Think again

Wanted: A more hopeful agenda for America’s working families

By TIM NESBITT

Enough of the depressing reality shows about our vanishing jobs and declining incomes. We need to make time for more hopeful points of view.

Our economy is rebounding to record highs, but the back story in most American communities today is relentlessly downbeat. That story, which I have helped to tell in these columns over the past two years, goes like this:

We’re losing the great middle- class of this country because corporate greed and cutthroat competition in the global economy are decimating and degrading our jobs. As family-wage jobs decline, our children face fewer opportunities and bleaker futures. And our public institutions can’t do much to reverse these trends, because they’re suffering from increasing financial constraints and declining public confidence.

All of this is true. Worst of all, we don’t know what to do about these developments that appear to be so powerful, irreversible and grim. We’re fumbling for answers. But maybe we should focus instead on the equally reasonable premise that the work we have done to create the richest country in the world can and should provide a foundation for a more prosperous future for our children — and that we can make it so.

I was reminded of the bleaker story when re-reading an article that appeared in the New York Times last February about the Caterpillar Corporation, which has slashed pay and benefits for its newer workers even though it remains a highly profitable company that dominates its niche in world markets. Analyzing the Caterpillar experience, the Times’ Louis Uchitelle concluded: “The longstanding presumption that factory workers at successful companies can achieve a secure, relatively prosperous middle-class life for themselves and their families is evaporating.”

Caterpillar has a strong union, the United Auto Workers. But that union was forced to accept a two-tier system of pay and benefits that cut compensation for new hires by as much as 40 percent. The union’s representatives rationalize this deal by saying that new hires at Caterpillar are still doing better than they did before they came to the company. But, to their credit, those leaders also say they will fight for the new hires in their next round of contract negotiations.

Still, the new hires don’t sound grateful. And, the union leaders don’t sound hopeful. If there’s a common emotion shared by the older and younger workers at companies like Caterpillar, it’s more resignation than resentment. And that may be the biggest problem we have to overcome.

This is why I think we need to pay more attention to trends in the global economy and in our nation’s demographics, which can work to our advantage.

We in the baby boom generation may work later in life than our parents, but we’re still going to retire. And when we do, we are going to free up a tremendous number of jobs in our workplaces. Most of those jobs are good jobs by any objective measure of their value to the economy. Whether you are a “knowledge worker” in an office, a crane operator on the docks or a millworker whose plant shaves wood from logs, you are probably using technology in ways that enhance your productivity far above what it was a decade ago.

And most of those jobs are still good-paying jobs. We have to keep them so.

This should open up new opportunities for cooperation between older workers and younger workers. Our unions’ bargaining campaigns should focus on our fight for the workers who will succeed us, as the Machinists did in their successful negotiations with Boeing last year.

We should find new ways to emphasize what our generation can give back to those who come up behind us. We have a nursing shortage now, which will only get worse as more nurses retire. And we have a long list of young people waiting to get into our limited nurse training programs — because we don’t have enough nurse educators. Maybe our unions can organize newly-retired nurses to become teachers and mentors for a new generation of health care workers.

Our building trades unions know what it takes to provide world-class training in skilled occupations, many of which are becoming more technologically sophisticated and challenging. They’ve developed apprenticeship programs that should serve as a model for more jobs and industries.

And, those newly-hired Caterpillar workers shouldn’t be viewed as losers in the global economy. They are likely to be better educated, more flexible and more skilled in their jobs than we were in ours. We should make them and their counterparts in other industries the poster children of a new campaign for inter-generational equity in our economy.

Finally, we need a new narrative of hope and opportunity, especially in the public sphere. That narrative has to begin with the assertion that we deserve better for our contributions to the wealth of our country. It has to demand more from government, from reining in the excesses of “Caterpillaging” corporations to reorganizing our health care system in ways that protect family incomes.

Above all, it should pass along this lesson from our generation and the generations before us who created the great middle class of this county — that we can make a successful economy and enjoy prosperity again, if our work is fairly rewarded and our rewards are broadly shared.

Tim Nesbitt is former president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. For more information, check out the Oregon AFL-CIO online at www.oraflcio.org