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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #21-99 Booming Inequity: Work and the New Economy Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact:- Daniel Levine: If you talk to someone about work and you know "How's the job going?" "Oh great." You know, you talk to them fifteen minutes longer all of a sudden it's not so great. And you start hearing about the frustrations and the fact that they've got to put in this extra time that they're not getting compensated for, that they're being pulled away from things more important to them. Amy Dean: We have to rebuild a social movement in this country around the questions of economic justice. Phillip Babich: Workers today are earning less than they did when Richard Nixon was President, with adjustments for inflation. And families are deeper in debt than ever before. The United States leads industrial nations with the widest gap between rich and poor. On this roundtable edition, we look at some of the reasons for this disparity amidst the celebration of a booming economy, and some ways to boost incomes for working people. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. For a large majority of our lives, we work. According to federal statistics, we're working harder and longer hours, but overall pay is stagnant if not declining. That is unless we're top executives in Fortune 500 companies. Executive compensation, according to many observers, is off the scale. So why, with the Dow Jones industrial average surpassing the 10,000 mark in the spring of 1999, are many of us struggling to make ends meet and often working in jobs that don't fulfill our desires for meaningful and inspiring lives? To explore these and other questions we're joined by Amy Dean, executive officer for the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council based in San Jose, California. Amy, thanks for joining us. Amy Dean: Thanks. I'm glad to be here. Phillip Babich: And Daniel Levine, founder of the on-line magazine DISGRUNTLED, which has been dubbed "The business magazine for people who work for a living". Levine also published a book with the same title in September 1998: Disgruntled: The Darker Side of Work. Dan, thanks for joining us. Daniel Levine: Thanks for having me. Phillip Babich: Well first off Dan, your subtitle implies that there's a dark side and then a darker side. What's the dark side? Daniel Levine: I think the dark side is you have to get up every morning and do it. I think the darker side is that, you not only have to get up and do it, but you have to do it in an environment which is really stacked against the rights of the worker in the workplace. That it's a place where the employer has most of the power, other than your ability to walk out and say, "I quit." Phillip Babich: Your magazine and your book looked at many different tales from workers that kind of show that dilemma, I guess. Can you talk about that? Maybe some examples for us? Daniel Levine: Sure. I mean, you know, we went on line in November of 1995 and... I guess it was one of the unintentional consequences of being on the internet that it does a lot of type of dialogue with readers and we've heard workplace horror stories across the board. But, you know, what I think a lot of it comes down to is that until people are confronted with their lack of rights in the workplace, and their inability to really enforce what rights there are, because of an environment of at-will employment which basically says, you know, barring some kind of statutory violation your employer can fire you at will. You know, there's this sense of powerlessness in that you have to sit there and either take the abuse or figure out some other way to pay your mortgage. Phillip Babich: So lots of people are just kind of grinning and bearing it then? Daniel Levine: Well, certainly the people we hear from. I mean, there are certainly people we hear from that have found ways of addressing that, some conventional -- some not so conventional. But, yeah, I think a lot of times people don't grin and bear it, they become numb to it and desensitized and just accept it. And, you know, if you talk to someone about work and you know "How's the job going?" "Oh great." You know, you talk to them fifteen minutes longer all of a sudden it's not so great. And you start hearing about the frustrations and the fact that they've got to put in this extra time that they're not getting compensated for it, that they're being pulled away from things more important to them. So, you know, there's kind of, I think, this frame of mind that a lot of people put themselves in to get them through the day. Phillip Babich: Now, Amy Dean, the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council works with employees in the Silicon Valley among other places. It's the high tech mecca. And what are you hearing from workers in that region? Amy Dean: I think the hallmark of the new economy demonstrates that there is growing insecurity for people at both ends of the labor market. Whether you work at the very high end or you work at the low end -- and as we know there's very little in between -- that there's growing insecurity across the board. I think what's happening is that in spite of the fact that there's record breaking unemployment, the qualitative nature of employment is changing dramatically. And that while there's plenty of jobs to be had, the fact is that the nature or the quality of those jobs is really deteriorating. And that there's no such thing as permanent employment. People kind of move in and out of the work force in a very kind of fluid way. Benefits not associated with that. The risk of kind of the ebbs and the flows of the cycle being borne by the individual. And so we see what's happening for people, really, almost in every sector of the new economy working with greater and greater uncertainty. Last thing I'll say is that if you look at the fastest growing occupations within