On Labor Day, Work to Save the Middle Class

By Leo Gerard
September 3, 2010
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010093503/labor-day-work-save-middle-class

This Labor Day feels gloomy. It’s a celebration of work
when there is not enough of it, a day off when too many
desperately seek a day on.

America has commemorated two Labor Days since this
brutal recession began near the end of George Bush’s
presidency in December of 2007. Now the relentless high
unemployment, the ever-rising foreclosures, the
unremitting wage and benefit take-backs have replaced
American optimism and enthusiasm with fear and anger.

Happy Labor Day.

On this holiday, we can rant with Glenn Beck, kick the
dog and hate the neighbor lucky enough to retain his
job. Or we can do something different. We can join with
our neighbors, employed and unemployed, our foreclosed-
on children, our elderly parents fearing cuts in their
Social Security lifeline and our fellow workers
worrying that the furlough ax will strike them next.
Together we can organize and mobilize and create a
grassroots groundswell that gives government no choice
but to respond to our needs, the needs of working
people.

We can do what workers did during the Great Depression
to provoke change, to create programs like Social
Security and achieve recognition of rights like
collective bargaining. These changes were sought by
groups to benefit groups. In a civil society, people
care for one another. And America is such a society --
one where people routinely donate blood to aid
anonymous strangers, children set up lemonade stands to
contribute to Katrina victims and working families find
a few bucks for United Way.

The self-righteous Right is all about individuals
pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. That
proposition -- the do-it-all- by-yourself-winner-takes-
all philosophy -- clearly failed because so many
Americans are jobless, homeless and too penniless to
afford boots.

Over the past decade, the winner who took all was Wall
Street. The banksters gambled on derivatives and other
risky financial tomfoolery and won big time. Until they
lost. And crashed the economy. After the American
taxpayer bailed them out, those wealthy traders
returned to making huge profits and bonuses based on
perilous schemes.

Still, they believe they haven’t taken enough from
working Americans. They’re lobbying to end aid for
those who remain unemployed in a recession caused by
Wall Street recklessness. And they’re demanding
extension of their Bush-given tax breaks. This is the
nation’s upper 1 percent, people who earn a million or
more each year, the 1 percent that took home 56 percent
of all income growth between 1989 and 2007, the year
the recession began.

Since 2007, 8.2 million workers have lost jobs.
Millions more are underemployed, laboring part-time
when they need full-time jobs, or barely squeaking by
on slashed wages and benefits. Since the recession
began, the unemployment rate nearly doubled, from 5
percent to 9.6 percent, and that does not include those
so discouraged that they’ve given up the search for
jobs, a decision that is, frankly, understandable when
there are only enough openings to re-employ 20 percent
of the jobless. Five unemployed workers compete for
each job created in this sluggish economy.

And American workers weren’t prepared for this
downturn, having already suffered losses in the years
before it began. The median income, adjusted for
inflation, of working-age households declined by more
than $2,000 in the seven years before the recession
started.

At the same time, practices like off-shoring jobs and
signing regressive international trade deals
contributed to the loss of middle class, blue collar
jobs. A new report, "The Polarization of Job
Opportunities in the U.S. Labor Market," by the Center
for American Progress and The Hamilton Project, says:

"The decline in middle-skill jobs has been detrimental
to the earnings and labor force participation rates of
workers without a four-year college education, and
differentially so for males, who are increasingly
concentrated in low-paying service occupations."

The recession compounded that, the report says:

"Employment losses during the recession have been far
more severe in middle-skilled white- and blue-collar
jobs than in either high-skill, white-collar jobs or
low-skill service occupations."

What that means is high roller banksters are living
large; lawn care workers and waitresses subsist on
minimum wage, and working class machinists and
steelworkers are disappearing altogether.

The researchers found the U.S. economy is increasingly
polarized into high-skill, high-wage jobs and low-
skill, low wage jobs. America is losing the middle jobs
and with them its great middle class.

No wonder the rising anger in middle America.

But fury doesn’t solve the problem. This Labor Day, we
must organize to save ourselves and our neighbors. We
must stop America from descending into plutocracy. We
must demand support for American manufacturing and
middle class jobs. That means terminating tax breaks
for corporate outsourcers, ending trade practices that
violate agreements and international law and punishing
predator countries for currency manipulation that
subverts fair trade by artificially lowering the price
of products shipped into the U.S. while artificially
raising the price of American exports.

We must demand support for American industry,
particularly manufacturers of renewable energy sources
like solar cells and wind turbines that create good
working class jobs, increase America’s energy
independence and reduce climate change.

We must insist on policies that support the middle
class, including preserving Social Security and
Medicare, extending unemployment insurance while
joblessness remains high, and enforcing the health care
reform law so that every American worker and family can
afford and is covered by insurance.

On this Labor Day, we should all have a picnic, invite
neighbors, friends and family, and over hot dogs and
potato salad, organize to save the American middle
class.

Mobilize to end the gloom and restore American
optimism.

_____________________________________________

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