
other.)
Without mentioning one-time president Bill Clinton, Sweeney lambasted
NAFTA
and the WTO for having lowered workers’ incomes in Mexico, Canada, and
the
U.S. And he blamed the pacts for trade deficits that he said have
destroyed
more jobs than have been created.
“Clearly we’re on a collision course with disaster, and the danger is
compounded by the fact that we’re replacing the high-wage, full-benefit
jobs
we’re losing with low-wage, no benefit jobs.
Furthermore, Sweeney implied, Corporate America and Washington’s
“non-partisan” politicians are shooting themselves in the foot, as they
mangle the lives of U.S. workers. That’s because workers, he rightly
said,
“are also the backbone of our capitalist system and the main
contributors to
the profits of the corporations that seem hell-bent on eroding the
standard
of living in this country.”
Analysts and commentators of various political stripes have said time
and
again that in the early 1970s U.S. capitalism had entered an era of
intractable problems. Nevertheless, the practical, flinty, hard-nosed
bureaucrats that sit astride the American labor movement seem to think
that
all that has changed is that U.S. capitalists arbitrarily have gotten
greedier, nothing more elemental than that.
In reality, renewed international competition has hammered the U.S.
economy.
For example, if the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) were growing
at
the same rate as it did from the end of World War II until the early
1970s,
the GDP, now at $10.7 trillion, would be 20 percent higher at $12.84
trillion! The difference is equal to the combined GDP of Great Britain
and
Canada.
At the same, however, capital has increased its share of the GDP, at
the
expense of its workers. If workers received the same share of the GDP
they
were paid in the 1970s, today’s paychecks would contain hundreds of
billions
more than they do.
Despite U.S. capital’s chase to the four corners of the globe for raw
materials, for labor, and for markets, this nation’s bankers and
manufacturers still can’t compete with their overseas counterparts for
investment profits as successfully as they did from 1945 to the early
1970s.
That’s a predicament that U.S. capital seeks to resolve at the expense
of
U.S. workers.
The endless drive by capital to invest and profit is the cornerstone of
the
entire system. American workers need to be told that their present
difficulties are more than a speed-bump. They have to be told that
their
problems flow from the private ownership of banks, factories, and the
like.
They need to be told that their troubles result not just from greedy
corporations, but also from the system, capitalism, itself.
They need to be told those things, not for the purpose of getting them
to
accept lower living standards but for the purpose of explaining why
it’s
necessary to prepare to defend their living standards through mass
mobilizations, much as workers did during the 1930s.
In the midst of his remarks, Sweeney made a remarkable statement that,
if
only it were true, would indicate a sea change in most U.S. workers’
views
about capitalism and the two corporate parties that rule to safeguard
the
corporate roost. “Working families,” Sweeney asserted, “are no longer
willing to wait patiently for answers or to trust markets and
governments
that are controlled by corporate money.”
Sweeney implied that impatient workers are also militant workers and
Corporate America should watch out.
Unfortunately, Sweeney’s statement is wrong—and deliberately
wrong—about the
political state of mind of most U.S. workers. Sweeney was merely using
a
well-worn verbal, and merely verbal, bargaining-table ploy. But rather
than
scaring his corporate listeners, his remarks must have struck them as
silly.
The bosses know that workers aren’t likely to suddenly rush into the
streets
at Sweeney’s command, seeking to wrest a better life from Corporate
America,
even under the present circumstances. That’s partly because of the
profound
bureaucratization of the U.S. labor movement—that is to say, the
lengthy
suppression of workers’ democracy within organized labor.
The profound bureaucratization of labor’s officialdom goes a long ways
to
explain today’s profound demobilization of the ranks, despite the
bosses’
provocations. Not that there haven’t been sporadic fightbacks since the
1970s, but they were choked off from above.
Looking back to the extreme jobs crisis that defined the Great
Depression
(1929-39), the best that Corporate America came up with then was a sort
of a
generalized pauperism for much of the population. What relief workers
received was the result of massive, unprecedented workers’
mobilizations
that threatened to break through the boundaries of “corporate markets.”
That should suggest how profound a mobilization by workers is required
to
deal with Corporate America’s assault on workers’ living standards;
and,
perhaps, even with what Sweeney calls “the worst job market since the
Great
Depression.”
The article above was written by Charles Walker.
