Amazon Walks a Political Tightrope in Its Union Fight [feedly]

Amazon Walks a Political Tightrope in Its Union Fight
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/technology/amazon-union-politics.html

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WASHINGTON — Amazon is aligned with the Biden administration on several fronts.

It backs a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. It has pledged to meet all the goals of the Paris climate agreement on reducing emissions. It has met with the administration to discuss how to help with the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.

But a union drive at one of its warehouses in Alabama has the retailer doing a political balancing act: staying on the good side of Washington's Democratic leaders while squashing an organizing effort that President Biden has signaled his support for.

Amazon workers in Bessemer, Ala., have been voting for weeks on whether to form a union. The voting ends Monday. Approval would be a first for Amazon workers in the United States and could energize the labor movement across the country.

Labor organizers have tapped into dissatisfaction with working conditions in the warehouse, saying Amazon's pursuit of efficiency and profits makes the conditions harsh for workers. The company counters that its starting wage of $15 an hour exceeds what other employers in the area pay, and it has urged workers to vote against unionizing.



Labor leaders and liberal Democrats have seized on the union drive, saying it shows how Amazon is not as friendly to workers as the company says it is. Some of the company's critics are also using its resistance to the union push to argue that Amazon should not be trusted on other issues, like climate change and the federal minimum wage.

Refer someone to The Times.

They'll enjoy our special rate of $1 a week.

Amazon has always fought against unionizing by its workers. But the vote in Alabama comes at a perilous moment for the company. Lawmakers and regulators — not competitors — are some of its greatest threats, and it has spent significant time and money trying to keep the government away from its business.

Amazon's business practices are the subject of antitrust investigations at the Federal Trade Commission and in multiple state attorney general offices. Mr. Biden on Monday nominated Lina Khan, a legal scholar who came to prominence with her critique of the company, for a seat on the F.T.C.

"I think everyone is seeing through the P.R. at this point and focusing on both their economic and political power," Sarah Miller, a critic of Amazon, said about the company. Ms. Miller, who runs the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust think tank, added, "I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C."

Drew Herdener, Amazon's vice president for worldwide communications, said in a statement that the company shared common ground with the Biden administration on climate change, immigration reform, the minimum wage and pandemic policy, and was "seeing really positive collaboration on those fronts" with the White House.



"As it relates to progressive Democrats in general, we've been surprised by some of the negative things we've seen certain members say in the press and on social media," he said. "If there's a progressive company in this country, it's Amazon. Find me another large company paying two times the minimum wage, providing great health benefits from Day 1, 95 percent education reimbursement, safe working environment, and so on. We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees."

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Lina Khan, a nominee for the Federal Trade Commission.Credit...Lexey Swall for The New York Times

Amazon spent $18.7 million on federal lobbying last year, compared with $2.1 million a decade ago, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Its lobbyists press their employer's case on a variety of issues, like how drones are regulated and the laws that govern pharmacies.

Consumers adore Amazon. In late 2019, a national survey by The Verge, a technology news site, found that 91 percent had a favorable view of the retail giant. When professors at Georgetown and New York Universities asked Americans in 2018 which institutions they had the most confidence in, only the military ranked higher than Amazon.

Still, when Jeff Bezos, the chief executive, testified before Congress last year, he faced accusations that the company squeezes the small businesses that use its online marketplace. A liberal philanthropic organization funded a network of activists to press Amazon on privacy, competition and labor issues. They have also attacked Mr. Bezos, the richest person in the world by some measures, for his personal wealth.

Amazon has made efforts to reach out to the new administration. Dave Clark, who runs the company's consumer business, sent a letter to the White House in January offering to help with the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine and met virtually with Jeff Zients, the White House's coronavirus coordinator, to discuss the vaccine rollout.



In December, the company also hired the lobbyist Jeff Ricchetti, whose brother, Steve Ricchetti, is a longtime aide to Mr. Biden and now a counselor to the president. In the final quarter of last year, Amazon paid Jeff Ricchetti $60,000, according to disclosure forms he filed with the government.

