Together Let Us Build Working

Class Power in our Communities:

The 2011 Launch of the

SACP Red October Campaign

We are in that time of the year when the SACP launches its popular Red October Campaign. Our Red October Campaign is inspired and seeks to take forward the spirit and the victories of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia - ushering in the first workers' government in the 20th century.

The Red October campaign has been an important platform in building and strengthening the SACP over the last 11 years. Through our Red October Campaign we have built an SACP that is closer to the workers and the poor of our country. Through this campaign we say to the workers and the poor of our country, take up struggles to change your lives for the better and be the masters of your own destinies. It is only the workers and the poor themselves, in struggle and in solidarity with all other progressive forces that will consolidate and deepen our national democratic revolution, and advance the struggle for socialism in our country.

Through these campaigns we have also exposed the failures of the capitalist system to address the needs of the overwhelming majority of our people, and particularly also the failures of the neo-liberal macro-economic policies pursued since 1996. Our Red October Campaign has also been an important organising tool to recruit more and more members to the SACP. The Red October Campaign has also been an important platform for the ideological development of SACP members, and generally to conscientise and mobilise the workers and the poor to be the makers of their own history.

Since its launch twelve years ago, the Red October Campaign has been an important campaigning platform led by the SACP, and has notched some important victories, including:

a. the roll out of banking services to the poor via Umzansi account

b. the transformation of the financial sector as a whole

c. The passage of the Co-operatives and Co-operative Banks legislation

d. the introduction of the National Credit Act to protect consumers against reckless lending

e. the convening of the Land Summit in 2005, direct as a result of the 2004 Red October Campaign - a summit that resolved that the ‘willing seller, willing buyer' model of land reform must be changed as it is an obstacle to access to land by our people

f. raised the plight of our public transport system and the fact that it needed much improvement and attention in 2006, including the convening of the national transport indaba

g. the introduction of the National Health Insurance (NHI) in which our campaigning in 2007 and 2009 on health matters contributed significantly towards this advance

h. Our campaign against corruption through our Red October Campaign of 2009, and the increase focus by government on these matters including the call for the reform of the government tender system by also making it more transparent

The major lessons from our Red October Campaign include the fact that we must not just satisfy ourselves by becoming professional critics, permanent protestors and lamentors in the face of the many challenges facing our country. But that is essential for the working class to take the lead on concretely what is to be done, through concrete actions and campaigns!

Since 1994, and especially since Polokwane, our country has made some important advances. Today we have an industrial policy, a framework for a new growth path, a proposed NHI, amongst others, and our task should be on how we build on these, to continue to provide leadership in order to change the lives of millions of our people.

Through our Red October Campaign we have deepened our work with the progressive trade union movement, formed important alliances with community organisations, youth and women's groups, faith groups and many progressive NGOs and research initiatives to advance the struggle of ordinary workers and the poor.

The 2011 Red October Campaign is a very special one as it is launched during our 90th anniversary year. It is therefore a Red October also to celebrate the heroic role played by our Party in the national liberation strugggle, and the role we continue to play in the reconstruction and development of our country. It is a celebration done in the best way we do as communists, to continue being in the trenches with the workers and poor of our country.

In 2011 the SACP calls upon all our people to join us in campaigning on the following on the following issues:

1. People's education for people's power - Education with an emphasis on making our schools functional, and also the wider challenges of skills and training, with a particular focus on the girl child and the youth.

2. Building a solidarity economy - Through this to, amongst others, building and strengthenings a people's cooperative banks movement as part of taking forward our campaign to make banks and other financial institutions to serve our people

3. Building local people`s committees for comprehensive rural development - With a particular emphasis on building a women`s rural movement for land, food and infrastructure for rural development

4. Intensifying the struggle against corruption - Through all these struggles we must these to intensify the struggle against corruption and tenderpreneurs

The 2011 Red October Campaign, seeks to build on the many advances we have made in the past, taking these to higher We must use our voting district (VD) based branches to convene community red forums in all our localities around our key areas of focus, engage communities, as well as intensify our work with and inside the trade union movement.

5. People's education for people's power

Education and skills are the most important tools to empower the workers, the poor, our youth and women, our communities, and to lay a basis for a better life for all in our country. Let us mobilise our youth to take up all the opportunities for schooling and skills development. Let us say to them it is cool to be educated, as part of defeating all the attempts to mislead young people to think that their salvation is in tenders, and often ill-gotten monies as a short cut to riches. Education can never be taken away from anybody, unlike a tender that can be given or taken away the next day.

