May Day

International Workers' Day was celebrated May 1. It's a bank or national holiday in much of the world. - although not in the US or Canada where the contributions of workers are celebrated in September.

Across Europe and even here at home, May Day protests were held against austerity programs that aim to reduce deficits in a time of recession by cutting benefits for the less well off and decreasing government jobs. CNN's website has a series of photos and videos of the European protests.  NBC News has coverage of the Seattle and Los Angeles demonstration.

So where do the workers of the world and of the US stand 123 years after the first May Day was observed?

On the plus side:

• The eight-hour workday is fairly universal in the industrialized West. This was what workers in the late 19th century were struggling for: eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours recreation.

• Discrimination against women and minorities in the workplace is ending. Here at home, we had to pass the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act in 2009 to reverse a 2007 ruling by the conservative US Supreme Court that placed new time limits on when discriminatory pay complaints could be filed.

• In the US, the only Western industrialized nation without a single payer health care system, businesses over a certain size must now (starting in 2014) provide a health care plan for their full-time employees thanks to the Affordable Care Act. SCOTUS has already ruled on its constitutionality but Republicans continue to mount attacks against the act. We are not out of the woods yet on this one. Congressional legislators can affect the funding and Republican-controlled state legislatures can hamper implementation.

On the negative side:

- It still can be dangerous to be a worker.

• A recent explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant killed 15. Apparently the various agencies responsible for monitoring the safety of the plant (the agencies whose regulations Republicans abhor and try to defund) as well as the plant management failed to recognize the danger of storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate.

 

• A building collapse in Bangladesh killed more than 500 garment workers. [Huffington Post] These deaths occurred a day after a five-story crack opened in the building. The workers had been threatened with a loss of pay if they did not go to work the day of the collapse. If companies want to reap the benefits of globalization, they need to act morally. That is, they (or at the very least our government) should demand the same safety and health standards be applied in developing countries as in our own.   Saying that you contract out your work does not relieve you of the responsibility for the safety of the workers nor does it relieve you of the obligation to ensure that safety audits of contracted facilities are conducted competently.

- The global recession continues unabated throughout most of the world.

• Unemployment in the Eurozone (the 17 countries using the Euro) reached an overall record high of 12.1% in March. Greece and Spain are much worse than the average - at about 27% unemployment in each. Youth (15-24 years old) unemployment is staggering with Greece and Spain again the worst off (56% in Spain and 59% in Greece).
• The austerity nonsense (read this as "deficit reduction in the midst of a recession") that is in vogue in Europe and the US has clearly been unable to help countries recover economically. In Great Britain, which is not in the Eurozone, unemployment in February rose to 7.9%. In mid-April, after cutting its forecast for UK economic growth, even the IMF is asking Prime Minister David Cameron's governing coalition to "consider easing up on its austerity drive amid a weak economic recovery." As the WSJ reports: "The U.K. economy has barely grown since Mr. Cameron took office and is at risk of shrinking for the second consecutive quarter in the first three months of 2013, which would push it into its third recession in five years."
• Here at home, official unemployment stands at 7.5%, down slightly from March's 7.6%. 165,000 new jobs were created in April - which is about what is needed to absorb the new workers entering the US labor force each month.
• Some common sense is prevailing - in, of all places, Italy. Italy's new Prime Minister Letta has said growth policies must be urgently adopted to counter an austerity drive under which the country was "dying". "Italy is dying from austerity alone," he said. "Growth policies cannot wait."
• Unfortunately, no such common sense seems to exist in the US where economic ideologues, the so-called "deficit hawks" are driving the discussion towards the same measures that have failed to work in Europe. How Obama can be taken in by these right wing arguments is beyond my comprehension. Trying to reach a "Grand Bargain" with the proponents of the economic philosophy that drove us into this ditch and that has prevented us from emerging from it (supply side economics (aka trickle down); deregulation) - with the opponents still geared to denying him victories even as a lame duck president - is ludicrous. (See Senator Toomey's comments on the failure of gun legislation.) The shadows of Reagan and Thatcher continue to cast their palls on recovery in the US and UK. 

- Income inequality is growing - particularly in the United States.

 

 

 

• The gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us in this country continues to grow. It is no coincidence that this gap has grown as the influence of unions and union membership have declined.  In the graph above (taken from the Center on Budget and Policy Prioities website), the influence of Reaganomics and the policies promoted by the Chicago School can be clearly seen.  Until about 1980, all income levels were sharing in the growing prosperity.  Afterwards the slope of the curve for the wealthiest begins to deviate significantly from the slope of the curves for the rest of us.  Trickle down?  I don't think so.

• Per the Global Post webpage on the income gap and the Gini methodolgy used by social scientists to measure inequality: "Income inequality is surging, and there are few countries where it is rising faster than the United States. The distance between rich and poor is greater in America than nearly all other developed countries, making the US a leader in a trend that economists warn has dire consequences."   In the Gini methodology, 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents a state where everything is owned by one person.  Among the member nations of the OECD, only Mexico and Chile have greater inequality than exists in the US.

 

Other Stuff

May Day

International Worker's Day is celebrated on May 1. It is a national holiday in more than 80 countries and celebrated unofficially in many others. It originally started as a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair, which began as a peaceful rally in Chicago in 1886 in support of workers striking for an eight-hour day. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police as they acted to disperse the public meeting. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; scores of others were wounded. [Wikipedia]

 

 

 

Union Membership

In January, the NYTimes reported that the percentage of unionized US workers had dropped to its lowest level in 97 years.  In spite of a gain of 2.4 million jobs in 2012, union membership dropped by 400,000.  The percentage of unionized workers is down from 32-35% in the post WWII years.  It bears repeating: the exponentially widening income gap in the United States is partly due to the weakening of unions in this country.  The other part of the equation is the shifting of manufacturing jobs overseas.  Manufacturing jobs are being replaced by less-well-paid jobs in the services industries. 

So I guess I'll close with Paul Robeson's fantastic rendition of the worker's song Joe Hill.  And a hope for a rebirth in the validity of the American Dream for our upcoming generations.