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An Amazon warehouse in Kent, Wash. According to a 2019 survey by The Verge, 91 percent of people in the United States had a favorable view of Amazon.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

The company's top lobbying and communications executive, Jay Carney, was a communications director for Mr. Biden during the Obama administration. President Barack Obama later named Mr. Carney the White House press secretary. He has deep relationships with Mr. Biden's inner circle, and has played in a garage band with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Under Mr. Carney's leadership, Amazon has taken steps to satisfy its liberal critics. In 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, attacked the company over its wages. Not long after that, the company announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour and push federal policymakers to do the same.

"We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do and decided we want to lead," Mr. Bezos said in a statement at the time.

Amazon has promoted the $15-an-hour minimum in ads in publications frequently used to reach government officials, including Politico and The New York Times. Its lobbyists have pushed for a federal law raising the wage.

The union organizers in Bessemer have increasingly attracted support from the White House and top lawmakers in Congress. Labor leaders spent weeks pushing Mr. Biden's staff to have him weigh in on the election at the warehouse.

Their lobbying paid off: In February, Mr. Biden appeared in a video that didn't mention Amazon explicitly but was seen as a clear sign of support to the union. In the video, he said there "should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats" from employers in coming union elections, including in Alabama.




"I didn't speak with the president directly, but my understanding was that the second this hit the president's briefing book, he was like, 'I'm in,'" said Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants.

The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California both support the unionization effort, as do many other Democrats in Congress.

"We've got to protect every worker's right to form and join a union, and to bargain collectively for better pay, quality health care, a safer workplace and a secure retirement," said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, where Amazon has its main headquarters. "That absolutely includes the Amazon workers in Alabama, just like workers in Washington State and across our country."

Amazon's opposition to the union drive could scuttle some of the good will it established among Democrats with its support for a higher federal minimum wage, some liberals said.

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Representative Andy Levin, left, a Michigan Democrat, visiting the Amazon warehouse in Alabama after meeting with workers and organizers involved in the unionization effort.Credit...Megan Varner/Getty Images

Mr. Sanders said he appreciated Amazon's help on the minimum wage. "On the other hand," he said, "to my mind, I find it hard to understand why Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the wealthiest guy in the world, worth about $182 billion, is spending millions of dollars fighting a union organizing effort in Alabama, where his workers are trying to organize for better wages and better working conditions."

But he said he would ultimately approach the company "issue by issue."

Mr. Sanders will appear at a union event in Alabama with the rapper Killer Mike on Friday. Mr. Clark, the Amazon executive, responded to the news with derision on Wednesday evening.



"I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that's not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace to our constituents," he said on Twitter.

It recalled the message Amazon had waiting for a delegation of progressive lawmakers who met with union representatives in Alabama this month.

At the warehouse, workers held up a large banner with text in bold letters: "CONGRESS: PLEASE MATCH AMAZON'S $15/HOUR MINIMUM WAGE!"

Karen Weise contributed reporting.


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Krugman: Will Stagnation Follow the Biden Boom? [feedly]

Will Stagnation Follow the Biden Boom?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/08/opinion/biden-economy-stagnation.html

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It's morning in America! People are getting vaccinated at the rate of two million a day and rising, suggesting that the pandemic may be largely behind us in a few months (unless premature reopening or variants mostly immune to the current vaccines set off another wave). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already declared that vaccinated adults can safely mingle with one another, their children and their grandchildren.

On the economic front, the Senate has passed a relief bill that should help Americans get through the remaining difficult months, leaving them ready to work and spend again, and the bill will almost surely become law in a few days.

Economists have noticed the good news. Forecasters surveyed by Bloomberg predict 5.5 percent growth this year, the highest rate since the 1990s. I think they're being conservative; so does Goldman Sachs, which expects 7.7 percent growth, something we haven't seen since 1984.

