Opioid Crisis Shows How Economic Inequality Kills [feedly]

Opioid Crisis Shows How Economic Inequality Kills
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/02/opioid-crisis-shows-economic-inequality-kills.html

Opioid Crisis Shows How Economic Inequality Kills

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Yves Smith

By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website

Pharmaceutical pushers like Purdue Pharma "couldn't have done their dirty work" without America's increasingly unbalanced economy

America's growing rate of economic inequality is more than a numerical ratio that worries economists or a trendy political talking point. The phenomenon has been linked to human tragedies ranging from higher murder rates to growing gaps in life expectancy.

Add death by opioids to the list.

In recent years, social scientists have been debating why more people have been dying from drug overdoses. Does the increased availability of highly addictive opioids fully explain the rise? Not entirely, it turns out.

Sociologist Shannon Monnat is author of a new study with the Institute for New Economic Thinking that examines county-level drug deaths in the U.S. Her research reveals that while overprescribing doctors, pharmaceutical pushers and illegal dealers are highly significant, a big part of what makes a community susceptible to the opioid scourge is recent patterns of economic distress — the kind inflicted by decades of bad policy.

A recent flurry of headlines about the billionaire Sackler family, whose members own Purdue Pharma, the company that created the powerful opioid painkiller OxyContin, highlights the ugliness of drug sales representatives promoting dangerously high doses to boost profits. "Supply is certainly important," says Monnat, "but Big Pharma couldn't do its dirty work without America's increasing economic inequality."

Monnat's research examines U.S. drug fatalities from 2000-02 and 2014-16, two-thirds of which were caused by heroin, fentanyl, and prescription opiates. She concentrates on non-Hispanic whites because other than American Indians, that group has suffered the highest drug mortality rates of anybody over the last two decades.

Several of her findings complicate the common media narratives. Despite the characterization of opioids as "hillbilly heroin," most deaths and the biggest increase in fatalities among whites since 2000 were actually in urban counties. Rural areas saw fewer deaths overall, but the rates varied widely from one region to another. Some rural counties have the highest opioid mortality rates in the country, while others enjoy the lowest.

Why would opioids be raging through some predominately rural states, like Maine and Kentucky, but not others, like Idaho and Iowa?

Among non-urban counties, drug mortality rates appear to spike in two types of places: economically beaten-down communities centered on mining and distressed areas where people increasingly depend on service jobs. In these corners of America, economic anxiety matters more in terms of how many will die from opioid overdoses than supply factors, which tend to drive death rates more around big cities.

Monnat explains how despair builds in areas like Appalachia, where residents have seen mining jobs disappear and there are fewer ways for people without a college degree to make a living. In regions where manufacturing jobs were once abundant, like Pennsylvania, people have to rely on badly paid service jobs that offer few benefits.

Communities facing these challenges begin to implode. The best and brightest young people tend to leave to find jobs elsewhere. Families break apart. The tax base shrinks and social services disappear. Economic policies that support disinvestment in the public sphere, along with those that disfavor workers and allow corporations — like greedy pharmaceutical companies — to run roughshod over communities make everything worse. Distress spreads across generations.

On the other hand, rural areas where people are more reliant on farming or where there are a wider variety of jobs tend have a lower rate of death from opioids. The quality of labor markets matters, it turns out. Monnat also thinks that that greater social cohesion in these communities may help people stay more resilient when economic strains develop. Having a more robust social safety net helps, too. Elsewhere, she has shown that places where religion and sports are more of a focus also tend to have lower rates of drug fatalities. Maybe going to church or rooting for the local team gives people meaning and a sense identity, which helps them cope better when other sources of these human needs disappear.

The opioid crisis is really a "tale of two rural Americas," says Monnat. In places where economic inequality has thrown more lives into chaos, a greater number of lives will be snuffed out by this deadly strain of drugs. (Methamphetamines, she notes, cause slower deaths, so we may not have the full story of their impact on drug fatalities yet).

Her findings suggest that no matter how well intentioned the efforts to limit supply or provide treatment to the addicted, places where the economy isn't working for most people may continue to see high opioid fatalities.

Research like hers underscores the reality that policymakers in both political parties are going to have to move beyond the neoliberal framework popularized in the Reagan era that promotes corporate deregulation, shrunken social safety nets, and trade and labor policies that hurt ordinary workers. Such policies were meant to spark growth, but instead they have only made a thin slice of people wealthy and socked America with inequality that has disproportionately hit certain regions of the country.

Pro-worker policies, investments in public services like health and education, fairer tax systems, and re-establishing sensible rules for how companies do business are all part of a much-needed prescription for a healthier society.

