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Sunday, March 23, 2014

One by One, States Are Pushing Bans on Sick Leave Legislation


Economic Policy Institute



One by One, States Are Pushing Bans on Sick Leave Legislation


Nearly 40 million Americans—almost 40 percent of the private-sector workforce—lack the right to even a single day of paid sick leave. These employees commonly go to work sick, or leave sick children home alone, out of fear of dismissal. Even when they are not terminated, the loss of pay takes a dramatic toll—particularly since jobs without sick pay are concentrated among low-wage workers. A typical family of four with two working parents who has no paid sick leave will have wiped out its entire health care budget for the year after just three days of missed work.

As shown in the figure, ten states have adopted laws that ban any city or county within the state from establishing a right to sick leave. In Wisconsin, legislators repealed the city of Milwaukee’s mandatory paid sick leave law, which had been established by a referendum supported by 69 percent of voters in 2008. In each of the ten states, the bills’ sponsors included members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). And in each case, the bills were adopted following vigorous advocacy by corporate lobbies such as the Chamber of Commerce, National Federation of Independent Business, and Restaurant Association.

These bans fly in the face of public opinion. 75 percent of Americans—including 59 percent of Republicans—think there should be a law guaranteeing all workers a minimum number of paid sick days. Yet, the nation’s most powerful corporate lobbies remain adamantly opposed, and have been pushing bans on paid sick leave legislation in one state after another. Read EPI’s new report The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011–2012 to learn more about the unprecedented series of corporate-backed legislative initiatives aimed at lowering labor standards, weakening unions, and eroding workplace protections.

— With research assistance from Alyssa Davis 

See more work by Gordon Lafer

For Labor To Succeed, It Has To Be Disruptive

TPM




TPM Cafe: Opinion

For Labor To Succeed, It Has To Be Disruptive

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AP Photo / Kris Tripplaar 
 
 
According to Soltas, the primary function of unions is to promote the narrow interests of their dues-paying members and "provide a voice for workers that management can hear." As a side benefit, unions also sometimes improve workplace productivity and reduce turnover, so everybody wins. It would be a shame if workers lost their voice and productivity took a hit, says Soltas, but there are technocratic fixes to those problems (such as better monetary policy) which can achieve a positive result for all without recourse to fundamentally selfish labor cartels.

Needless to say -- because so many others have already said it in the intervening weeks -- this line of thinking relies on a historically suspect understanding of how unions operate. The movement is not a monolith, and some unions will always pursue their own self-interest at the expense of all else, but even a cursory glimpse at American history should belies the idea that myopic acquisitiveness is somehow an intrinsic feature of organized labor. In fact, as Rosenfeld notes, so-called "cartels" of self-interested workers have always played an irreplaceable role in the struggle to lift standards for the entire working class.

That's why there's no top-down, technocratic fix to the hegemony of the boss: The technocratic class is unlikely to do anything of note for the working poor's living standards unless they're forced to. The power of organized labor rests not just in its ability to bargain with individual managers, but in its capacity for disruption on a massive scale. This country's economy has become more egalitarian and more progressive when the working class has used that power to extract concessions from the elite.

A classic example of massive disruption put to good use would be the General Motors Sit-Down Strike of the mid-to-late 1930s. By attacking the most powerful car manufacturer in the United States, the United Automobile Workers (UAW) sought to transform the whole industry. Their victory was a pivotal moment in the fight to better living standards throughout American manufacturing, and therefore the working class as a whole, but it didn't come easy: In order to get there, strikers had to occupy a GM plant and hold it against violent attacks from the local police department. When GM finally agreed to bargain with UAW, it was a victory for raw labor power first and foremost.

Not all confrontations between the rich and poor need be that dramatic, but the fact remains that power respects only power. The only way to improve the fortunes of the working class is to demonstrate that it has sufficient capacity to undermine any economic status quo in which it doesn't get a fair share.
Note that this doesn't mean organized labor exists to provide a "countervailing force" to capital, which is how Mother Jones' Kevin Drum characterized its mission in his response to Evan Soltas. There can be no enduring balance or harmony between workers and the boss; history never makes accommodations for that sort of lasting stability, and the only reason we pine for it now is because the post-World War II status quo briefly made the dream of a balance between class interests seem at least semi-plausible. We don't have the luxury of such illusions now. So long as there is class, there will be class struggle.

The question, then, is what shape that struggle will assume in the future. Soltas and Drum may very well be right in at least one regard: The modern American union is a historically idiosyncratic phenomenon, shaped by legal institutions which emerged only in the mid-20th century. That form of organized labor was never going to last forever, but that doesn't mean labor will stop organizing once it's gone. Unions were around long before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, and they'll be around long after the post-NLRA labor system has crumbled. What they'll look like then is anyone's guess.

Ned Resnikoff is a reporter at msnbc.com, covering issues of class, labor, inequality and climate change.

Want To Win The War On Poverty? Rebuild The Labor Movement

TPM



TPM Cafe: Opinion

Want To Win The War On Poverty? Rebuild The Labor Movement

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AP Photo / Frank Franklin II 
 
 
Amid all the discussions are familiar calls to raise the minimum wage, buttress the food stamp program, and expand health insurance to the nation's needy. Yet absent from the conversation is a proven and powerful way to reduce poverty: strengthening the labor movement. Historically, unions have played a vital role in supporting the most vulnerable, despite the fact that very few union members were then, or are now, themselves poor. Cross-nationally, countries with powerful labor movements have lower poverty rates. And, in the U.S., recent research by the sociologists David Brady, Regina Baker, and Ryan Finnigan finds that states with strong unions tend to do a better job reducing the number of Americans living “on the outskirts of hope,” as President Johnson memorably characterized the issue.

How have unions reduced poverty? Both directly and indirectly. Directly, by helping to double the wage levels in industries as varied as textiles in New England, California canneries, and department stores in the nation’s largest cities, as the historian Nelson Lichtenstein has found. Prior to their organization, wages for bottom-rung occupations in these industries were extremely low. Likewise, maritime work was once brutal, disorganized, and temporary – until unions successfully signed up thousands of port employees along much of America’s coastline.

But unions are not simply economic organizations. They are political ones too, and through their political efforts unions have consistently championed poverty-fighting policies, indirectly helping low-wage Americans. Take food stamps, a program whose funding was recently cut by Congress. Current controversies surrounding food stamps are nothing new. During the course of its existence, many lawmakers have lambasted the program as overly generous and in need of reform. Key segments of the labor movement have intervened against these efforts, repeatedly, during decades of attacks from budget-cutting politicians. During the mid-1970s, for example, organized labor took to the courts to fight for the program’s solvency: Over 50 labor unions joined various other organizations and sued the federal government over proposed cuts to food stamps. Half a decade later, unions would threaten court action again.

READ: MSBNC's Ned Resnikoff responds with "For Labor To Succeed, It Has To Be Disruptive"

Or take the minimum wage. As I explore in my book, unions have been pressuring elected officials for over half a century first to establish and then to raise the minimum wage, although not all their battles proved successful. Legendary labor leader George Meany once castigated President Jimmy Carter for failing to accede to union demands to increase the minimum wage to $3.00/hour. Meany claimed to the New York Times in 1977 that Carter’s intransigence was “a bitter disappointment to everyone who looked to this Administration for economic justice for the poor.” More recently, the campaigns to increase wage floors in states and localities across the country have been heavily underwritten by labor unions.

Finally take New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, who in his inaugural address promised to “take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities,” by combating inequality and lifting up those at the bottom of society. If not for the Working Families Party (WFP), a party funded and co-founded by some of New York’s still-powerful unions, de Blasio’s political ambition may have been stillborn. His 2009 campaign for public advocate was managed by the WFP, and the party considers him a longstanding ally. As documented by Harold Meyerson in the American Prospect, whatever successes the mayor may have in narrowing the yawning income and wealth gaps in the city will also be due to the WFP: The new mayor has the party to thank for the 20 allies that comprise the “Progressive Caucus” on the city council.

While organized labor remains strong in New York, it has been devastated elsewhere. Nationally, private sector organization rates have plummeted from approximately 35 percent to 5 percent. Public sector unions are fighting rearguard battles even in such traditional labor strongholds as Wisconsin and Illinois.

We recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty. One clear lesson of the last half century is that if you take away unions you lose the financial and organizational resources behind various efforts to support the poor. Quite possibly, you lose New York’s new mayor. Over the next 50 years, winning the new War on Poverty will require a mix of creative policy initiatives, many of them now being touted by politicians across the ideological spectrum. But it will also require something almost nobody is discussing: a revitalized labor movement.

Adapted from What Unions No Longer Do by Jake Rosenfeld. Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press. All Rights Reserved.


Jake Rosenfeld is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, co-director of the Scholars Strategy Network Northwest (SSN-NW), and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE), the West Coast Poverty Center (WCPC) and the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. He received his PhD in Sociology from Princeton University in 2007. For more information, please see www.jakerosenfeld.net.