Law To End Abuse of Farmworkers Needs Strengthening
Farmworker Justice, the tiny but tireless organization that advocates for migrant and seasonal farmworkers, held a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Protection Act (AWPA), a federal law designed to help farmworkers get paid and obtain safe transportation to the fields without fear of retaliation. I worked on the legislation and the implementing regulations 30 years ago as a staffer for Rep. Bill Ford, so I listened with mixed emotions as lawyers familiar with the Act outlined both how the law has helped and where it has fallen short.
AWPA did not change the basic powerlessness of migrant farmworkers, especially the undocumented workers from Mexico and Central America who do most of the farm work in the West and Southwest. As Hector Sanchez of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and Mary Bauer, a legal aid attorney from Virginia, put it, farmworkers still live and work in Third World conditions here in the U.S., the richest country on earth. They are often housed in shacks, trailers, cars, or even chicken coops with no plumbing.
Truth As Well As Reconciliation
In the last week, we’ve paid great attention to Nelson Mandela’s call for forgiveness and reconciliation between South Africa’s former white rulers and its exploited black majority. But we’ve paid less attention to the condition that Mandela insisted must underlie reconciliation—truth. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Mandela established, and that Bishop Desmond Tutu chaired, was designed to contribute to cleansing wounds of the country’s racist history by exposing it to a disinfecting bright light. As for those Afrikaners who committed even the worst acts of violence against blacks, they could be forgiven and move on only if they acknowledged the full details of their crimes.
In the current issue of the School Administrator, I write that we do a much worse job of facing up to our racial history in the United States, leading us to make less progress than necessary in remedying racial inequality. We have many celebrations of the civil rights movement and its heroes, but we do very little to explain to young people why that movement was so necessary. Earlier this week, the New York Times described how the Alabama Historical Association has placed many commemorative markers around Montgomery to commemorate civil rights heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks, but declined—because of “the potential for controversy”—to call attention to the city’s slave markets and their role in the spread of slavery before the Civil War. Throughout our nation, this fear of confronting the past makes it more difficult to address and remedy the ongoing existence of urban ghettos, the persistence of the black-white achievement gap, and the continued under-representation of African Americans in higher education and better-paying jobs.
How to Raise $1 Trillion in Revenue Without Waiting on “Tax Reform”
Tax increases were considered a dead issue in the discussions leading up to the recent budget deal negotiated by Sen. Murray and Rep. Ryan. The main justification for this position was that tax reform is imminent, and changes to the tax system could be better handled by the experts on the Ways and Means Committee. This argument has been repeated over and over, but it is meaningless. To begin with, the House GOP leadership has made it clear that tax reform will have to be revenue neutral—that is, no revenue increases—so waiting for a tax reform bill in the context of a budget deal makes no sense. Second, the House GOP leadership has made it clear that tax reform will not be considered, let alone introduced, this year. The prospects for tax reform in the next year or the next Congress are, at best, dim. So there was no serious excuse for not increasing tax revenues in the budget deal.
Wholesale tax reform, however, is not needed to increase tax revenues; just a few tweaks to the tax system could raise enough revenue to extend unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term unemployed and provide substantial relief from the sequester over the next 10 years. The table below lists six tax changes, with revenue estimates, courtesy of the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. The six changes, which would increase taxes on those taxpayers most able to pay, are:
Avoiding a Government Shutdown Falls Far Short of What American Families Need
Reactions to last night’s budget deal epitomize what’s wrong with American tax and budget policy these days. On the one hand, policymakers are given a pat on the back for simply keeping the government from grinding to a shuddering halt. This is a low bar indeed. On the other hand, the criticisms lobbed against the deal are completely backwards—claiming that the deal is insufficiently ambitious in closing long-run budget deficits.
The deal is indeed insufficiently ambitious, especially when held up against all of the ways intelligent fiscal policy could help American living standards. I recently tried to provide some detail on what fiscal policy would look like if the living standards of low- and moderate-income families actually entered into policymakers’ calculations. For anybody interested in seeing just how far short the deal brokered yesterday was in meeting the economic needs of American families, take a look at that paper, Taking “Middle-Out” Economics Seriously in this Fall’s Fiscal Debates.
The very short version of how yesterday’s deal fell short is as follows:
Unemployment Insurance Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Solution
On Monday, Paul Krugman dissected the Republican view that emergency unemployment insurance should be ended, throwing 1.3 million jobless workers into immediate financial crisis. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), for example, claims that unemployment compensation keeps workers from taking jobs and that people should be cut off from unemployment benefits after six months to keep them from becoming dependent. The fact is, as Krugman points out, there are far more people looking for work than there are job openings, and for two out of three unemployed workers it is literally impossible to find a job, no matter how hard they work or how small a paycheck they are willing to work for.
The notion that people would rather get unemployment compensation than a job ignores how low weekly benefits actually are. In many states with unemployment rates above the national average, the average pay replacement rate is far lower than the national average. Mississippi, for example, has 8.5% unemployment and a UI pay replacement rate of 28.6%. Tennessee’s unemployment rate is 8.4% and its UI pay replacement rate is 28.2%. And Arizona’s unemployment is 8.2%, while its UI pay replacement rate is a near-rock bottom 24.9%. It’s hard to argue that such stingy benefits are keeping anyone from taking a job. The average weekly benefit in Mississippi in 2013 was $194, which works out to less than $5 an hour for a 40-hour work week.