This entry was posted in Economic fundamentals, Free markets and their discontents, Guest Post, Health care, Income disparity, The destruction of the middle class on February 20, 2019 by Yves Smith.

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The Existential Politics of Climate Change [feedly]

Note the central role of Pay The Losers, under the labor section

The Existential Politics of Climate Change
https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/21/02/2019/existential-politics-climate-change

limate politics are changing.  Beyond "politics as usual," climate politics are becoming existential: climate-forcing and climate-vulnerable interests are both fighting for the survival of their way of life. We offer recommendations for how the Paris process and domestic coalition-building can be mutually reinforcing, emphasizing the role of labor.

Climate politics are changing.  After years of gridlock, the 2015 Paris Agreement puts domestic politics front and center – shifting from a "global deal" approach to a more flexible "catalytic" system in which countries (and other actors) set their own goals and ratchet them up over time.

At the domestic level, there is new momentum – and conflict.  Beyond "politics as usual," climate politics are becoming existential: varying interests are fighting for the survival of their way of life. This is forcing governments to confront the enormous economic implications of a changing climate and altering the nature of climate politics.  For example, after years of denialism and obstruction, the US is considering two bills on climate change: one an expansive "Green New Deal" focused on massive government investments; the other a narrower plan to price carbon. And following the emergence of the Gilets Jaunes movement, France is engaged in a national conversation about climate change and inequality.  Similar debates are emerging throughout the developed world.  

Time is short. The next round of national pledges under the Paris Agreement is due in 2020. The shift to existential politics will up-end much of the conventional wisdom around climate policy.  Fault lines will sharpen, but this will provide opportunities for progress. Seeding and supporting winning coalitions at the domestic level is critical for the post-Paris regime.

The Existential Politics of Climate Change

Distributional politics is about who gets what, and climate politics are no different: Who should pay more for energy through a modest carbon tax? How much money should the developed world provide to help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change? 

Existential politics is like distributional politics on steroids: the stakes are whose way of life gets to survive. In a world of existential politics, different interests fight for their jobs, homes, and preservation of other assets. Owners of assets that cause climate change – and critically, those who work for them – face increasing threats of being put out of business or losing their jobs as coal plants are shuttered, manufacturing moves elsewhere, and renewables increasingly compete with fossil fuel-based energy.  Other climate-forcing industries – from agriculture to cement manufacturing – will also have to decarbonize, or face the prospect of going out of business.  Even if the net benefits are positive, some workers in those industries will lose their livelihoods, and for many, future employment will be difficult.  Despite definitive evidence of climate change, climate-forcing asset owners continue to pour vast resources into preserving the value of their assets and preventing more aggressive climate politics.1

At the other end of the spectrum, owners of climate-vulnerable assets, such as residents of small island states and coastal areas, farmers and insurance companies, or the tourism industry, face the prospect of losing everything as the effects of climate change intensify.  Scientists have attributed the intensity of recent natural disasters to climate change, including Hurricanes Maria and Harvey and the California forest fires.2  One study estimates that the direct damages from climate change will reduce GDP in the Southeast US by almost 30%.3  These climate-losers, at least some of the wealthy ones, are beginning to organize to forestall greater losses.  In Miami, a new political coalition has formed to protect further devaluation of real estate (find cite).  And the elite ski resort in Whistler, British Columbia, is demanding compensation from the oil sector in Alberta. 

As climate-losers become more numerous and diverse, we can expect entrenched interests like fossil fuel owners to respond with more short-termism and obstructionism on climate policy.  Fossil fuel companies spent more than $30 million to defeat a carbon tax proposal in a 2018 Washington state referendum. And a renewable energy initiative in Arizona lost in the midterms, when the state utility spending upwards of $20 million to defeat it. These changes will provoke a fundamentally different sort of political contestation. Policy and strategy will need to adapt to the new reality of existential politics.

Turn losers into winners: the critical role of labor

But existential politics need not be cause for despair; it can be an opportunity to create a broad base for support on climate action. First and foremost, this requires recognizing those who will lose from pro-climate policies, and neutralizing their opposition.  The existential politics of climate change are as much about workers as about an energy transition. 

The political magic of marrying job creation with decarbonization efforts has attracted policy entrepreneurs since at least the early 2000s. For example, the Obama Administration's post-crisis stimulus package included numerous "green jobs" initiatives, and the 2016 Clinton campaign's climate platform promised a rapid expansion of clean energy jobs across America. Figures like Ban Ki-moon, Michael Bloomberg, and Thomas Friedman have endorsed more ambitious packages along these lines framed as a Green New Deal.

