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Think againLabor's lessons from the stormBy
TIM NESBITT On the day after the levees broke in New Orleans, the U.S. Census Bureau
released its annual report on the state of working America, which a Wall
Street Journal reporter summarized as follows: “Although the U.S.
economy grew robustly last year, the income of the median household slipped
a bit, wages of full-time workers fell, the number of Americans living
below the poverty line rose and more Americans went without health insurance.”
This wasn’t the first time we had seen statistics like these. The
barometer that measures the condition of America’s working families
has been falling for the last five years in a row, with little response
from the public.
Think back to last year’s presidential election campaign, when we
last tried to sound the alarm about the course of this country’s
economic policies. Many of us talked to working people who had lost their
jobs, their health insurance or their pensions but felt that there was
no one to blame, as if hard times are like patches of bad weather —
a test of our ability to hunker down and endure rather than a time to
fight back and demand better from those who control the levers of power
in our economy and our government. Too many working family voters, we
found, were more likely to be persuaded by the argument that government
should “leave us alone” than by our calls for accountability
from our elected leaders.
That was then. Everything is different now.
Tragically, it took a raging storm to tear away the psychological blinders
that have kept so many Americans from confronting the contradictions of
a “robust” economy that can’t deliver good jobs for
a majority of its working families. As we watched the poor and the middle
class, residents and tourists, blacks and whites fending for themselves
in the abandoned public buildings of New Orleans, we recognized how precarious
life can be when you’re on your own in the so-called “ownership
society.”
I’ll let others document and explain the failures of government
to respond to this disaster. Even if you don’t think that the federal
government should be tasked with responding to emergencies of this sort,
the fact is that Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was chartered
by this Administration and funded by us taxpayers to do exactly that.
The more significant facts for those who believe in government accountability,
a good measure of which is whether you do what you’re tasked to
do and do it efficiently, are the private contractors and political cronies
who forced out experienced staffers and crippled the agency.
But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this catastrophe than
the failure of a failed government agency. It’s the failure of a
failed philosophy of government.
Grover Norquist, Bill Sizemore’s old mentor and a leader of the
anti-union forces in Washington, D.C., has built a powerful political
coalition around the sound-bite-sized idea that government should leave
us alone. Their version of leaving us alone frees government to pander
to the needs of corporations and well-heeled donors, for whom public policy
is a means to private plunder. That’s why their agenda includes
freeing us from the minimum wage, privatizing Social Security and making
us smarter consumers by having us pay the full cost of our health insurance
— all prime tenets of the ownership society.
Norquist found a new agenda item for the ownership society soon after
the storm hit. While families were still stranded in New Orleans, he dashed
off a letter to President Bush urging him to suspend the federal government’s
prevailing wage laws when reconstruction begins. Bush took his advice
several days later and issued a proclamation allowing government contractors
in the storm area to pay less than $10/hour for pipelayers and $9.55/hour
for laborers, with no benefits required. Thanks to Bush’s proclamation,
our taxpayer-funded rebuilding effort will no longer provide a living
wage and family benefits for the workers who do the rebuilding.
Contrast Bush’s actions to those of his predecessors a generation
ago, when a fighting union movement and an aroused electorate demanded
and got from a responsive government a minimum wage, a 40-hour work week,
a Social Security system that practically wiped out poverty among the
elderly and, eventually, a GI bill that opened up our colleges to working
people and helped to build a thriving middle class in this country.
The lessons of this disaster are clear. Without a government that is responsive
to the needs of working families, willing to curb corporate greed, protect
our jobs, promote equal opportunity and provide equal protection for all,
we get what we’re experiencing in this economy and what we’re
seeing on the streets of New Orleans.
America’s workers deserve better from their government. Now they
have to demand it. Tim Nesbitt is president of the Oregon AFL-CIO. For more information, check out the Oregon AFL-CIO online at oraflcio.unions-america.com
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