Silicon Valley as well as California, the ten fastest growing occupations all pay below fifteen dollars an hour. And so we got massive job growth, but the quality and the pay of those jobs is really declining. Phillip Babich: And fifteen dollars an hour, or below fifteen dollars an hour, what does that get you these days? Amy Dean: Well, in Santa Clara County it takes one mother and child to be self-sufficient - that's to be off of any public assistance just to subsist at the bare bone minimum - twelve dollars and forty-two cents and hour. And that's no frills or thrills, that's just paying your bills to rent an apartment and paying your groceries and transportation and child care and that's it. Daniel Levine: One of the things people have sought out as a solution is a trend called downshifting, which is basically abandoning some of their consumer lifestyle and learning to spend less in order to work less. Now some of that has come about from people who have had to confront this in a very involuntary way. They've been in good jobs in middle management and suddenly in their late forties early fifties have been downsized and find they can't go out and get work at the same level that they had. They're taking jobs for half the salaries they were enjoying or less. And in many ways though, what we're finding is that people are finding that once they get over this need to spend, that they are finding a more satisfying and rewarding life, particularly if it's associated with cutting back on work. That's a solution for some people. Generally, that's not easily done for people with young children going through school or- Phillip Babich: Now we're told with this kind of the rapid job changes that some people have to go through that "Tough", you know, "get used to it, here are some training programs" et cetera, so that you can switch back and forth between jobs. Is that a viable solution Amy? Amy Dean: Well I think that we will not turn back the clocks. I mean the fact that work increasingly is short termed and temporary I don't believe will change. I think that's a response to the growing volatility of a global marketplace. It's a response to the massive shifts that have taken place in the economy. It's a function of technology. Moving in and out of the workforce to perform work and not necessarily be connected to a job per se, is not gonna go away. So the question becomes for us is, what is the next set of institutions responsible for governing the economy locally? What's government's role in this new mix? What are next generation of labor organizations going to look like in this new mix? And what's the role of our training infrastructure - workforce development community colleges - what's there role in trying to figure out how we mediate or absorb the risk for individuals? And I think it's nothing short of massive transformation in all of our institutions. And a call for a new social contract in this country. Phillip Babich: Now maybe you can pick up on that point. You were talking earlier about contingent or temporary labor, and your labor council that you work with published a report in 1996 on this growing sector. And I interviewed you around the time for the AFL-CIO's radio program "On Target" and you were talking about organizing temps. What's going on now? Amy Dean: Well, we launched a project, two initiatives, at the beginning of this year. One is a general membership organization called Together at Work. We've signed up our first one hundred members this year. We just launched the project. The membership organization is building portable benefits. We've got three benefit plans that will be coming on-line by this summer. Health plans for people who can come in, who need to move from job to job, through membership of Together at Work. We're building a pension plan. And over time the goal will be to subsidize a portion of the pension and health benefits for members The second initiative that we launched is something called Solutions, which is a staffing agency. And the goal is to enter into the labor market, broker supply and demand of labor, in the clerical/technical sector. We're placing people at two dollars higher than the average that our industry competitors are placing, cause we're not taking a fifty percent profit margin. The fact that we're taking a smaller profit margin, and we're rolling the profits back into the human resource development of members of Solutions, puts us in a situation to be able to pay people more, still solve and meet the needs of the employer community, but create a decent wage for people who are working in the short-term situation. The last thing, the last goal of Solutions, as an actual formal labor market actor, is to build stability for people because of linking enough employers together. So that if your assignments are short term, by virtue of having a relationship with Solutions, you'll be able to come in and out of different assignments and be gainfully employed longer term, in spite of the fact that employment is short term and inconsistent. Phillip Babich: Dan, if we're looking at this kind of new work environment. We know many people who are relatively highly skilled, college, know a dozen software programs, etcetera, able to get employment with corporation X, corporation Y, week after week after week. What do you think that does for the individual, in a sense, that if they're kind of marketing these skills and acting, essentially, as kind of educated drones in a way? Daniel Levine: Well you know, the biggest problem goes back to what I think Amy was saying about this need for a new social contract. A lot of times, because people are working in this manner, they don't have the same rights and the same benefits that are afforded to employees. And I think the real key is if we're going to accept that there is no turning back the clock, which I think is true, that there's this new way that people are working. What I think we really have to look at is building the same types of protections and safety net and benefit structure that, you know, employees twenty thirty years ago could assume was a given. And I think that's really more of a political problem than a workplace problem. And one that, you know, unfortunately given politics today is hard to bring about change. Phillip Babich: There seems to be this separation between politics and the economy in the way you both are discussing. Is that kind of a problem with today's society, in the sense that the economy operates kind of separately from the political structure really? Amy Dean: Well, I think it's a great point, in that less than twenty-five years ago in this country we made economic decisions because they were a vehicle or a means towards achieving certain social and political values that we had as a nation. Somewhere along the way in the last twenty-five years, we stopped making economic decisions as a means to an end. And we started making economic decisions in an attempt to build an environment of competitiveness, as though competitiveness was somehow the end in and of itself. And so we have lost track of what the goal is. Now, in the midst of having that happen in the last twenty years, a lot of people seem believe that the forces of the economy are somehow equivalent to the laws of nature. They're not. And the fact is economic decisions take place because people make political decisions that inform them. And to the extent that people can make good political decisions or bad political decisions suggests that we all have the ability to shape and form and impact the way our economy grows or doesn't grow. Phillip Babich: Do you think then that large multinational corporations, for example, hold too much power in making those economic decisions that effect so many lives? Amy Dean: I think that historically in our country, we've always tried to maintain a balance between, on the one hand, the forces of the market, and the values that we hold as a nation. And throughout history there are periods where one is more out of whack than the other. I mean, clearly we're going through a period now where the forces of the market reign, in that, you know the market is the highest institution to which all others are subservient. And so it's so out of balance and so out of whack that while I don't have any romantic notions about us being able to rebuild power - but I'm also optimistic about the fact that it is so out of balance that being able to reassert a politics of compassion that attempts to balance again the forces, is... I think, the window and the door is opening right now. Phillip Babich: That was Amy Dean, executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council. We're also joined by Daniel Levine, author of Disgruntled: The Darker Side of Work. Laura Livoti: You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, please give us a call. It's toll free: 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tape and transcript orders. That's 800-529-5736. Phillip Babich: We now return to our roundtable discussion with Amy Dean, executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council, and Daniel Levine, author of Disgruntled: The Darker Side of Work. I asked Amy and Dan about a report issued in April 1999 by the Boston based group United for a Fair Economy. The report "Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing Wealth Gap in America" presents conclusions by the economist Edward Wolf of New York University, a leading authority on wealth distribution. He and his co-authors found that the top 1% of households in the United States, controls 40% of the wealth. Daniel Levine: We've had tax policies and political policies that have rewarded asset owners and penalized wage earners. Amy Dean: Yeah, I think that we definitely need to look at what kinds of political reforms that we can have. I agree absolutely that there has been tax policies that have not rewarded wage earners and have created incentives for those at the high end. I think that there are lots of things that we can do to restore balance. The first is that we need to build back parity into our National Labor Relations Act - the body of law that's primarily responsible for governing relationships between employee and employer. We need to once again make it a right for people to bargain collectively in this country. People do not have the right to bargain collectively in this country. We have lost that right. The law has been whittled away in the last thirty years. The law has been rendered impotent because of changes in the economy. We need to make the right to organize the premier civil rights issue in this next century. That's one thing. The second thing is we need massive reform with employment law. We need to ensure that those people who are not working on some kind of permanent fixed basis can be covered for unemployment, for periods when they're separated from the workforce. In other words, employment policies in so many of our social constructs like workers comp and other things assume a permanent fixed relationship between employee and employer. We need to reform those policies to accommodate the new ways people go to work. Creating the political space and will is a whole other matter. But once we do that, and I believe we'll do that because of a resurgent labor movement, it's then a question of ensuring that once the door opens - it won't open automatically, it won't open without a fight in this country - but once the door does open, I don't think there's any shortage of obvious reforms that we need. Daniel Levine: Do you think that's possible? You know, particularly labor act reform with the two party system where, you know, the choice is to support the Democrats or not. Amy Dean: I think that the only thing that brings about the next wave of reform, specifically it relates to your question around labor law reform, is we're gonna have to heat it up in this country. We're gonna have to make the right to organize a major civil rights issue. We have to rebuild a social movement in this country around the questions of economic justice. And I think once we build a social movement we'll begin to create the space and will. We will not create the space and will by playing inside politics. But we do absolutely need the Democrats to be in power to create the space for us to go about pushing the envelope so that we can bring about reform. Phillip Babich: Maybe you could both talk about the political space that some workers are encountering in their workplaces: either the individual who pursues a worker's comp claim, or an individual who is interested in getting more information from labor to decide on how to organize or if organizing is viable in the workplaces. What stories are you hearing? Dan? Daniel Levine: On the organizing side? Phillip Babich: On organizing or workers' comp claims. What's it like for workers? Daniel Levine: Well, I think it's an AFL-CIO figure: ten thousand people a year are fired from their jobs for organizing activity even though that's illegal to do. It's a very unfriendly environment. It's an environment where the employer has gotten a lot of power in the organizing process as far as running a no campaign. It's a very difficult and uncomfortable place I think for workers to find themselves. And it's something they do with great risk to their future employment there. Even so, people are organizing every day, but the odds are stacked against them because we've had, you know, thirty years of labor laws and judicial decisions that have been very much stacked against them. Phillip Babich: You said in some cases in your book about workers who claimed, or made workers' comp claims, and they were essentially blackballed when they went looking for other jobs. Daniel Levine: Well, there are now data bases that employers can tap into that can find out, when you go for a job without you being aware of an employer or potential employer doing this, they can tap into data bases and find out: have you ever filed a workers' comp claim; have you ever sued a previous employer? You know, they'll look at a whole host of financial records and drivers records and do a lot of homework in a very short amount of time for a very small amount of money given the new technology. And there are, I think, very serious issues of privacy concerns that are raised around that, that are poorly addressed today. Phillip Babich: Is it legal to conduct such searches? Daniel Levine: Sure it is. I mean, there have been people that have done things that are illegal, but, you know, there's no kind of omnibus privacy act that addresses workplace privacy rights. You know, the place where you see these types of issues addressed legally are things like the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which basically, as long as the employer discloses that he is going to do this and you've given him permission to do that, they can do that. But you know, we hear of people applying for jobs where people are doing credit checks that have, you know, no access to money, there not going to be a bank teller or something. And it leads to very bizarre decisions in hiring. Phillip Babich: Amy. Amy Dean: The largest private sector organizing drive was just won at Stanford Hospital just a couple of months ago, which represented that almost two thousand workers who were able to persevere in spite of massive employer intimidation. It was a traditional election that was won through the labor board. And typically in those situations where you go through the labor board, all the rules are stacked against you. The employer can have access to the employees and intimidate them twenty-four hours a day. We can't even walk on the workplace and talk with people. There was tons of intimidation, tons of harassment that went on. To hear the employees of that facility testify is just heart wrenching when you hear what they went through. It's amazing. What helped them to be successful, and I think this is the common thread that you see across the board, and it was successful in organizing drives right now around the country, is when community leaders come forward and lend their moral stature to supporting the rights of employees to choose for themselves, without interference from their employer, about whether they want to have representation or not. Daniel Levine: Just to expand on that a little. There was actually an interesting body of research that was recently published by a group of academics through Cornell University. Kate Bronfenbrenner - Organizing to Win was the book. I don't know if you're familiar with it Amy. But, one of the things they did was, and I think it's weird to see academics spending this type of time and energy on analyzing union organizing, at least from an employee side. But, one of the things they found that campaigns, organizing campaigns that were successful, were successful partially because the issues they were focusing on weren't micro issues of wages or conditions, but really broader issues of rights and justice. And issues that extend beyond that workplace and issues where an employer can't walk in the door and say, "Okay, you know, we're giving you a fifty cent raise. You don't need this union," and make that issue go away temporarily. And I think that's kind of one of the things that people who are not organized really look to the labor movement still to kind of be a champion of all workers' rights. And look for these types of social justice issues to be really fought for by the labor movement and reach out to a broader community. Phillip Babich: Well meanwhile as workers are struggling for even the right to organize in some cases, executive compensation is according to some, running away, really. I'm going to read something. This is from the AFL-CIO's web site. They have an executive pay watch. And they say, "According to Business Week the average CEO of a major corporation made forty-two times the pay of a typical American factory worker in 1980. By 1990 that ratio had more than doubled to eighty-five times the average factory wage, and almost quintupled again to a staggering four hundred and nineteen times more in 1998." That's an issue that you talk about in your book, Dan. Daniel Levine: Yeah, the whole notion of what to this kind of explosion in CEO compensation was this notion of pay for performance. And it's become a total joke. And all it's become is kind of a vicious cycle where, you know, a CEO looks across the street and points to the board that just granted his competitor a raise and a new round of options and, you know, puts his compensation committee on the job to up his own. What's even made it worse is that boards have been fairly free at re-pricing options -- that once a CEOs pay is going to be pegged to stock performance, so he's granted a series of options at the current market price. But the stock falters and it's down twenty bucks from where it was when he got the options grant. And the board rather than say, "Well this CEO hasn't performed and he's not going to get that reward," instead says, "We've gotta keep this guy incentivized. We don't want to lose him to competitors. So we're going to re-price those options and drop them, you know, twenty points." And that money... It's kind of imaginary I think to a lot of people, but the fact of the matter is you're transferring wealth and it's gotta come from somewhere. It's gotta come either from the shareholders or the employees or the customers of the company. It has to come from somewhere. It doesn't just get taken out on paper. It's not something that's just created that way. And I think it goes back to what we've talked about. The shifting economy, shifting fortunes report, it's really helped exaggerate this disparity between the wealthy people in the workplace and everyone else. Phillip Babich: Well, moving on, there are some solutions that are on the table. Amy, you were mentioning one which is organizing temporary workers of the contingent workforce. The other one has to do with living wage campaigns that are taking place in, I believe, approximately sixteen cities across the United States. Maybe you can talk about what a living wage campaign is. Amy Dean: Well they've been very strategic tools in really bringing together the kinds of groups and constituencies that need to come together. You know, in the last thirty years the progressive community and progressive politics is really fallen and kind of been parked in an enclave of identity politics. And it's only been until very recently, which I think is a function of a resurgent labor movement, that we've begun to reconstitute notions of liberalism in that country that are centered in the context of what we have in common as opposed to what we don't have in common. These living wage campaigns are a great example of that point, where you see a broad alliance of constituencies that haven't talked for many years, coming together to put the question of equity and social justice front and center in the community as a premier issue that needs to be addressed. And so there have I think it's nineteen or twenty cities now across the country, where people have been successful in passing public policies that link public contracts, usually at the city level, to a minimum wage standard -- typically what people think is necessary to live at within the particular region. In San Jose, we passed one this past year in November. And it was the highest wage in the country. We also have provisions in it so that employers who are willing to be neutral in organizing drives will get preferential treatment in the bidding process. And there's also a component that addresses the issue of retention of employees, so that when contractors come and go -- you know this issue of fluidity that we talked about earlier -- that employees won't be hired or fired, but that if employees are continuing to do a good job they will remain. So it's a question of wages, retention, and then this issue of preferential treatment for employers who want to be neutral. Phillip Babich: Have businesses stopped doing business with the city of San Jose because of rising costs or anything like that? Amy Dean: In all the instances - the oldest actually living wage policy's in Baltimore. It was passed in 1994, so we have the most amount of data from that one -- the rest of them are relatively young. There's been no examples in Baltimore, no examples in Los Angeles, San Jose it's too early to tell. Daniel Levine: An with that there, you know going back to Baltimore, there's been a significant impact on the lives of those workers as far as improving their standard of living. Amy Dean: Right. Phillip Babich: Well, I've been speaking with Amy Dean. She's the executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council based in San Jose. Amy, thanks for joining us on Making Contact. Amy Dean: Thank you. It's been fun. Phillip Babich: Great. And Dan Levine, founder of the on-line magazine DISGRUNTLED, which has been dubbed "the business magazine for people who work for a living". Dan, thanks for joining us. Daniel Levine: Thank you. Phillip Babich: That's it for this edition of Making Contact, a look at the growing wage disparity in America, and how workers are responding. Thanks for listening. We had production assistance from Stephanie Welch and Rosie Reyes. Laura Livoti is our managing director. Peggy Law is executive director. Our production assistant is Shereen Meraji. Norman Solomon is senior advisor. Our national producer is David Barsamian. And I'm your host and managing producer, Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same phone number for tapes or transcripts. That's 800-529-5736. Making Contact is an independent production. We're committed to providing a forum for voices and opinions not often heard in the mass media. If you have suggestions for future programs, we'd like to hear from you. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. ‘Bye for now. |