But then what? I'm very optimistic about economic prospects for the next year or two. Beyond that, however, we're going to need another big policy initiative to keep the good times rolling.



President Biden's American Rescue Plan is what the name implies. It's a short-term relief measure meant to address an economic emergency. There are some elements Democrats hope will become permanent — child tax credits, enhanced subsidies for health insurance — but the great bulk of the spending will fade out within a year.

And once the big spending is behind us, we're all too likely to find ourselves back in a condition of "secular stagnation," an old concept recently revived by Larry Summers. I know it's an obscure piece of jargon. But what it means is a condition in which the economy has persistent trouble maintaining full employment, even with ultralow interest rates. An economy subject to secular stagnation will still have occasional good times, but policymakers will find it difficult to offset bad news, like the bursting of a financial bubble.

This is a bad place to be. There's a growing consensus among economists that the U.S. economy spent most of the decade after the 2008 financial crisis producing less and employing fewer people than it should have. We may — may — have finally gotten close to full employment on the eve of the pandemic, but even that isn't clear.

Exactly why we found ourselves in this condition is a subject of some debate, but a few factors are obvious. A drastic slowdown in growth of the working-age population reduced investment demand; so did an apparent slackening in the pace of technological progress. Whatever the reasons, the prepandemic economy spent most of its time underperforming relative to its potential.

And financial markets are signaling that they expect a return to underperformance once the Biden boom is behind us. These days interest rates are, in effect, a barometer of economic optimism — and these rates have in fact risen as the rescue plan has moved toward the finish line. But the rise has been modest, comparable to the "taper tantrum" of 2013 (don't ask) and minor compared with some interest rate surges of the 1990s.



What markets are telling us, in effect, is that after the boom they expect a return to stagnation — which would, again, be a bad place to be. How can we avoid it?

OPINION DEBATEWhat should the Biden administration prioritize?

ABDULLAH SHIHIPAR argues that the Department of Health and Human Services should declare racism a public health emergency "to bring desperately needed relief to the communities of color that have been ravaged by the pandemic."
KARA SWISHER writes that the Coronavirus vaccine rollout "has been shaken by far too much chaos," and in particular "chaos that is often related to glitchy tech" that could be improved.
RHEA BOYD, a pediatrician, writes that a focus on vaccine hesitancy "implicitly blames Black communities for their undervaccination" and obscures opportunities to fix the problem.
NICHOLAS KRISTOF, Opinion columnist, argues that while we need investments in bridges, highways and the electrical grid, "perhaps America's most disgraceful infrastructure failing is its lack of public toilets."

The answer is actually obvious: a large program of public investment, paid for largely with borrowing, although with a case for new taxes, too, if it's really big. Such a program would do double duty. Macroeconomics aside, we need to spend a lot to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, fight climate change, and more. And public investment can also be a major source of jobs and growth, helping to pull us out of the stagnation trap.

The good news is that the Biden administration's economists understand all of this perfectly well, and by all accounts they're already in the process of putting together a very ambitious infrastructure plan.

The bad news is that getting such a plan enacted will be very hard politically — probably even harder than getting to yes on short-term economic rescue.

In a well-functioning democracy, putting together a big public investment plan wouldn't be hard. "Every bit of polling evidence I have reviewed," wrote Gallup's Frank Newport, "shows that Americans are extremely supportive of new government infrastructure legislation." Remember, the Trump administration spent four years promising a plan any day now, although it never delivered.

But every bit of polling evidence I've reviewed also showed that Americans — including many Republicans — supported the American Rescue Plan. Yet not a single elected Republican voted for it.



Republicans will probably offer similar lock-step opposition to anything Democrats propose on infrastructure. In fact, the very popularity of infrastructure spending will stiffen their opposition, because what they want, above all, is to make the Biden administration a failure.

So the big question is whether Democrats can pull off another political miracle, and pass a second round of crucial economic legislation in the face of scorched-earth Republican opposition. The answer to that question will determine whether the Biden boom will endure.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman


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The alignment of earnings in occupations and at U.S. workplaces increasingly exacerbates earnings inequality

https://equitablegrowth.org/the-alignment-of-earnings-in-occupations-and-at-u-s-workplaces-increasingly-exacerbates-earnings-inequality/

The alignment of earnings in occupations and at U.S. workplaces increasingly exacerbates earnings inequality

Equitable Growthby Nathan Wilmers, Clem Aeppli / 5h

//keep unread//hide

A few common explanations dominate the discussion of rising earnings inequality in the United States. Automation and computerization, for example, have augmented many nonroutine white-collar jobs—meaning those jobs can pay more—while replacing more routine jobs. Tech pays off differently depending on your occupation. Another set of explanations of earnings inequality has to do with the types of employers, workplaces, or firms that make up the U.S. economy. Low-paying service-sector employers have multiplied, and manufacturers have deunionized, outsourced, or offshored, while a select few firms in finance, consulting, and tech pay disproportionately high wages. This last set of firms is made up of so-called superstar firms.

In short, where you work matters for earnings inequality, too—it's not just what you do at work.

In a new paper, we argue that these two types of explanations miss something crucial. From 1999 to 2017, increasing earnings inequality occurred not mainly because of changing pay-offs to where you work or what you do at work. Instead, inequality is increasing through the increased alignment between occupations and workplaces. High-paying occupations are increasingly clustered at high-paying workplaces, and low-paying occupations are increasingly located at low-paying workplaces.

This alignment between earnings at workplaces and occupations exacerbates overall earnings inequality. But this has largely escaped public attention because we typically study either occupations or workplaces in isolation.

For our analysis, we used restricted-use Occupational Employment Statistics, or OES, survey data collected by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. Twice a year, the BLS surveys about one-sixth of establishments in the United States, asking them to list the occupations they employ, the number of workers in each occupation, and the wage distribution of each occupation. So, the OES data let us examine the role of both workplace and occupation in earnings inequality—something that other sources of U.S. data cannot do.

Using this survey's data, we modeled workers' earnings as the sum of both occupational premiums and workplace premiums. An occupation premium is what a certain occupation pays beyond the average, once you take into account the workplaces where it is employed. A workplace premium is what a workplace pays beyond average, once you take into account the occupations it employs.

Here's an example. A software engineer working at the online vacation rental company Airbnb Inc. earns a lot, since software engineers in general are well-compensated and since Airbnb pays its employees above the rate they might earn elsewhere. A software engineer working at a nonprofit might earn less—even though that worker could still earn more than other employees at the nonprofit due to their occupation, the nonprofit as a whole pays less. So, software engineering has a high occupational premium, Airbnb has a high workplace premium, and the nonprofit has a lower workplace premium.

Using what's called a two-way fixed-effects regression, we calculate these two sets of premiums for every occupation and for every workplace in the OES survey. This approach lets us separate inequality between occupation premiums (due to skill-biased technological change, for example) from inequality between workplace premiums (due to superstar firms, for example).

Surprisingly, we find that both between-workplace inequality and between-occupation inequality have stayed roughly level over the past 20 years, each explaining around the same amount of earnings variation. The big change has been in the covariance between occupation and workplace premiums, which has doubled in the past 20 years and which accounts for two-thirds of the total increase in wage inequality. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows that pay premiums are increasingly aligned such that highly paid occupations are more likely to be located at high-paying establishments, and similarly for poorly paid occupations and low-paying establishments. Workers with the high-premium occupations at high-premium establishments enjoy very high wages, while those with low-premium occupations at low-premium establishments receive very low wages. We call this the consolidation of workplace and occupation inequalities.

But why does consolidation matter?

