[Peace-discuss] Labor and Obama

[Ricky Baldwin]

This article from the American Prospect's blog TAPPED overstates the case a bit, I think, but only a bit...  There's no revolution going on yet, but things like this and the Ledbetter bill make a hell of a difference to ordinary people trying to make end meet.

I still say the big question on the Employee Free Choice Act is the Senate, but as Bob Naiman pointed out at JWJ recently, Al Franken's case makes it look a whole lot stronger ...

 Ricky


"Speak your mind even if your voice shakes." - Maggie Kuhn


http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=01&year=2009&base_name=labor_lovin_president
 
LABOR LOVIN' PRESIDENT.
President Obama’s unveiling today of his administration’s Task Force
on Middle Class Working Families is the most unambiguous statement yet from the
president of his support for unions. Surrounded by union leaders from both the
AFL-CIO and Change To Win (which generated the idea for the task force some
months ago) and by Vice-President Biden, who will chair the task force,
Obama delivered comments were even more emphatic than his official actions. 
“I don’t see organized labor as part of the problem,” the president said.
“To me, it’s part of the solution.” 
Lest anyone miss the point, he added, “You cannot have a strong middle class
without a strong labor union.” 
But for a few stray remarks from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry
Truman, that’s the strongest endorsement of the case for unions that an
American president has ever made. 
The task force, whose executive director will be Biden’s economic adviser, Jared
Bernstein (formerly of the Economic Policy Institute and the most liberal
of the new administration’s major economists), will be comprised of the
Secretaries of Labor, Education, Commerce and Health and Human Services, as
well the directors of the Economic Council (Larry Summers), the Domestic
Policy Council (Melody Barnes), the OMB (Peter Orszag) and the
Council of Economic Advisers (Christinea Romer). Its first full meeting
will come late next month in Philadelphia,
on the topic of green jobs. The task force’s goals, according to its website,
include “restoring labor standards, including workplace safety,” “helping to
protect middle-class and working-family incomes” and “protecting retirement
security.”
In conjunction with announcing the task force, Obama also issued three
executive orders on labor issues: one requiring federal contractors to offer
jobs to their current workers when receiving new contracts; the second
preventing payment to federal contractors for any funds they spend opposing
their workers’ attempts to organize; and the third repealing a Bush administration
order requiring federal contractors to post notices telling workers how they
can withhold dues payments from the union representing them if they don’t like
the union’s politics. 
The first order comports closely to some municipal “worker retention”
ordinances that various living-wage advocacy groups have persuaded city and
county governments to adopt over the past decade. In weeks to come, labor
leaders expect Obama to sign more labor-backed executive orders, including one
to require project labor agreements between contractors and construction unions
on federally-funded infrastructure projects. 
Probably the most significant part of today’s proceedings is Obama’s
observation that a strong labor movement is essential to building a strong
middle class. It’s certainly a historically grounded assertion: The only time
in American history that median household income increased at the identical level
that productivity increased was the period from 1947 to 1973, when both rates
increased by 104 percent. Not coincidentally, this was the only time in
American history when union labor constituted more than a quarter of the work
force. Over the past decade, with the unionized percentage of the
private-sector workforce reduced to single digits, productivity increases have
enriched only the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, according to the work of
economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. 
But it’s not just the historical accuracy of Obama’s remarks that is
notable, however much they represent a departure from the practice of his
predecessor. What’s really notable here is that Obama is publicly, as
president, laying the basis for his case for the Employee Free Choice Act,
though his public push for the bill is still to come. A number of union leaders
have recently told me that they expect the bill to begin to move through
congress this spring, and they sound relatively optimistic that they can get to
the magic number of 60 in the Senate. With his comments today, Obama certainly
has given them a basis for their optimism. 
--Harold Meyerson 
Posted by Phoebe Connelly
on January 30, 2009 5:01 PM 


      
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