The Sunrise Movement, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a growing group of Democrats and Democratic Socialists, are beginning to understand how the technocratic, "win-win" version of these ideas could be used as tools for political mobilization. The supporters of the 'new' Green New Deal have wisely understood that merely showing the possibility of upfront, tangible benefits is not enough; real progress requires building a coalition to demand them. Ocasio-Cortez proposes total decarbonization while employing anyone who needs a job. This reframing of the climate issue is an obvious focus in the US and other OECD nations is to win over labor as a key constituent by providing them with employment. 

The political effect is palpable. The Green New Deal has generated more political salience in a few months than policies like carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade systems have generated in years. Such redistributive measures, the preferred tools of economists, have dominated policy debates for decades, but rarely are they implemented at a price that can actually drive deep decarbonization. Pigovian redistribution may be elegant, but in a world of existential politics no one gets out on the streets to demand it.

Other examples show how existential politics can turn losers into winners in the OECD.  After committing to shutting its most of its coal mines by the end of next year, Spain has pledged to invest €250M in those regions affected by the policy.  Some will receive compensation for early retirement, while others are re-skilled.  Most will receive additional social aid. Germany's coal phaseout commission has proposed an even costlier package, some €40 billion over the next decades.

In short, building broad coalitions requires a focus on labor: compensating workers in climate-forcing sectors in creative ways, like buying out pension plans from failing coal companies. If done correctly, this will galvanize greater support for pro-climate policies without acting as more corporate welfare.  Nationalizing pensions will be a considerable expense, but one targeted at a large swath of the population, rather than the wealthy few climate-forcing asset owners. It could be financed, at least partly, by other pro-climate policies, like a carbon tax. When workers know that losing their job will not mean losing their homes, they are much more likely to support climate policy. 

There is some evidence that a similar approach would resonate elsewhere.  The Gilets Jaunes movement in France demonstrates that regressive climate policies will not be acceptable to the vast majority of democratic electorates. 

At the same time, we must realize that owners of climate-forcing assets will also lose from decarbonization policies. Investors in oil companies and other fossil firms may demand compensation for giving up their assets—as Saudi Arabia has always demanded in international climate negotiations. With billions of dollars at stake, they will continue to obstruct progress on climate policy. Broad-based domestic coalitions are one strategy to counter their structural power.

Implications for international climate policy

Building domestic winning coalitions under increasingly existential political conditions will be critical for decarbonization. Yet countries do not operate in a vacuum. Rather, international drivers will be a vital part of determining whether pro-decarbonization coalitions wield power domestically and create momentum transnationally. Three steps can help.

First, the "nationally determined" nature of the Paris pledges should be strengthened to focus on politically powerful domestic priorities. Many of the 2015 pledges do this already: India trumpets the value of solar energy, China includes industrial policy goals, and Peru emphasizes forestry. The Paris Agreement requires national pledges to be comparable and measurable, and represent "progression" over time. But within these constraints, we should encourage the widest possible range of policy measures so that future political leaders see in the Paris system a vessel into which they can project their own ambitions.

Second, transnational networks of cities, states/regions, businesses, and other actors can help strengthen pro-climate interests at the national level. In the United States, cities, states, and businesses representing over half of US GDP have declared that they will adhere to the Paris Agreement despite the Trump Administration's intention to withdraw. In other countries, like Japan and Mexico, similar coalitions are pushing their governments to higher ambition. While these interests act locally, they are networked globally, and after the Paris conference have been institutionalized in the UNFCCC process. This access to international attention, expertise, and resources can give pro-climate actors an advantage in national political fights.

Finally, international climate finance will need to catch up with the shift from distributional to existential politics. While climate-related foreign aid from rich to poor countries can help (as promised under the Paris Agreement), the next step is ending fossil fuel subsidies worldwide – particularly those for coal. Rich countries need to get their own house in order. Although there are many different ways to construe what constitutes a subsidy, conservative estimates suggest that OECD nations spent roughly $150 billion on fossil fuel subsidies.4 Further, under the Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese policy banks and other public funds have supported billions more in fossil fuel infrastructure. The G20 agreed in 2009 that these subsidies should end. Phasing out subsidies should be billed as more than a technocratic fix to inefficient markets, but rather a rightful redistribution of wealth to workers.

 

 

Jessica Green is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.

Thomas Hale is Associate Professor of Global Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

Jeff D. Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and Watson Institute for Public and International Affairs at Brown University. 

Image credit: Takver via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

 References

 

1. Supran, G. & Oreskes, N. Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communications (1977–2014). Environ. Res. Lett. 12, 084019 (2017).

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On Paying for a Progressive Agenda [feedly]

On Paying for a Progressive Agenda
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/on-paying-for-a-progressive-agenda.html

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

Feb. 19, 2019


Whoever gets the Democratic nomination, she or he will run in part on proposals to increase government spending. And you know what that will mean: There will be demands that the candidate explain how all this will be paid for. Many of those demands will be made in bad faith, from people who never ask the same questions about tax cuts. But there are some real questions about the fiscal side of a progressive agenda.

Well, I have some thoughts about that, inspired in part by looking at Elizabeth Warren's proposals on both the tax and spending side. By the way, I don't know whether Warren will or even should get the nomination. But she's a major intellectual figure, and is pushing her party toward serious policy discussion in a way that will have huge influence whatever her personal trajectory.

In particular, Warren's latest proposal on child care – and the instant pushback from the usual suspects – has me thinking that we could use a rough typology of spending proposals, classified by how they might be paid for. Specifically, let me suggest that there are three broad categories of progressive expenditure: investment, benefits enhancement, and major system overhaul, which need to be thought about differently from a fiscal point of view.

So, first off, investment – typically spending on infrastructure or research, but there may be some room at the margin for including spending on things like childhood development in the same category. The defining characteristic here is that it's spending that will enhance society's future productivity. How should we pay for that kind of outlay?

The answer is, we shouldn't. Think of all the people who say that the government should be run like a business. Actually it shouldn't, but the two kinds of institution do have this in common: if you can raise funds cheaply and apply them to high-return projects, you should go ahead and borrow. And Federal borrowing costs are very low – less than 1 percent, adjusted for inflation – while we are desperately in need of public investment, i.e., it has a high social return. So we should just do it, without looking for pay-fors.

Much of what seems to be in the Green New Deal falls into that category. To the extent that it's a public investment program, demands that its supporters show how they'll pay for it show more about the critics' bad economics than about the GND's logic.

My second category is a bit harder to define, but what I'm thinking of are initiatives that either expand an existing public program or use subsidies to create incentives for expanding some kind of socially desirable private activity – in each case involving sums that are significant but not huge, say a fraction of a percent of GDP.

The Affordable Care Act falls into that category. It expanded Medicaid while using a combination of regulation and subsidies to make private insurance more available to families above the new Medicaid line. Warren's childcare proposal, which reportedly will come in at around 1/3 of a percent of GDP, also fits. So would a "Medicare for All" proposal that involves allowing people to buy in to government insurance, rather than offering that insurance free of charge.

It's harder to justify borrowing for this kind of initiative than borrowing for investment. True, with interest rates low and demand weak it makes some sense to run persistent deficits, but there are surely enough investment needs to use up that allowance. So you want some kind of pay-for. But the sums are small enough that the revenue involved could be raised by fairly narrow-gauge taxes – in particular, taxes that hit only high-income Americans.  

That is, in fact, how Obamacare was financed: the revenue component came almost entirely from taxes on high incomes (there were some small items like the tax on tanning parlors.) And Warren has in fact proposed additional taxes on the wealthy – her proposed tax on fortunes over $50 million would yield something like four times the cost of her child care proposal.

So benefit enhancement can, I'd argue, be paid for with taxes on high incomes and large fortunes. It doesn't have to impose on the middle class.

Finally, my third category is major system overhaul, of which the archetype would be replacing employer-based private health insurance with a tax-financed public program – the purist version of Medicare for all. A really major expansion of Social Security might fall into that category too, although smaller enhancements might not.

Proposals in this category are literally an order of magnitude more expensive than benefit enhancements: private health insurance currently amounts to 6 percent of GDP. To implement these proposals, then, we'd need a lot more revenue, which would have to come from things like payroll taxes and/or a value-added tax that hit the middle class.

You can argue that most middle-class families would be better off in the end, that the extra benefits would more than compensate for the higher taxes. And you'd probably be right. But this would be a much heavier political lift. You don't have to be a neoliberal tool to wonder whether major system overhaul should be part of the Democratic platform right now, even if it's something many progressives aspire to.

My main point now, however, is that when people ridicule progressive proposals as silly and unaffordable, they're basically revealing their own biases and ignorance. Investment can and should be debt-financed; benefit enhancements can be largely paid for with high-end taxes. Howard Schultz won't like it, but that's his problem
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Black women’s labor market history reveals deep-seated race and gender discrimination [feedly]

Black women's labor market history reveals deep-seated race and gender discrimination
https://www.epi.org/blog/black-womens-labor-market-history-reveals-deep-seated-race-and-gender-discrimination/

The black woman's experience in America provides arguably the most overwhelming evidence of the persistent and ongoing drag from gender and race discrimination on the economic fate of workers and families.

Black women's labor market position is the result of employer practices and government policies that disadvantaged black women relative to white women and men. Negative representations of black womanhood have reinforced these discriminatory practices and policies. Since the era of slavery, the dominant view of black women has been that they should be workers, a view that contributed to their devaluation as mothers with caregiving needs at home. African-American women's unique labor market history and current occupational status reflects these beliefs and practices.

Compared to other women in the United States, black women have always had the highest levels of labor market participation regardless of age, marital status, or presence of children at home. In 1880, 35.4 percent of married black women and 73.3 percent of single black women were in the labor force compared to only 7.3 percent of married white women and 23.8 percent of single white women. Black women's higher participation rates extended over their lifetimes, even after marriage, while white women typically left the labor force after marriage.

Differences in black and white women's labor participation were due not only to the societal expectation of black women's gainful employment but also to labor market discrimination against black men which resulted in lower wages and less stable employment compared to white men. Consequently, married black women have a long history of being financial contributors—even co-breadwinners—to two-parent households because of black men's precarious labor market position.

Black women's main jobs historically have been in low-wage agriculture and domestic service.1 Even after migration to the north during the 20^th century, most employers would only hire black women in domestic service work.2Revealingly, although whites have devalued black women as mothers to their own children, black women have been the most likely of all women to be employed in the low-wage women's jobs that involve cooking, cleaning, and caregiving even though this work is associated with mothering more broadly.

Until the 1970s, employers' exclusion of black women from better paying, higher status jobs with mobility meant that they had little choice but to perform private domestic service work for white families. The 1970s was also the era when large numbers of married white women began to enter into the labor force and this led to a marketization of services previously performed within the household, including care and food services. Black women continue to be overrepresented in service jobs. Nearly a third (28 percent) of black women are employed in service jobs compared to just one-fifth of white women.

Discriminatory public policies have reinforced the view of black women as workers rather than as mothers and contributed to black women's economic precarity. This has been most evident with protective welfare policies that enabled poor lone white mothers to stay at home and provide care for their children since the early 20^th century. These policies were first implemented at the state level with Mother's Pensions and then at the national level with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935. Up until the 1960s, caseworkers excluded most poor black women from receiving cash assistance because they expected black women to be employed moms and not stay at home moms like white women.3

This exclusion meant that for most of the history of welfare, the state actively undermined the well-being of black families by ensuring that black women would be in the labor force as low-wage caregivers for white families. This helped to secure the well-being of white families and alleviated white women of having to do this work. The state simultaneously undermined the well-being of black families by denying black mothers the cash assistance that they needed to support their children and leaving black women with no other option but to work for very low wages. Indeed, the backlash against poor black moms receiving cash assistance eventually culminated in the dismantling of the AFDC program and the enactment of TANF—a program with strict work requirements.4

Because of discriminatory employer and government policies against black men and women, black mothers with school age children have always been more likely to be in the labor force compared to other moms. Today, 78 percent of black moms with children are employed compared to an average of just 66 percent of white, Asian American, and Latinx moms.5

Although black women have a longer history of sustained employment compared to other women, in 2017, the median annual earnings for full-time year round black women workers was just over $36,000—an amount 21 percent lower than that of white women, reflecting black women's disproportionate employment in low-wage service and minimum and sub-minimum wage jobs. Black families, however, are more reliant on women's incomes than other families are since 80 percent of black mothers are breadwinners in their families.

Despite black women's importance as breadwinners, the state has compounded the lack of protections afforded black mothers by failing to protect black women as workers.6 In fact, state policies have often left black women vulnerable to workplace exploitation by excluding them from various worker protections. New Deal minimum wage, overtime pay, and collective bargaining legislation excluded the main sectors where black women worked–domestic service and farming. Although there have been inclusions since then, these sectors still lack full access to worker protections.

The legacy of black women's employment in industries that lack worker protections has continued today since black women are concentrated in low paying, inflexible service occupations that lack employer-provided retirement plans, health insurance, paid sick and maternity leave, and paid vacations. Over a third (36 percent) of black women workers lack paid sick leave.

All workers—especially the most vulnerable–need workplace protections, including minimum wages that are livable wages. Universally available family-friendly workplace policies would be especially beneficial to women given their care responsibilities: paid sick and parental leave, subsidized child and elder care, and flexible work options.

This analysis is based on the author's working paper, "Black Women on the Verge: Missing Black Men and Its Impact on Black Women"

1. Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei. Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the U.S. Boston: South End Press, 1996.

2. Jones, Jacqueline. 1985. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

3. White, Deborah Gray, "Making a Way Out of No Way", in Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994", W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

4. Edelman, Peter. So Rich, So Poor: Why it's So Hard to End Poverty in America. The New Press. 2012.

5. Author's calculation from BLS data.

6. Mutari, Ellen, Power, Marilyn, and Deborah M. Figart (2002). "Neither Mothers Nor Breadwinners: African-American Women's Exclusion From US Minimum Wage Policies," 1912-1938, Feminist Economics, 8:2, 37-61.

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New York Labor Didn't Shrink from Confronting Amazon [feedly]

New York Labor Didn't Shrink from Confronting Amazon
https://prospect.org/article/new-york-labor-didnt-shrink-confronting-amazon

Add note

AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews

New York City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer, second from left, speaks during a press conference in Gordon Triangle Park in the Queens borough of New York, following Amazon's announcement it would abandon its proposed headquarters for the area. 

Ever since Amazon's plans to open a second headquarters in New York were announced last November, two things have become clear about organized labor and Amazon. First, labor is eager to unionize Amazon, or at least parts of Amazon, a fiercely anti-union company that doesn't have a single unionized facility in the United States—none of its "fulfillment center" workers, Whole Foods workers, or drivers are unionized. Second, labor is seriously divided about how to achieve its ambitious goal of unionizing Amazon.

Days after Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio trumpeted the deal in which Amazon promised to create 25,000 jobs in Queens and would receive $3 billion in subsidies, New York's building trades unions announced that Amazon had given its blessing to letting the project's construction work, involving an estimated 5,000 workers, be unionized.  Moreover, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union said that Amazon and the developers on the new project had agreed that the janitors and security guards who worked at Amazon's new headquarters would be unionized. 

Even as the building trades unions and Local 32BJ openly supported Amazon's plans for New York, however, many New York progressives railed against the deal because of Amazon's anti-union reputation, the $3 billion subsidy and fears that Amazon's arrival would push up New York's already high rents. 

But many labor leaders wanted more from Amazon than what the construction trades and Local 32BJ were getting. 

These labor leaders noted that the unionized construction workers and janitors would not be directly employed by Amazon, but by contractors and developers working with Amazon. The AFL-CIO, the Teamsters and the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) were intent on using Amazon's New York ambitions as a way to get a union inside Amazon. For too long, union leaders argued, major corporations like Amazon have allowed a little unionization on their fringes—for instance, among janitors and construction workers—but not in their core operations. 

As one union strategist put it, "The labor movement had to decide: Are we happy to be a movement on the margins, or do we want to fight for the real pie? … Do we stay in the box or do we fight for the real economic core of the labor market?" The AFL-CIO, Teamsters and RWDSU concluded that with Amazon growing so large and so central to the nation's economy, it was time to confront the giant. 

"We had a broad message that if Amazon wanted the largesse of New York, if they wanted the subsidies, they first needed to respect workers and respect communities," said Stuart Appelbaum, the RWDSU's president. "We looked at how Amazon treats workers all over the world, and it was unacceptable. We looked at the health and safety problems when you go to work at Amazon, and it wasn't good. We talked about how the International Trade Union Confederation named Jeff Bezos [Amazon's founder] one of the worst bosses in the world."

The AFL-CIO, Teamsters and RWDSU called on Amazon to agree to neutrality to help unions organize the 2,500 workers at Amazon's new fulfillment center in Staten Island. Appelbaum voiced confidence that neutrality (a commitment not to oppose unionization) would enable labor to organize the Staten Island warehouse and that this would lead to unionization at other Amazon facilities. As a model, Appelbaum pointed to what his union had done with Zara. The retail clothing chain had agreed to neutrality at one New York store, and once the RWDSU unionized that store, it used that as a launching pad to unionize all eight Zara stores in New York. Similarly, that union used neutrality to organize more than 1,500 workers at 17 H&M stores in the New York area.  

"Everyone knows the history of Amazon across the world, their labor relations and how they treat their workers—it's notorious," said George Miranda, the top Teamsters official in New York. "Now that they were coming into New York, the most progressive, union-heavy state, we were looking for neutrality where they would not fight unionization."

At a tense City Council hearing on January 30, Brian Huseman, Amazon's vice president of public policy, was asked whether his company would agree to neutrality. Huseman said no.  Jimmy Van Bramer, the City Councilman who represents Long Island City, where the Amazon headquarters would be located, responded, "Shame on you,"and "it's a union-busting deal from the beginning."

As the AFL-CIO and unions sought neutrality, sharp divisions emerged within labor. The RWDSU had urged Local 32BJ not to openly endorse the Amazon deal to help keep the heat on the company, but 32BJ said that it was too late, that it already had a deal. Local 32BJ's leaders worried that the other unions' demand for neutrality—and its timing—could fan the anti-Amazon flames just when Amazon officials were hinting they might have second thoughts about opening a headquarters in a city where they didn't feel welcome. 

Last Wednesday, Appelbaum, Miranda and Mario Cilento, the president of the New York State AFL-CIO, met in Governor Cuomo's office with four top Amazon executives. But Cuomo, one labor leader said, made clear that "neutrality isn't even on the table." Nonetheless, the union leaders and Amazon executives then came close to agreeing on a four-point plan that might be called "near neutrality." The points were no company hostility, a fair election process, a pledge not to retaliate against union supporters, and allowing union organizers some access to the Staten Island warehouse to communicate with workers. (Under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling, employers have the right to prohibit union organizers from setting foot on company property.)

Appelbaum said the four-point plan meant "the company would still be able to say, 'You don't need a union. We don't think you need a third party.' But they wouldn't be able to say, 'This terrible union, all they want is to take you money.' But none of that was defined."

Appelbaum continued, "We all agreed to have our attorneys, our wordsmiths, flesh out the concepts." The Teamsters' Miranda added, "It was a good conversation, it wasn't antagonistic. … There was, 'no, we're not doing this.'" 

The labor leaders left thinking they were near a deal. So they were stunned to learn hours later that Amazon had pulled the plug on New York. Mayor de Blasio said, "Out of nowhere, they took their ball and went home."

"I was totally surprised," said the Teamsters' Miranda. "I can only surmise that the boss [Jeff Bezos] decided he had enough. I was disappointed because we lost a lot of jobs, a lot of good jobs. All we were asking for was for people in Staten Island to have an opportunity to decide whether to be unionized. It would have been a win-win for everyone."

It's not clear why Amazon scrapped its New York plans. Some concluded that Amazon, facing a wave of resistance from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, many city and state lawmakers and community groups, feared that it would face years of opposition and complaints, even though polls showed that most New Yorkers approved the Amazon deal. Some said that Amazon pulled out because it didn't want to grant labor the least toehold or even a watered-down form or neutrality for just one fulfillment center. 

In a statement, Amazon said, "While polls show that 70 percent of New Yorkers support our plans and investment, a number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward." 

Hector Figueroa, Local 32BJ's president, said, "This was a really a lost opportunity from the labor perspective. ... I think people overplayed their hand and they [Amazon] are now gone." Figueroa clearly regretted Amazon's withdrawal; he said his union had deals in the works to have unionized janitors and security guards at Amazon facilities in Queens, Virginia, and Seattle that could have meant over 2,000 well-paid unionized positions. 

Figueroa wrote an op-ed for The New York Daily News, criticizing the left for chasing Amazon away. Amazon, he wrote, was "coming to the most progressive, union-friendly city and high-tax state in the country," and "New York was showing the world that strong unions, smart regulation and progressive taxation are not an impediment to growth." Figueroa added that "opposition from a few progressive organizations—many of which I have historically considered allies—created enough controversy to make Amazon abandon the project."

He asked whether Amazon's decision to reject New York "for expanded operations in Virginia and Tennessee" and other states would "help Amazon workers seeking to organize?"

"Not one bit," he wrote "Does it hurt those efforts? Probably."

Figueroa argued that rather than risk chasing away Amazon before it opened its headquarters, it would have been smarter to let Amazon set up shop in progressive, pro-union New York and then mount a big unionization drive and demand neutrality and more, perhaps by staging mass demonstrations at Amazon's New York headquarters.

Appelbaum sharply questioned Figueroa's suggested strategy. "The point about Amazon being in a pro-union environment would make it more likely that Amazon would be organized is nonsense," Appelbaum said. "Germany is a more pro-union environment; and it [Amazon] has been viciously anti-union there, even refusing to comply with laws requiring it to negotiate with Ver.di [one of Germany's biggest unions]. And Ver.di is a very strong union."

A top labor leader in Washington said Amazon was making a "stupid business decision" by running away from New York over some progressives' complaints and a demand for neutrality when "New York is the greatest collection of human capital in the world."

Despite their differences over strategy regarding Amazon, Figueroa and Appelbaum vigorously agreed on the continued importance of seeking to unionize Amazon. Figueroa said, "I'm hoping that the desire to organize Amazon—which is absolutely necessary for the labor movement—is backed by the planning and level of resources needed." 

Appelbaum said, "Amazon is transforming industry after industry. What we're talking about here is the future world of work. The Bezos model is to treat employees as expendable, to dehumanize and mistreat them. Because Amazon is transforming so many industries, we cannot accept that it's allowed to continue to operate as an anti-union, non-union company." 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Progressives need to ignore the noise and stay ambitious [feedly]

Progressives need to ignore the noise and stay ambitious
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/02/14/progressives-need-ignore-noise-stay-ambitious/

By Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein, a former chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden, is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and author of 'The Reconnection Agenda: Reuniting Growth and Prosperity'.

February 14

The New Green Deal is a 14-page document that exists about 40,000 feet up in terms of abstraction. It will not be passed by this Congress. That's not just because of the political divide but also because it is not legislation: It's a set of broad ideas — good ones, from my perspective — to reduce carbon emissions while creating good jobs through investment in green industry.

The Green New Deal isn't the only such proposal. Sen. Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, Sen. Bernie Sanders's estate tax, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70 percent income tax over $10 million, Rep. John B. Larson's Social Security expansion, jobs programs from Sen. Cory Booker and Sen. Ron Wyden, universal health coverage plans from every Democratic senator running for president (which is itself a sizable subset of the party's caucus). None of these ideas will become law through this Congress because that's just the political reality of divided government.

So what's the point of offering them? All these proposals elevate vital alternatives to the status quo, on everything from the economy to the environment to racial justice to the basic functions of our democracy. Those of us who agree with the need for changes can, and should, debate the best alternatives. But we must be careful not to let those debates diminish or shut down their urgency.

One challenge we face is that it's harder than it should be to recognize the urgency of the moment. Unemployment is 4 percent and, at the national level, job and wage growth appear solid.

But it doesn't take much to see the cracks in the veneer.

As Kathleen Bryant and I have described, during the 35-day government shutdown, workers with middle-class jobs were seen to be living paycheck-to-paycheck. A 2017 survey by the Federal Reserve found that 4 in 10 adults would be unable to meet an unexpected expense of $400 without "selling something or borrowing money." The scientific community is in wide agreement that the impact of global warming is already being felt in the increased volatility of temperatures and intensity of storms. Wealth concentration is close to levels last seen in the late 1920s, and need I remind you: That didn't end well.

The deterioration of democratic institutions should be setting off daily alarm bells, but instead, we feel like things must be working, because Congress appears to have agreed on Monday not to shut the government down on Friday (though the president had yet to agree). Talk about lowering the bar!

Thanks in no small part to an activist, diverse progressive base — populated by young voters anxious to get out of the center-left box, people of color, immigrants and a few dinosaurs like myself — the new Democratic majority is reflecting this urgency and offering up ideas to address the pressing challenges we face.

Their actions have triggered a typology of responses.

There's the technocratic response (one with which I'm intimately familiar). Policy wonks, even including those favorably disposed toward these sorts of ideas, point out that taxing wealth demands valuations with which the IRS is unfamiliar. (Warren's plan recognizes and addresses this challenge.) We note that guaranteeing a lot of people good government jobs would require a massive extension of administrative capacity by a barely functional federal sector. We point out that despite some assumptions embedded in certain Medicare-for-all plans, private insurers aren't about to "go gently into that good night."

There's the histrionic "socialist!" response, one born of fear that progressives are finally catching onto the game played by the oligarchs and the politicians they fund. Watch this CNBC clip of a debate I just had with anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist. When such people claim that progressive ideas threaten to turn the U.S. into the Weimar Republic, you know they're scared, and for good reason. Warren et al. really are coming after their clients!

Finally, there's the response that the new Democrats are "overreaching" and thus undermining their potential success. This is a political argument, based on the belief that there exists a significant, heretofore largely silent, majority of the electorate that might lean toward Democrats but will be scared off by an ambitious progressive agenda.

From where I sit, many of the technocratic challenges are off point, insisting on a level of specificity that is unwarranted at this early stage, as when David Brooks asks about the Green New Deal, "Exactly which agency would inspect and oversee the renovation of every building in America?" Obviously, the fear mongering about socialism is just that; it should be quickly dismissed out of hand.

The question of political overreaching may be a good one, though. My theory of the case is there's a significant swath of the electorate that feels the urgency of the moment — that agrees that when it comes to the toxic combination of wealth concentration and money in politics, climate change and government functionality, it's well past time for nibbling around the edges. They're not worried about precisely which agency will implement future plans. They're worried about the existence of a viable future.

So that means the new Democrats face an interesting challenge: They realize they were sent here to signal that they get the urgency of the moment, and that they aspire to rebuild the institutions necessary to meet the challenges we face. But they must do that under the scrutiny of policy wonks, vicious opponents and the constraints of a complex political process.

I think they're doing a great job so far. The noise will only get louder, but I urge them to block it out and just keep on pushing ahead.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed