off-shoring

Labor Day: Build Esprit de Corps for Action

Leo Gerard — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 10:58:49 -0400

Celebrate Labor Day. Really, celebrate. It’s important.

Wear a t-shirt announcing to the world the name of your union and march in a parade, chanting and whooping it up about how glad you are to belong to an organization whose members are devoted to looking out for each other. If you’re among those without a union, proclaim your profession and declare your pride in the hard work you do. Make some happy noise. Infect your fellow marchers with your zeal.

Invite your most beleaguered neighbors, friends and co-workers over for a picnic. Raise a pint, braise some burgers and praise your companions for their skill, devotion and compassion. Recognize them for all they’ve persevered through since this relentless recession began in December of 2007. Build esprit de corps among your fellow workers.

This is one day devoted to labor, to the middle class, to the majority. One day out of 365. On this holiday, everyone gives an obligatory nod to workers. So don’t fret this Labor Day. Don’t waste it away in apathetic doldrums. Don’t let the minority rich and their purchased politicians take this celebration away from us too.

Some, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, have called for protests on Labor Day. They say workers must use this opportunity to demand that Washington solve the real crisis debilitating this country – dogged joblessness.

Reich is right. But it’s too early for that. Ultimately, workers must flip this ugly situation upside down so that once a year it’s Rich People’s Day. Once a year, the middle class gives the frivolous Kardashians and tax-shirking GEs of the world an obligatory nod. But every other day, 364 days a year, is labor day.

Then, we would have a country committed to the wellbeing of the majority, the middle class, the workers, whose labor creates wealth.

Getting there is a long haul from where we are now, though. We must develop some self-confidence before we start protesting. Achieving the change we want requires an uprising of hope and anger. There’s plenty of anger out there. The populace is seething after suffering years of “no, not-for-you” politics from country club conservatives:

No more unemployment insurance extensions. No more Social Security and Medicare as you and your parents know it. No public option, providing health insurance for all. No end to tax breaks for corporations that off-shore jobs. No more Trade Adjustment Assistance workers who lose their jobs because of off-shoring. No end to tax breaks for corporate jets. No end to tax breaks for oil companies making billions. No end to income tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. No extension of the payroll tax break for the middle class. No reasonable restrictions on the big Wall Street banks that got bailed out with taxpayer money. No help for unemployed homeowners threatened with foreclosure. And no, there won’t be any jobs program. The country club conservatives must sustain high unemployment to regain the White House. So too bad for the jobless.

These unremitting attacks on the middle class have left workers feeling beaten up and beaten down. Workers are suffering from what author, psychologist and social critic Bruce E. Levine calls “battered people syndrome.” Exhausted, depressed, and blaming themselves for the country’s problems, too many workers feel unable to challenge the elite overlords.

This combination of anger and hopelessness produces destruction and self-destruction, like the riots that left London burning last summer. Hopeless about their future and angry at the rich for bilking the poor and at expense-padding British politicians imposing “austerity,” the city’s jobless ruffians abandoned morals, just as the wealthy and the ruling class had.

Frances Fox Piven counsels in her book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America that hope is crucial, that constructive change arises from the mix of hope and anger. In places like Libya and Egypt this Arab Spring, wealth proved insufficient to overpower the majority invigorated by hope and anger.

The bitch for the rich in a democracy like America’s is that majority rules. And, frankly, the rich and corporations (newly dubbed persons by the U.S. Supreme Court) are a tiny minority in America.

Even though we’re the majority, workers can’t win until we hope we can, until we feel some assurance that we can overcome. It’s a long haul to hope from resignation and pessimism.

So let’s put some effort into fostering optimism. Let’s strengthen each other this Labor Day. We must raise that hope before we organize Reich’s protests.

Rile yourself up and pump up a friend this Labor Day so we can unite in anger and hope to push back the naysayers and make every day Labor Day. This video helps.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger

No Fluke: Republicans Support Off-Shoring Jobs

Leo Gerard — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 11:33:12 -0400

Like the clear results on a pH test strip, the vote in the U.S. Senate this week on the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act showed Republicans’ true color: Red. Red for China.

Or Mexico. Or Indonesia. Or anywhere multi-national corporations get tax breaks for exporting American jobs. In this test of loyalty, every Republican in the Senate voted for corporate greed over American workers.

No fluke, this is a GOP pattern. The red party has consistently sided with giant corporations to the detriment of the American economy and American workers. In voting against health care reform, Republicans chose giant health insurance corporations over uninsured Americans. In opposing financial reform, Republicans embraced Wall Street over the taxpayers who bailed out the big banks and don’t want to do it again.

Republicans vainly attempted to rationalize those votes as opposing government regulation. There’s no regulation issue in the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act.

That Act would have removed tax incentives the U.S. government gives corporations to close domestic factories, fire American workers and move production overseas. And, conversely, the Act would have instituted tax cuts for corporations that return foreign employment to U.S. soil.

Every Republican in the Senate voted against the Act. They voted to continue forcing Americans to give tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas during the worst recession since the Great Depression. The GOP said it is right and proper for U.S. citizens to subsidize corporate killing of American manufacturing. And Republicans said it would be wrong to do the opposite -- to use tax breaks to encourage corporations to restore off-shored jobs to the U.S.

Democrats, whose first priority is American workers, are pushing a 17-bill Make it in America plan. The Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act is part of that effort to bolster domestic industry and employment.

With joblessness stuck at 9.6 percent and with the U.S. trade deficit destroying or displacing 5.6 million jobs -- 70 percent of them good-paying manufacturing jobs -- in just one year – 2007, Democrats developed this plan to preserve American industry and jobs. Recent surveys of likely voters suggest the Democrats’ Make it in American program is exactly what Americans want and believe the country needs.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released earlier this week, 86 percent of respondents cited corporate off-shoring of American jobs as the primary cause of the country's continuing economic distress.

Similarly, a bi-partisan polling team that conducted a survey of likely voters for the Alliance for American Manufacturing in April found large majorities believe manufacturing strength is crucial to U.S. economic security and that the government should fortify American industry. These voters told the pollsters that they believe America no longer leads the world in manufacturing but could again with proper support.

That can-do-it attitude is realistic. Already some manufacturers are on-shoring. General Electric is moving production of its energy-efficient water heaters from China to the United States. Caterpillar and NCR, a technology company, are doing the same. A survey in June found 21 percent of North American manufacturers brought production into or closer to the United States in the previous three months and another 38 percent planned to research such a move.

Manufacturers gave USA Today numerous reasons for this repatriation. Chinese wages and shipping costs have risen. They cited poor quality foreign manufactured goods; theft of intellectual property; long product delivery times interfering with response to consumer demand, and benefits from providing engineers easy access to assembly lines.

The trade publication, Supply Chain Digest, quoted two experts in an August story about the on-shoring trend:

“George Stalk, a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, has led research efforts showing the inventory benefits for high margin, fashion-oriented goods from bringing production at least back to North America almost always trump the value of lower manufacturing costs in Asia. Those benefits come from both not losing sales from being out of stock and not getting stuck with obsolete inventory that a company can’t sell or must mark down dramatically.”

And, the story quoted Jeremy Leonard, a consultant for Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI:

“A lot of companies who have gone there to take advantage of cheap labor are starting to tell us that if you (calculate) total cost and don't just look at wages, it's actually not worth it."

Democrats sought to nurture and expand the repatriation trend. But like numerous Make it in America bills passed by the U.S. House, the Creating American Jobs and Ending Off-Shoring Act died at the hands of Senate Republicans. Democrats had the majority with 53 votes for the measure, but Republicans, as they have all year, blocked passage by using a filibuster to require a super-majority of 60.

The next test for Republicans will occur Nov. 2. In the mid-term election, Americans red-in-the-face angry at the GOP for extending tax breaks to corporations for expatriating American jobs have the opportunity to show Republican politicians what it feels like to lose a job.