Consolidation exacerbates overall earnings inequality, with those in high-occupation-premium, high-establishment-premium jobs earning extra and those in low-occupation-premium, low-establishment-premium jobs earning even less. The result is worse earnings inequality than either between-occupation or between-workplace variation would create by themselves. And, though we cannot test it with our data, consolidation could affect other aspects of work, too. While a janitor hired by Eastman Kodak Co. some 40 years ago could work her way into other jobs at the firm, a janitor at Apple Inc. today is actually employed by a custodial services contractor and has little chance for promotion.

The consolidation we observe means that many conventional explanations for rising earnings inequality do not capture the full story. Explanations emphasizing divergence between occupations or educational levels or explanations focusing on the importance of where you work ignore the fact that the two are increasingly tied together.

This earnings-inequality dynamic also means that policymakers need to look at more than one dimension of earnings inequality—occupation or workplace—at a time. Policies such as the minimum wage cut across both workplace and occupation at once: It doesn't matter whether it's the occupation premium or the workplace premium that's low. So, a higher minimum wage keeps low workplace premiums and low occupation premiums from compounding. Of course, the minimum wage alone isn't enough—most of the rise in inequality over the past 20 years is due to a growing gap between median-earning and high-earning workers.

So, policymakers should also consider interventions in the sectors where the consolidation of earnings inequality is most rampant. First is the service sector, which is increasingly dominated by low-paying workplaces employing primarily poorly paid occupations on the one hand (think fast-food restaurants), and very high-paying workplaces employing mainly well-compensated occupations (think consulting firms). Together, this shift in industrial composition accounts for more than 20 percent of the total increase in consolidation.

Second is the bifurcation of social services. Some hospitals, nursing homes, and the like have cut costs in recent years by shifting to a workforce of primarily poorly compensated occupations. An underresourced community health center, for example, may reduce the number of physicians on staff, relying instead on a workforce of nurses and other employees with less-prestigious credentials. Perhaps constrained by budget cuts, the health center also may pay its employees less across the board than they might earn elsewhere.

Meanwhile, other establishments in social services have shifted up, employing more professional elites and paying them well, too. Think of a small psychiatric practice with a primarily wealthy clientele. These patterns of down-shifting and up-shifting account for about 12 percent and 11 percent, respectively, of the total increase in consolidation, according to our working paper.

While most dramatic in these two sectors, earnings consolidation has occurred throughout the U.S. economy. Regardless of industry, the alignment of workplace and occupation now exacerbates overall earnings inequality. It forms a new source of earnings inequality, one which defies conventional explanations and which requires attention from researchers and from policymakers alike.

Some State Policymakers Pushing Tax Cuts Amid Widespread Hardship [feedly]

Some State Policymakers Pushing Tax Cuts Amid Widespread Hardship
https://www.cbpp.org/blog/some-state-policymakers-pushing-tax-cuts-amid-widespread-hardship

Even as some states take steps to help people who are struggling the most due to the pandemic and recession, policymakers in some other states are doing exactly the opposite of what this crisis calls for: proposing extreme tax cuts that would primarily benefit the well-off, weaken the state's ability to help those facing hard times, and worsen racial and economic inequities. Because of the pandemic, millions of people are going without enough food, facing eviction, and struggling to pay their utility bills and other household expenses. Millions of children have effectively lost a year of......

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UMWA president talks about Biden's energy plans

• By Jackie Whetzel for The Register-Herald
 
• Mar 6, 2021
 

https://www.register-herald.com/news/state_region/umwa-president-talks-about-bidens-energy-plans/article_91496246-6b77-5eb5-b2ec-7bf22050e2c9.html

United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts says he has no doubt America can learn to burn coal in a clean manner, and he's hopeful President Joe Biden will come up with a rapid plan to replace all of the coal-related jobs that will be eliminated under his clean energy plans.

Biden has been vocal about his desire to transition America to 100 percent renewable energy for electricity generation by 2035 and net-zero emissions by 2050.

To do so, fossil fuels will have to be retired.

Biden wants the U.S. to lead when it comes to addressing the world's climate emergency.

While Biden's plans would likely have a positive impact on the environment, they could also be devastating to coal communities in West Virginia and throughout Appalachia – despite the president's talk of wanting to assimilate coal workers into new industries when mining jobs go away.

In a one-on-one phone interview, Roberts told The Register-Herald that Biden's energy plans "concern us greatly."

"We knew based on his campaign what his plans would be with respect to energy," said Roberts. "I know President Biden wants to do the right thing. I don't doubt that at all – that's not the issue."

Roberts said the problem is thousands of workers will be unemployed under net-zero emissions – and there is no concrete strategy to replace the multitude of coal industry jobs that will be lost.

"You see a state like West Virginia and areas like Kentucky, Indiana and Alabama – they're all heavily dependent on coal," Roberts said. "We're talking about doing this in 14 years. Think about that. We're going to change the entire method of producing electricity by eliminating all these jobs. What do we do with the workers?"

It has been said that the Biden administration plans to create millions of jobs in renewable energy fields, but Roberts says he has to see evidence that those jobs are being created before thousands of workers are left unemployed.

"Just think about this for a moment," Roberts said. "The 2035 net zero emissions would eliminate not only coal, but it would also eliminate natural gas.

"The idea that we would be using, as a country, renewable and renewables only – A, I don't think that's possible. B, I don't think that's pragmatic. And C, It would be devastating to the economy in Appalachia where you and I come from," Roberts said, specifically referencing West Virginia.

Many of the union workers Roberts represents have shared their concerns about how they will provide for their families if the coal industry is eliminated.

"We've (already) lost thousands and thousands of jobs across Appalachia, and there hasn't been a plan for helping find jobs that were equivalent to these (coal) jobs. So the question is: What's the plan here? Or is there a plan?" he said.

In a December 2019 Newsweek article, Biden was quoted on the campaign trail saying, "Anyone who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well," referring to computer-related jobs.

Some Americans dubbed these comments "tone deaf" and "unhelpful."

At the time, American Coal Council CEO Betsy Monseau said it was a "lack of appreciation" for what miners actually do.

When asked about Biden's comments, Roberts said, "I think coal miners can do anything."

However, we're still not talking about union jobs that offer an equivalent wage and benefits, he said.

Former presidential candidate John Kerry has been quoted saying coal miners can be put to work installing solar panels.

"That's fine," Roberts said, "except those aren't union jobs and don't pay much."

Aside from massive job losses, Roberts says transitioning to clean energy is also a hard pill to swallow because it will make America more reliant on China.

"What we're talking about doing here is helping China out economically," Roberts said. "Two-thirds of all solar panels in the world are made in China. Two-thirds of all wind turbines are made in China. If we're going to do this, let's do it in Appalachia and put thousands of people to work and make them union jobs represented by the UMWA."

Also bringing the demise of the steel industry into the conversation, Roberts said, "We don't produce steel in this country and we've just stopped talking about it. Why can't we have a steel industry again in America?"

Roberts was once a miner himself and hails from a family deeply rooted in the mining industry. His father was also a steel employee.

He says he understands the job and has dedicated his life to fighting for the rights of union coal workers.

He plans to continue what he considers an uphill battle.

"We will defend these jobs because we know how hard it is to replace them," he said. "The administration should be working hard to create these high-paying jobs before eliminating them. That doesn't work well in my mind – and I don't think it works well for the people of Appalachia, either."

Roberts recalled the time when coal jobs were abundant across Appalachia.

Those days are long gone – and few industries have moved in to replace many of these old coal communities.

Roberts can recall standing 20 feet away from former president Barack Obama once when he was running for president in 2008.

"He said, 'If we can find a way to put a man on the moon, we can burn clean coal,'" said Roberts. "The only thing we've failed to do here is put the money and resources into this.

"I have no doubt that we can burn coal cleanly. We have people who say to us, 'You don't believe in science and technology.' I believe in both of them," he said. "The question is: Do they believe we can use technology to utilize coal cleanly in a coal-fired power plant?"

A recent CNBC article cited a Bureau of Labor report stating that there were less than 50,000 coal jobs at the end of 2020.

"2020 was the worst year for coal mining," Roberts said. "50,000 is about right, yes. It might even be lower than that. It will be higher at the end of 2021, but the jobs in the coal mining industry will be at risk."

When asked if miners should be concerned for the future of their careers, he said, "Yes."

"For 10 years, I've told myself it's like the fight that never ends," said Roberts, referencing his fight to keep miners' pensions and health care.

Roberts is currently the longest serving president of the UMWA. He could have retired years ago but has elected to continue working.

"I'm not planning on leaving in the middle of this fight. I've met a lot of wonderful people along the way. I've been blessed."

--

John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV

Enlighten Radio

Socialist Economics

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Strengthening workers’ right to organize is 50 years overdue [feedly]

Strengthening workers' right to organize is 50 years overdue
https://www.epi.org/blog/strengthening-workers-right-to-organize-is-50-years-overdue/

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Luxemburg 150 [feedly]

Luxemburg 150

Mike Roberts memorializes Rosa Luxemburg.

I think, in hindsight, they all got parts of Imperialism right, but strayed unnecessarily from Marx's original thesis that capitalism would overtake ALL previous ancestral systems in time throughout the world. That is still happening. "Imperialism -- stronger nations drawing weaker ones into their markets, but not without overrunning institutions and stimulating economic and political instability. The dominance in an economy of primarily inputs or primarily outputs, depending on uneven levels of development, steadily emerges into new states of globalization shaped by global geopolitical struggles.
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2021/03/06/luxemburg-150/

Yesterday, 5 March 2021, was the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Luxemburg, the great revolutionary socialist of the Polish-German labour movement.  Luxemburg's contribution to socialist ideas and to the struggle to replace capitalism is too manifold for a short blog post to do her justice.  So I won't attempt to do a proper job here.  Instead, I shall offer a few comments on her contribution to Marxist political economy along with some suggestions for some very useful critiques of her work.

Since the 1970s there has been a Collected Works in German. But more recently, there is a new Complete Works in English, edited by Peter Hudis, in fourteen volumes.  As Hudis explained in an article in Solidarity 356 (11/3/15: bit.ly/hudis-rl), "given the amount of time, care, and attention that she gave to developing her major economic works, it makes sense to begin the Complete Works with her contributions to the field of Marxian economics and those fill the 1200 or so pages of the first two volumes."

Luxemburg's four actual books (three published, and a larger one never completed) were all about economic theory: The Industrial Development of Poland, The Accumulation of Capital, the Anti-Critique, and the Introduction to Political Economy.  She was a formidable economist by all standards, and one who reckoned that economics was "her field". Her most famous work was The Accumulation of Capital in which she set out to refute the reformist views of Bernstein and Kautsky, the German Social Democrat leaders, that capitalism would not 'collapse'; and the theory of Rudolf Hilferding, the Austrian Marxist that monopoly and finance capitalism would provide a degree of stability for capitalist accumulation.

As is well known among Marxist circles, Luxemburg attempted to refute these views in her book by arguing that there was an inherent tendency for capitalist accumulation to overreach the market for buying the goods and services being produced.  In her view, that showed that capitalism could and would get into crises; and moreover, it also explained imperialist expansion.  To avoid  crises of overproduction at home, capitalism was forced to search for new markets overseas and find buyers for its goods in the non-capitalist sectors of the world.

She argued that Marx's analysis of crises fell short here.  Marx had failed to see in his reproduction schemas in Volume Two of Capital that this was the ultimate cause of crises: namely the overproduction of capital goods relative to demand (both from capitalists and workers in the imperialist countries), forcing capitalism to find that demand from the colonial non-capitalist peasants.

She was not afraid to take on Marx as well as other leading theorists.  As she concluded in her Anti-Critique: "Marxism does not consist of a dozen persons who have granted each other the right to be the 'experts', before whom the masses are supposed to prostrate themselves in blind obedience, like loyal followers of the true faith of Islam. Marxism is a revolutionary outlook on the world that must always strive toward new knowledge and new discoveries… Its living force is best preserved in the intellectual clash of self-criticism and in the midst of history's thunder and lightning".

There are many effective critiques of Luxemburg's thesis.  I can list a few papers here that go into those critiques in much more detail than this short post.

https://imhojournal.org/articles/henryk-grossmann-vs-rosa-luxemburg-causes-meaning-economic-crises-not-just-history-karel-ludenhoff/

https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/henryk_grossman_on_imperialism.pdf

https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2019-01-16/luxemburg-economics-crises-and-national-question

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/modern-imperialism-and-the-working-class/

I think the most effective critique of Luxemburg's crisis theory came from Henryk Grossman.  Grossman acknowledged Luxemburg's work.  He agreed with her that the expansion of imperialism was due to the capitalist system's proneness to economic crises. But he differed from Luxemburg in regarding imperialism as a factor which offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, not as the need for capitalism to find markets for over-production. Imperialism was a counteracting factor to the key underlying cause of crises and 'breakdown' in capitalist production, namely the tendency for the rate of profit on capital to fall over time.

Lenin was also critical of Luxemburg's explanation of imperialism.  In his famous book on Imperialism, he argues that imperialism is the result of capitalism's need to export capital which arises "from the fact that in a few countries capitalism has become 'overripe' and (owing to the backward state of agriculture and the poverty of the masses)" and "capital cannot find a field for 'profitable' investment."  Grossman went further than Lenin: "[W]hy," then, "are profitable investments not to be found at home?…..The fact of capital export is as old as modern capitalism itself. The scientific task consists in explaining this fact, hence in demonstrating the role it plays in the mechanism of capitalist production."

Luxemburg knew from reading Marx's Capital about the law of profitability, although Marx's notes on Capital, Grundrisse, were not available to her. But she dismissed the law as irrelevant to capitalist crises.  For her, the law was a long-term thing. Indeed, it was so long-term, as she famously put in Anti-Critique, when answering criticisms of her Accumulation book, that "There is still some time to pass before capitalism collapses because of the falling rate of profit, roughly until the sun burns out".

But Marx did not see the law of profitability as something in geological time but very relevant to human time.  "When Adam Smith explains the fall in the rate of profit from an over-abundance of capital, an accumulation of capital, he is speaking of a permanent effect and this is wrong.  As against this, the transitory over-abundance of capital, over-production and crises are something different.  Permanent crises do not exist." (Theories of Surplus Value).

Peter Hudis has added an interesting anecdote to Luxemburg's rejection of Marx's 'most important law in political economy'. He wrote to me in an email:  "what is less well known, is the person she is responding to" in dismissing the relevance of the law of profitability in crises. "He was an anonymous reviewer of 'The Accumulation of Capital' in 'Dresdener Volkszeitung' of January 1913.  Several years ago, when I was editing 'The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg', I managed to track down that the author was Miran Isaakovich Nakhimson. Born in 1880, he joined the Bundists in 1898 and became known as one of its most prominent political economists. Although virtually forgotten today, he was a considerable presence at the time."

Hudis goes on: "It's fairly clear from Luxemburg's correspondence that she was particularly irritated by Nakhimson's critique–which is interesting, since he was virtually alone among her critics in going after her for neglecting Marx's law of the rate of profit. In a letter to Franz Mehring in February, 1913, she writes, "Too bad that Nackhimson has a slap in the face coming to him, but perhaps in the end this would be too great an honor to give this scoundrel and expert at confusion."  A little harsh, it seems, on the Bundist economist.

Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the Freikorp troops under the control of the Social Democratic government during the 1919 uprising.  Nakhimson was murdered by Stalin's NKVD in 1938.  Both economists were revolutionary fighters for socialism and suffered a similar fate, if by different hands.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed