Readers of this blog may have found a familiar name and a familiar story in Bob Herbert’s New York Times column this Saturday.
Last summer, when Lynda Hiller told her story here, she and her husband were struggling to keep their home. She had been unable to work while she fought to survive breast cancer, and during that time her husband also lost his job. Things have not gotten better:
“He looked for two years,” Ms. Hiller said. “He applied every place he could, sometimes four or five times at the same company. He went everywhere, to every job fair you can think of, to every place where there was even a mention of an opening. But for every job that came available, there were 20 people or more who showed up for it.”
Last fall, Mr. Hiller took a part-time job as a dishwasher at a Red Lobster restaurant. “It’s a job,” Ms. Hiller said. “It’s not fancy. It’s not truck driving.”
And it was not enough for them to keep their home. Ms. Hiller lost her job at a bank when she became ill. With both paychecks gone, meeting the mortgage became impossible. The Hillers lost their home and are now living day to day. “If my husband can get 30 hours of work in a week, then maybe we can pay some bills,” Ms. Hiller said. “If he can’t, we can’t. We’ve downsized our lives so much.”
Things have looked up a little for Liz Lassiter since Kim McMurray described her situation last fall. She had been struggling with homelessness, but last week, she was able to host the gathering Herbert described. “She doesn’t earn a lot or get benefits,” Herbert writes, but she has found more regular work.
As Herbert says:
These are the kinds of stories you might expect from a country staggering through a depression, not the richest and supposedly most advanced society on earth. If these were exceptional stories, there would be less reason for concern. But they are in no way extraordinary. Similar stories abound throughout the United States.
What she and Working America have learned through their conversations is that as many as four in 10 people they talked to are unsure what the nation should do about the unemployment crisis. What a majority will say when asked what is most important for growing and restoring the economy is that investing in jobs is the top priority, Only a tiny percentage will say “cut the deficit.”
In particular, outsourcing has emerged as the Achilles’ heel of the right, including the Tea Party candidates who are being bankrolled by the conservative political machine. Working America canvassers heard more calls for ending outsourcing in connection with the jobs crisis than any other single jobs-related issue. That suggests that progressive candidates should explain how policies endorsed by conservatives and their lobbyist backers—from trade agreements to tax subsidies—essentially encourage and reward outsourcing, even as they obstruct progressive legislation designed to rebuild the nation’s manufacturing capacity and funnel procurement dollars into American-made goods.
Nussbaum also learned that many rank-and-file workers, in spite of the constant barrage of “government-is-the-problem” rhetoric, understand that government can be part of the solution to today’s economic crisis. Messages that stress government intervention to create jobs, and funding to protect vital local services, wins more support than conservative messages that advocate cutting or privatizing services, the Working America canvassers have found.
There is also a real demand among working people to hold Wall Street accountable for the collapse of the economy—more proof, as if any were needed, that proposals such as a tax on Wall Street speculation and, more immediately, allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire at the end of the year, make for a winning political message.
Working America’s Karen Nussbaum and Dan Heck were on Hardball last night, talking about what we’re hearing, our efforts to organize working people, and mobilizing jobless workers to vote.
Harold Meyerson writes about Working America in the Washington Post:
In an April speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Trumka affirmed that “working people are right to be mad at what has happened to our economy and our country.” Our political leaders, he continued, need to validate that anger — and remedy its causes — if they are to keep that anger from turning into racial, religious and homophobic hatred. The roots of that anger, and of the recession, lie in our creation of what Trumka termed a “low-wage, high consumption” economy in which the manufacturing of things has been supplanted by the manufacture of debt.
Working America’s canvassers hear that anger every day — sometimes directed at Wall Street, sometimes at the president, immigrants and other right-wing bogeymen. They grapple with it by highlighting job-creation programs (improving local roads) and anti-offshoring legislation that Democrats have backed and Republicans opposed. Next week, they’ll start campaigning for actual candidates, using these criteria.
Their message is surely the right one. The question is whether congressional Democrats and Obama in particular actually measure up to progressive-populist claims that labor makes for them. That they have passed landmark progressive legislation, and mitigated the scope of the recession, is beyond question. Hampered by Republican opposition, however, they clearly haven’t done enough to turn the economy around.
Working America’s Kim McMurray writes in the Allentown Morning Call about the harm the recently-passed Pennsylvania state budget will do working people—and the many ways it lets big corporations off the hook.
Kim works with Working America members and every week sees stories like this:
A woman runs a day care business in Philadelphia. She has been working in the industry for more than 10 years. She built her business with the help of the Keystone Stars program, which provides resources so child care providers can enhance early education programs. The children in her care benefited directly from these resources and Lorraine was able to build her business, though she still has further to go. However, this and other early education programs were severely cut this year and will be forced to shorten their reach.
That’s who’ll suffer from budget tightening. And it’s not necessary:
The solutions are simple. Instead of cutting essential services that families rely on, our elected officials need to close the corporate tax loopholes that allow big businesses to get away with not paying their fair share. There are four main ways they can do this.
The first is to close the loophole that allows 70 percent of businesses in Pennsylvania to avoid paying income taxes. Multistate companies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. avoid paying income taxes in Pennsylvania by setting up subsidiaries in tax-haven states like Delaware. These subsidiaries can be nothing more than a post office box. One address in Delaware is home to more than 14,000 of these subsidiaries. Closing this loophole would bring in more than $616 million to the state annually, which could go toward funding public schools, libraries, homeless shelters and mental health clinics, all of which experienced significant budget cuts this year.
The specifics are different from state to state, but the basic story is being repeated all over the country: programs that support jobs, provide education, and keep working families in their homes are being cut while corporations and the wealthiest individuals don’t pay their fair share.
Richard Freeman, Harvard University professor and Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics goes in-depth about our history and success at the AFL-CIO website’s Point of View.
The story of Working America is the one of the greatest success in reaching workers outside of collective bargaining since the Knights of Labor in the 1880s. Its primary mode of enlisting members is through community canvassing, where bright young activists go door to door in potentially union-friendly neighborhoods. At the same time, Working America’s strong online program has resulted in 60,000 new members signing up through its website….