Leaving Extended Unemployment Benefits Out of the Budget Deal is Cruel and Stupid
The budget deal announced last night by conference chairs Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is better than another government shutdown, but nicer words than this are hard to find to say about it.
By far the worst aspect of it is the failure to extend the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program (EUC) in 2014. Without these extensions, 1.3 million workers will have their benefits cut off at the end of 2013, and another 850,000 workers will exhaust normal UI benefits over the first quarter of 2014.
The share of long-term unemployed workers in the total labor force was 2.6 percent in November—double the share of June 2008, when President Bush first signed the UI extensions into law.
Besides cutting off a vital lifeline to millions of Americans, cutting these extensions also continues the disastrous march towards budget austerity; a march that has been by far the primary contributor to our failure to recover from the Great Recession. Cutting these UI extensions in 2014 will create a fiscal drag on the U.S. economy that will reduce job growth by more than 300,000 over the year.
Shockingly Little Progress on Breaking the Glass Ceiling
When my daughter was in sixth grade she was shocked—SHOCKED—that there were so few women in powerful places, either in the private sector or the public sector. She thought that half of all the top jobs should go to women: half the Senate, half the House, half the CEOs, just like the student council at her school, where there was one boy and one girl for each grade.
I assured her that things were getting better and that by the time she grew up there would be women at the top of every enterprise. She is 22 now, and about to enter the workforce full time. Are we there yet? There are more women in the Senate and in the House, but a new study confirms that women are still not making progress on corporate boards.
In 1995, I worked on the release of the “Glass Ceiling” report (pdf) at the U.S. Department of Labor. Reviewing the report today, it’s clear that we’ve made shockingly little progress since then. I can find some hope in the fact that the recently named CEO of General Motors is Mary Barra. She is not just any old new CEO—she busted through the glass ceiling in one of the most male-dominated industries. But overall, there are so few women in corporate boardrooms that it’s hard to even argue for the need for a ladies room.
Ratio of Job Seekers Remains Extremely Elevated—No Time to Cut Unemployment Benefits
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover data released this morning by the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the ratio of job seekers to job openings remained unchanged in October at 2.9-to-1, which is equal to the worst month of the early 2000s downturn. A ratio of 2.9-to-1 means that for nearly two out of every three job seekers, there are no jobs available, no matter what they do.
The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, which has provided support to millions of Americans who lost their job through no fault of their own during the Great Recession and its aftermath, should not be allowed to expire on December 28, 2013, as it is set to do. Allowing these benefits to expire would cut a crucial lifeline to millions of unemployed workers and their families at a time when job opportunities remain historically weak.
More Than Three-Quarters of Workers Missing from the Labor Force Are Under Age 55
A blog post by Pedro Nicolaci da Costa in the Wall Street Journal highlights findings from a paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that much of the shrinking of the U.S. workforce has been due to workers retiring early, and that given that people who retire early are less likely to reenter the labor force when job opportunities improve, improving economic conditions may not draw these workers back in.
I’ve looked at the breakdown by age of the 5.6 million “missing workers”—potential workers who, because of weak job opportunities in the aftermath of the Great Recession, are neither employed nor actively seeking work. More than three-quarters of missing workers are under age 55 and are therefore unlikely to be early retirees. That means that even if all of the missing workers age 55 and over are early retirees who will never reenter the labor force no matter how strong job opportunities are (a very strong assumption), that still leaves 4.3 million missing workers under the age of 55 who are likely to re-enter the labor force when job opportunities strengthen. In other words, weak labor force participation rate remains a key component of the total slack in the labor market.
Roughly half of missing workers are of prime working age: Missing workers,* by age and gender, July 2014
| Missing workers | |
|---|---|
| Men under 25 | 630,000 |
| Women under 25 | 420,000 |
| Men 25–54 | 1,850,000 |
| Women 25–54 | 1,380,000 |
| Men 55+ | 580,000 |
| Women 55+ | 1,000,000 |
* Potential workers who, due to weak job opportunities, are neither employed nor actively seeking work
Source: EPI analysis of Mitra Toossi, “Labor Force Projections to 2016: More Workers in Their Golden Years,” Bureau of Labor Statistics Monthly Labor Review, November 2007; and Current Population Survey public data series
NAFTA’s Impact on U.S. Workers
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NATFA) was the door through which American workers were shoved into the neoliberal global labor market.
By establishing the principle that U.S. corporations could relocate production elsewhere and sell back into the United States, NAFTA undercut the bargaining power of American workers, which had driven the expansion of the middle class since the end of World War II. The result has been 20 years of stagnant wages and the upward redistribution of income, wealth and political power.
NAFTA affected U.S. workers in four principal ways. First, it caused the loss of some 700,000 jobs as production moved to Mexico. Most of these losses came in California, Texas, Michigan, and other states where manufacturing is concentrated. To be sure, there were some job gains along the border in service and retail sectors resulting from increased trucking activity, but these gains are small in relation to the loses, and are in lower paying occupations. The vast majority of workers who lost jobs from NAFTA suffered a permanent loss of income.