To this end the SACP is calling upon all our structures, including the alliance structures and communities to embark on the following:

Identifying and fixing dysfunctional schools - The Department of Basic Education has provided us with a list of all poorly performing or dysfunctional schools throughout the country. Let us go out and engage school governing bodies, parents, communities, learners and government departments to identify and mobilise for our schools to work. Let us make sure that there is teaching and learning taking place in all our schools, that teachers and learners are on time, teaching and learning. Let us expose all those teacher, principals and government officials who are not doing their work, and let us ensure that there are no shebeens next to our schools. Let us engage SADTU and other teacher organisations to make sure our schools work!

The SACP also says let us not only focus on secondary schools, but let us also make sure that our primary schools are functional, as foundation learning is very important for the rest of our education system.

Let us convene community forums to discuss, and decide on appropriate actions where we live, to make our schools work. Most of the dysfunctional schools are those attendend by the children of especially the black working class and the poor.

Let us form co-operatives and other community initiatives to ensure that it is these co-operatives that are used by government for the school feeding scheme. The school nutrition scheme is now reaching more that 8 million learners, and let us take this away from individual businesses and give them to co-operatives as part of genuine empowerment of ordinary people.

Why package everything into a tender? Why should the local state and local popular capacities not be harnessed jointly so that government and communities work together to build their own housing, their own schools, maintain their own roads and infrastructure?

It is time that the SACP tackles the many challenges facing the girl-child, for the naming and shaming of teachers who sexually abuse girl-pupils, and to conscientise our communities about the need to fight teenage pregnancy and youth suicide. To this end we must support the YCL call to end the publication of matric results in newspapers, so that we reduce the many stresses already placed on our young people at such a vulnerable age.

Infrastructure, books and stationery - Let us mobilise our communities to ensure that monies allocated to building schools and do away with mud schools. The SACP calls for the building of schools infrastructure, maintenance and repairs be part of the expanded or community public works programmes, and take them out of tenders to individuals. Let us also train our communities and use FET colleges to fix and repair school furniture, as part of creating job opportunities for ordinary people. Let us mobilise to ensure that required resources (books, stationery and teachers) are supplied timeously.

Community skills development and strengthening FET colleges - Let us get closer to making sure that our FET colleges are functional and for accessing government resources for community skills development initiatives. Let us make sure that poor youth in particular take up learning opportunities in FET colleges, now that poor student are no longer required to pay fees in these colleges.

Fighting corruption in all of our education system - It is important that our communities stand up to expose and fight all forms of corruption in our education system. Let us defeat the sometimes unholy alliance between some school or college managers, governing bodies and government officials to squander monies meant for education. Let us campaign to end all forms of corruption in the schooling and education systems

2. Building a solidarity economy

A national summit of the financial sector - This pillar of our campaign must be linked to laying the foundations for the revitalisation of our financial sector campaign. The SACP is calling upon the convening of the second national financial sector summit, incuding both the private and public financial sector to assess progress made since the signing of the financial sector charter in 2003. We want to know if banks are investing in low-cost houses; why the exorbitant charges they are still charging?; are they investing in a manner that is creating jobs through investment ninto infrastructure?

Building a co-operative banks movement - Much as private banks must still be pressurised to lend money to the workers and the poor for developmental activities, away from funding narrow BEE, this will not be enough to build the necessary finances to support co-operatives, the informal sector and SMEs. Therefore in the wake of the Co-operative Banks Act, let us engage our burial societies, stokvels and the trade union movement on creating a viable co-operative banks movement, as entities that will support development initiatives in our communities. These must just not be on the periphery but we must work towards mainstreaming them as an important component of a new growth path. This initiaitve is very crucial in building an alternative solidarity economy that is not based on capitalist greed and selfishness.

Our people's monies in burial societies and stokvels can support a lot of secondary initiatives that are owned and controlled by members of these societies themselves (eg micro banking services, coffin making, etc). Let us convene red forums to engage all our people's initiatives in burial societies, stokvels, and co-operatives for these resources to be pulled together in a manner that supports people's own development initiatives.

It is estimated that more than 60,000 people belong to 121 co-op banking institutions (Savings and Credit Co-ops (SACCO), Financial Services Co-ops (FSC); co-op banks.), with total assets of more than R100-million, employing around 100 people to run and manage these co-ops. Notwithstanding the above, the sector faces challenges ranging from inability to grow in membership, assets and services, lack of skills and effective leadership and governance.

3. Building rural motive forces for Land Reform, Food Production and rural development

The struggle for liberation will be incomplete and suffer major setbacks if there is no deliberate programme to restore back to the formerly oppressed people land taken from under colonialism and apartheid. Government alone, without a mobilised people, will not be able to achieve our land and rural development goals. Despite some progress made on this front, land in our country is still in the hands of a minority.

Rural development is more than just land and agriculture, important as these are, but is about rural infrastructure including access roads, the building of bridges, rural education infrastructure, rural clinics and police stations, and many other facilities that are readily available in many urban areas. Let us campaign for infrastructure as the foundation for sustainable rural economic development

In tackling these the SACP, acting together with the people in rural areas will embark in the following activities:

Conclusion of land restitution claims - Let us engage government and our communities for speedy settlement of all land restitution claims. Let us also ensure that all re-claimed land is used productively through support from government and through the mobilisation of financial and other resources in the hands of the communities. Let our co-operative banks support viable, productive agricultural activities in reclaimed land. Let reclaimed land be used for food production and food security.

The SACP calls for the intensification of the struggle against instances of corruption in the land restitution process. Land meant for the people must not be sold back to former owners because our people do not have the means to use it productively. Land meant for the people must be used by the people themselves and not be shared amongst tenderpreneurs or people in leadership or government positions!

Building People's Committees for rural development - Let the SACP convene people's red forums in all of our rural areas in order to form people's committees for rural development. Where various types of committees already exist to fight for access to land and agricultural activities or rural development, let us strengthen them in order to build motive forces for rural development. Let us pay particular attention to the organisation of women in the rural areas, as they are the ones who stand to benefit most

Transform the white agricultural countryside, with and for workers and poor - Working with FAWU and other progressive trade unions in the ‘white' countryside, let us intensify organisation of farm workers and for farm dwellers to have access to decent accommodation, pension funds, trade union rights, and intensify the struggle against evictions, and for access to education to all children of farm-workers and farm-dwellers.

Let us not allow white agricultural bosses to divide and exploit workers by seeking to replace South African workers with foreign, and vulnerable workers. Let us not fight amongst ourselves as workers, irrespective of our country of national origin, but must unite to defeat the white bosses' divide and rule tactics! We must accelerate the campaign for access to decent accommodation and pension funds for farmworkers, and fight against farm evictions.

Let us expose the racist agenda of organisations like the DA and Afri-forum, who never once raise the issue of abuse and the super-exploitation of black farmworkers, but instead oppose all actions of government to try and change our country for the better!

Let us fight to access to farms to organise farm-workers and address the conditions of farm-dwellers, and for farms to be declared workplaces and public residential areas, so that they are accessible. Let us remove the prison-type walls in farms that are seeking to make workers and their communities some kind of ‘prison labour'.

(The Evictions Toll Free Number: 0800 007095

Defend the moral and revolutionary integrity of our movement

In order to achieve many of these objectives outlined in our Red October Campaign it is important that we also intensify the struggle to defend all our organisations in the Alliance and the broader progressive movements from the corrupting influence of money and wealth. This requires amongst other that we intensify the struggle in the following areas:

Exposing, naming and shaming those peddling dirty money - Our movement is faced with a serious threat of attempts to buy our cadres with money, to influence decisions in our organisations through money, and to seek to sell our organisation to highest imperialist bidder through dirty money. Let us name and shame those who are trying to buy us. This is money meant to influence you, but once you accept such money, you will never, ever be part of those dishing out money, but will only use that power to steal our organisations, and to steal our government! Let us name and shame money peddlers, tenderpreneurs and those seeking to steal our organisations for their own personal interests of greed!

‘De-tenderise' the state as much as possible - Worse still, our state is being daily ‘tenderised' - bureaucrats in the state (some of them highly qualified professionals) don't actually DO anything, don't build anything - instead they spend their time writing up tenders and adjudicating on applications. Increasingly the state relates to its popular base by way of these tenders. Instead of uniting popular forces behind a common struggle for transformation, the state divides communities into competing factions all vying for a tender.

This is a source of a great deal of corruption in the state, but also of factionalism within our own organizations which get used as stepping stones to influence the allocation of tenders.

Let us also fight against the latest phenomenon of ‘professional tenderpreneurs', who do nothing but use their political influence to influence tender awards and get cuts from those corrupt proceeds. Let us not allow the relationship between government and political leadership, on the one hand, and our communities, on the other, to be mediated by the tender!

The SACP calls upon all our alliance to cement its unity by focusing on the key challenges facing our country (poverty, unemployment, disease), and UNITE against corruption and tenderpreneurs!

Expose the corrupting influence and failure of the capitalist system - The whole world is in a crisis today, retrenching millions of especially young workers, because of the greed and selfishness of the capitalist system. Let the workers and the poor of our country unite behind ‘Socialism is the Future, Build it Now' to roll back the capitalist system and its corrupting influence.

Let all communists go out in their numbers to mobilise our communities behind our Red October Campaign! We call upon all our communities, the workers and the poor to join us in this 2011 Red October Campaign!

Issued by the SACP, October 2 2011

February 21, 2011

By Peter Monaghan

SolidarityEconomy.net via Chronicle of Higher Education

In the 15th to 19th centuries, when Europeans rebelled against their rulers, they frequently heaped up barrels, paving stones, and any other handy objects to create immovable masses in city streets.

Such defensive and tactical structures went together so readily, so cooperatively, that it seemed the insurrectionists were acting on instinct.

In a new book, The Insurgent Barricade (University of California Press), Mark Traugott relates the history of “the most striking embodiment” of the revolutionary spirit of the times. And it is the dissemination of “barricade consciousness” that most interests the scholar, a professor of history and sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The barricades show, he writes, how people choose and symbolize the way they voice their discontent and collective hopes.

A touchstone of his research, he says, has been a 1970s concept from the historian, sociologist, and political scientist Charles Tilly, the “repertoire of collective action,” referring to the range of protest techniques available at any particular place and time.

So, writes Traugott, in France and then throughout Europe when the cry went up—“To the barricades”—protesters often unknown to one another “knew just what to do, and managed to concert their actions with great efficiency, even without benefit of the most rudimentary of command structures.”

On the phone from Lyon, where he continues to investigate the phenomenon, Traugott said his interest dates from his research for his 1985 book, Armies of the Poor: Determinants of Working-Class Participation in the Parisian Insurrection of June 1848 (Princeton University Press). He found the barricade to be “a much bigger story, much more complicated dynamic than I had at first imagined.”

The building technique generally involved barrels—barriques, from which the term “barricades” was coined during the 16th century. Those could easily be rolled into place and filled with earth and rocks, then reinforced by whatever could be scrounged —wagons, planks and beams from construction sites, paving stones, balustrades torn from buildings. Students, exiles, and itinerant workers sustained the practice for centuries, disseminating knowledge of it throughout Europe.

Whether glorious, heroic, or foolhardy, barricades were rarely suicidal, Traugott says. Think gaming theory, he suggests: A bravura pretense of total commitment was necessary to achieve desired outcomes, and meanwhile the tactic bought protesters time to make a realistic assessment of their chances of success; they could always hightail it when the firing and military charges began.

Often, he argues, fraternization, socialization, and solidarity building—with like-minded protesters, past and present—were the only benefits that insurrectionists could hope for.

As much as heavy death tolls and failed political aspirations, the symbolic aspect of barricades inspired artists and authors—for example, Victor Hugo featured the structures when he described a June 1832 revolt in Paris in Les Misérables, while Gustave Flaubert wrote of a similar event in L’Éducation sentimentale.

For historians, barricades pose a challenge: generally unplanned, or organized in secret, they generated little documentation, particularly because key participants often ended up dead. So, rather than count on records of any one barricade event for a full sense of their nature, purpose, and accomplishments, Traugott surveyed 150 such events in France and elsewhere in Europe, large and small, successful and unsuccessful, to garner a broad-based picture of barricade combat. “Some really celebrated cases that are great success stories and that make for the legend of the barricade aren’t terribly typical,” he says.

Given events in the Middle East, in recent weeks, Traugott says yes, he has indeed paused to ask how the barricade relates. “The events are still in progress,” he notes. “We don’t know how big they are, or how far they’re going to go. The overthrow of a dictator is one thing, but whether there’ll be a set of liberal reforms, which some of the insurgents think there’ll be, or want, or the opposite, we can’t yet know.”

“So, the historian in me says not to leap ahead too quickly in making parallels.” Still, he adds, “the sociological side of me searches for patterns and generalizations,” and those abound.

The coldheartedness with which insurrections have been put down—in the past, and now—is one pattern, he says, a response that demonstrates authorities’ recognition of how dangerous their symbolism can be.

The role of media is another pattern. Just as Facebook, Twitter, and other tools have been instrumental in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, “the propagation of barrier consciousness was prominently increased in the 1840s by a couple of important changes, including the rise of the so-called illustrated press,” he says. The Illustrated London News was founded in 1842, L’illustration one year later, and then German and Italian equivalents soon after. Drawings of the barricades of Paris and other European cities galvanized their large readerships.

“For the first time, people could see actual pictures of current events,” says Traugott. “This created an enormously increased capacity to disseminate information across national and linguistic dividing lines.”

“The parallels are pretty clear to what is now a completely global, completely instantaneous form of transmission.”—Peter Monaghan

Factory Auction to Save Jobs

By Jane Slaughter
solidarityeconomy.net

via Labor Notes

Nov. 29, 2010 - In a move to save factory jobs that evokes shades of the ’30s, the United Electrical Workers [1] are asking supporters to block a December 14 auction of presses and equipment from a plant south of Boston. The UE is calling for mass picketing and blockading of entrances to the 80-year-old plant if necessary.

Esterline Technologies Corp. of Bellevue, Washington, has refused to hold off on selling the equipment till another buyer can be found. The union’s request to buy the closed plant, which would create an employee-owned factory, has been ignored.

“They told us a year ago they did not want the presses or equipment,” said UE Local 204 President Scott Marques. “But they would rather junk them than sell them to us.”

The plant makes crucial door-seals and silicone gaskets for aircraft. Esterline is consolidating operations in Southern California and in Mexico.

Eminent Domain

Actually, the UE is trying two drastic tactics to keep the plant open: it’s also enlisted the Taunton, Massachusetts, city council, which has said it would use eminent domain [2] to take over the assets, and then sell them to a new owner. Keeping the machinery together—rather than sold off piece by piece or for scrap—is crucial to that plan.

Marques says that in addition to help from fellow union members and groups like Massachusetts Jobs with Justice [3], the union is trying to enlist the plant’s neighbors and nearby business owners. “They’re losing out, too,” Marques said, noting that generations have been supported by the plant.

The plant’s workers are known for their longevity, through multiple owners. Marques said 25 to 30 of the 85 union members have worked there at least 30 years, and two retired with 51 years’ seniority.

Doreen Arguin says she’s not ready to retire at the age of 60 years, 41½ of them in the factory. Now a van driver, she says it takes skill to create seals from silicone, fabric, and rubber—take a look at your window the next time you’re on a plane, and be grateful for union labor.

“I’m a worker, I like to work,” Arguin said. “I can’t fathom not going there every day. I’ve never been married, but I feel as if I just got divorced, and not a divorce that I wanted.”

Peter Knowlton, the UE’s regional president, says Esterline could realize only a pittance by selling the machines, maybe $100,000 to $250,000. An auction typically brings little more than the cost of scrap. “It’s collectively they have value,” he said, “when you put a workforce in front of them.”

But potential investors need to be sure there will be something there to buy. “No one wants to give you an answer if they don’t know if there’ll be presses or equipment in the building,” Marques said.

Knowlton believes Esterline might defy the city’s use of eminent domain, and hold the auction on December 14 anyway. Thus the need for as many supporters as possible to get in the way of that plan. The UE is no stranger to militant actions in December: in 2008 its local at Republic Windows and Doors [4] in Chicago occupied a factory for six days to demand legally required severance payments.
Bad Actors

Esterline and its local subsidiary Haskon, Inc. have set the standard for bad actors in a plant closing. Executives were shocked to learn that Massachusetts law requires a company to keep paying its regular share of workers’ health insurance for three months after a closing. It took the intervention of the state’s congressional delegation and attorney general to convince them to pay up.

Then the company reneged on severance pay. Its proposal “gets worse every time we meet,” Marques said. “Now they’re putting our severance on the basis of what they can get at auction of the machines.”

The Taunton mayor and city council are asking Esterline to postpone the auction till February 15. The union, potential investors, and interested management employees also need time to raise funds and write a business plan. The union has hired the longtime former president of Haskon as a consultant, and a feasibility study by the ICA Group, experts in employee-owned cooperatives, concluded that a new company could succeed in the aircraft sealant market.

Arguin, the local’s secretary-treasurer, explained that a small business would be eligible for certain government contracts through a program for “historically underutilized business zones.” Federal agencies are required to give a certain percentage of their contracts to such businesses.

The UE is asking for emails, faxes, and calls to Esterline requesting a delay of the auction till February 15. Contact Esterline Corp., 500 108th Ave. NE, Suite 1500, Bellevue, WA 98004, 425-453-9400, fax: 425-453-2916, info@esterline.com [5].

See the Keep Haskon Jobs In Taunton! Facebook page [6] for updated information, including on the December 14 auction protest. If your local plans to send a delegation, let the UE know at 774-264-0110 or uenortheast@gmail.com [7].

“We’re going to keep fighting, we’re not going to let it go,” Marques said. “We think we should be treated fair.”

Worker-Run Factories in Argentina Continue to Thrive,

Boosting the Economy and Influencing Workers in Other Countries

By Marcela Valente

SolidarityEconomy.net

viaIPS News, Nov. 12, 2010

After the late 2001 financial and political meltdown in Argentina, thousands of companies were abandoned by their owners in a sea of debt. But some of them were taken over and reopened by their employees. Today, as the economy continues to grow, these worker-run factories are still going strong.

There are now 205 "recovered" companies, with a total of 9,362 workers -- up from 161 companies with 6,900 workers in 2004, according to a study published in October.

"How has a phenomenon that emerged as a kind of life raft after the 2001 economic collapse grown rather than faded away during a period of economic boom?" asks the lead author of the study, Andrés Ruggeri.

"The workers learned that running a company by themselves is a viable alternative, to keep a company operating," he tells IPS. "That was unthinkable before."

The study, "Las Empresas Recuperadas en la Argentina. 2010" ("Recovered Companies in Argentina 2010"), was carried out by a large team of student volunteers with the Open Faculty Programme at the University of Buenos Aires.

The aim was to provide data to help design policies to strengthen and improve the self-management of companies, says the study, which is based on an in-depth survey of the companies. Although there are some earlier precedents in Argentine history of bankrupt businesses that were reopened by their workers, they were isolated cases.

But as a result of the severe 2002-2003 economic crisis, worker-run companies began to mushroom in a broad range of areas, including the food industry, steel, textile, footwear and plastic factories, meat-packing plants, ceramic, glass and rubber manufacturers, graphic design companies, transport firms, restaurants, health businesses and even a five-star hotel.

The companies were reclaimed by their workers after the owners disappeared overnight, leaving behind jobless employees, piles of debt, factories stripped of everything not bolted down -- and, often, charges of tax evasion or fraud.

Many of the companies are producing and even exporting again after they were taken over by the workers, who were owed months and sometimes years of back wages.

Most of the workers formed cooperatives, and decisions are reached in assemblies, while they receive advice and support from other worker-owned companies and from government institutions as well.

A similar phenomenon has occurred in other countries of Latin America. According to the Open Faculty Programme report, there are 69 "recovered" companies in Brazil, around 30 in Uruguay, 20 in Paraguay and a growing number in Venezuela. Cases are also starting to be seen in Spain, says Ruggeri.

Many believed that as the economy boomed -- it grew an average of 8.5 percent a year from 2003 to 2008 -- the companies had gradually shrunk in number, and only a few survived as testimony to an era, the study says. But "nothing could be further from the truth," Ruggeri says.

Even during times of economic growth, numerous companies fall into bankruptcy, sometimes as part of a strategy aimed at enabling the owner to start over again elsewhere. But the employees are left high and dry, and many of them are no longer young enough to be reabsorbed by the labour market, he points out.

"Recovered companies are a labour, economic and social reality that has taken root; they are here to stay and they will continue growing," the study says. Although they face their own difficulties, they have enormous potential, it adds.

One illustrative case not related to the 2002-2003 crisis is that of Global, a firm that produced latex products -- mainly balloons -- that declared bankruptcy in 2004.

One Monday morning the workers showed up and found the sign "closed until further notice." Neighbours told them that trucks had been hauling things away over the weekend -- the owners had taken all the machinery.

The company's dozens of employees were left without a job. But they managed to overcome many difficulties and reopen the business, and by 2005, Global had been transformed into "La Nueva Esperanza" (The New Hope), a cooperative with 32 members.

One of them is Domingo Palomeque, who has worked for 26 of his 50 years of life in the balloon factory on the outskirts of the Argentine capital. But now he does so as an equal partner in the cooperative.

"First we set up the cooperative, and then we recovered the machines they had stolen," Palomeque explains to IPS.

In the survey by the team of university researchers, the problem mentioned most frequently by the companies is the lack of financing to purchase raw materials and machinery or to hire specialised workers. They also cited problems making headway in the market.

La Nueva Esperanza is no exception. "Credit," Palomeque says without hesitation when asked what the company needs most. "We have to buy automated machines, not to replace people but to be more competitive."

The cooperative's products compete at a disadvantage in the local market today with cheap imports from Malaysia or Singapore. "Our products used to be cheaper, but that's not true any more," he says.

Despite the difficulties, they have managed to continue selling on the domestic market, and they even export their products. According to the report, 15 percent of the recovered firms export part of their output, and another 60 percent have the potential to do so.

The La Nueva Esperanza cooperative found its own way around certain hurdles. "It's something we invented ourselves -- we sell to Brazil, Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay, but we don't export the products ourselves: our customers register at an address in Argentine provinces bordering their countries," Palomeque explains.

He says there is no turning back. On the contrary, he has ambitions for the cooperative. "Our goal is to get new machines, hire new workers, and continue growing."

Recovered companies vary in size. Seventy-five percent employ less than 50 workers, only a few have more than 100 employees, and just 2.3 percent have more than 200 workers.

The study calls for coherent public policies to support the firms. "The state should take a more active role, but it acts in an erratic manner because it has an erroneous conception that this is a transitory phenomenon," Ruggeri says.

"It should strengthen these businesses because they are productive units that are growing sources of genuine jobs, which are neither precarious nor informal," he adds. "These are workers who have got back on their feet on their own."

In the last few years, the government has taken some steps that have given the businesses a boost. Through the Labour Ministry, it distributed more than one million dollars in subsidies. But it was a one-off arrangement. Without steady access to financing, the recovered companies "are condemned to teeter on the threshold of survival," the report concludes.

Marcela Valente has been an IPS correspondent in Argentina since 1990, specializing in social and gender issues. She is a History teacher and alternates her correspondent work with teaching journalism at various schools and workshops.
© 2010 IPS News All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/148808/

Workers’ Control and the

Contradictions of the Bolivarian Process

Interview with Gustavo Martínez

By Susan Spronk, Jeffery R. Webber

On June 10, 2010 we caught up with Gustavo Martinez, a union leader in the worker-controlled nationalized coffee company, Fama de América, in Caracas, Venezuela. The company has 350 workers at the national level, with two separate plants – one in Caracas and one in Valencia. We sat down with Martínez to discuss the centrality of workers’ control in the ongoing struggle to transition toward socialism and some of the most pressing contradictions of the Bolivarian process in Venezuela today.

To start off, can you tell us your name, how long you’ve worked in this coffee company, your job in the company, and your role in the union?

My name is Gustavo Martínez. I’m a union leader in Fama de América. I’ve worked here for nine years. I started in 2001. As you would expect, when I started there, Fama de América was a private enterprise, characterized by exploitation of the workers and rampant corruption. The owners of the enterprise, as capitalists, were only interested in extracting surplus; they didn’t care about the conditions of the workers. All of these characteristics we already know about capitalism.

There was a union at the time, first established in 1978, that was controlled by the [centre-right] party, Acción Democrática(Democratic Action, AD). Logically, as people on the left we were opposed to the union. I was one of those on the left. My parents are Colombian, and my father was a militant in the Communist Party in that country. He was pushed out of Colombia, displaced economically and politically, and therefore moved the family to Venezuela. He worked for a transnational and faced death threats for his political organizing in the workplace.

So I found myself here in Venezuela, working at the company, and there were others with a revolutionary background working here too.

One of the women workers suggested to us that the situation of Latin America was changing, that there would be new opportunities in Venezuela, with the rebellions in Argentina in 2001 and 2002, with elections of left candidates in Argentina, Uruguay, Ecuador, and elsewhere, the left was starting to gain strength in South America again.

So we started to have meetings with all the workers, and decided it was time to organize ourselves. And eventually we succeeded in organizing a new union, one that is critical and holds to the ideals of the left, the importance of the proletariat, the workers. So we succeeded in establishing this new union. And, obviously, we immediately began to come into conflict with the owners of Fama de América, who wanted to continue to exploit workers as they had always done in the past.

We understood that coffee, since the colonial period, had been in the hands of capitalists, and that it would require an extraordinary change of consciousness in the workers to change this dynamic.

We have workers who have been here for 30 or 40 years. And obviously while they feared change initially, they also felt that they had been very poorly represented by their former union.

In August and September of 2009 we started our struggle under the idea that the factory had to be under workers’ control. The new union met regularly and had searching philosophical and political discussions. The issue was raised over and over again about what our main purpose was, and we agreed that it was to establish workers’ control. It is the workers who produce, and it is the workers who should be in control of the entire process. The national government eventually agreed with us on this point.

But it wasn’t easy. We started to hold workshops on workers’ control. The workers in the plant didn’t have a lot of experience with struggle, nor with political theory. Workers would ask, why workers’ control? It’s impossible. And we said, no, it is possible. We talked about the original soviets in Russia, and talked about how they really had existed. And the workers came around to the idea, and over time this is what we wanted collectively.

We’re situated here in this industrial zone of Caracas, and we decided we wanted to replace the capitalists; we wanted to transform this factory and the neighbouring factories into a socialist zone. We needed to stop the exploitation that we were suffering at their hands.

Gustavo Martinez

Before moving on to more questions about the specific experiences of the workers in this factory, can you tell us a bit more about your personal political trajectory? You mentioned your father was a revolutionary.

Personally, I was never a militant in a political party. Like so many others, I saw most political parties as corrupt, as tools of exploitation. Here in Venezuela there was the Punto Fijo Pact according to which the mainstream capitalist parties, Acción Democrática and the Christian Democratic party, Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (Committe of Independent Electoral Political Organization, COPEI), agreed to take turns in power, basically the idea that you can govern for five years, and then I’ll govern for five years. So I obviously didn’t want to be a militant in either of these parties. And you have to remember, too, that the Communist Party of Venezuela in this epoch wasn’t recognized legally, and the political left in general had a very thin presence. And we also witnessed many former left-wing guerrillas later join right-wing parties.

But after Chávez had come to power and eventually established the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), many grassroots left-wing social movement activists responded to his call to join the party. I was one of them. And within the party I’m involved in the current called Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide), which is the furthest left current within the PSUV. Marea Socialista always raises the issue of workers’ control and self-criticism of the process.

There are many contradictions in the process, and we point them out. We understand that it’s not easy to build revolutionary transformation, and that little by little the process is making advances, and that many people are working to push the process forward.

When Fama de América started, for example, there was obviously exploitation. Workers were not valued as humans, they were treated merely as machines. They had to produce results, they were measured by their numbers, and the profits were more important than the workers. Today I feel a certain satisfaction because, whatever doubts we have about the limits of the advances and the level of consciousness among the workers, we’ve achieved something.

By taking control over our workplace, workers have opportunities that they never had before. Something has been achieved. Something has been gained.

How would you describe the process of nationalization of this company, and specifically the role of workers’ militancy from below in achieving it?

The workers have learned a great deal from their own experiences about the possibility of change. The workers began to understand through their own experience with the terrible union that they had before that something had to change.

And we began to push forward the idea of confronting the old ways of doing things in our factory. And we took our struggle to the radio, to the community television, and other media to explain to Venezuelans about the conditions of the workers in Fama de América. We explained that this wasn’t ultimately about the workers of Fama de América alone fighting their bosses; this was part of a larger struggle of the people against their oppressors. Our reality was in no way distinct from what was happening elsewhere in private enterprises throughout the country. This was part of a larger struggle against our oppressors, against our exploiters, and that the people had to rise up and assume their role in the struggle.

You’ve mentioned workers’ control at various points. How does workers’ control function inside this workplace, and what are the workers’ understandings of workers’ democracy in the plant?

Right, consider the following. The workers put forward the idea of workers’ control, and began to read and investigate about the possibilities and experiences that had developed elsewhere, including in capitalist countries. One example was the hotel employees in Argentina who struggled for workers’ control, and who won control of their hotel.

We talked to comrades who participated in that struggle, around the idea that we don’t need bosses, managers, to tell us how to do our jobs, we have the knowledge ourselves. So we held workshops with the workers, and we struggled for this idea, to push it forward.

Comrades from the Ministry of Culture also worked with us on this project to push the idea along, working together alongside us. The workers launched a campaign around workers’ control, this is the most important thing.

In these workshops we showed videos about workers’ control and used other educational tactics to explain experiences elsewhere in the world, and argued that we could do the same right here in our workplace.

My vision of the role of workers’ control, essentially, is that in order to push forward the revolution, to advance toward an authentic transition to socialism, the means of production have to be in the hands of the workers. And the chances of our success in achieving this, is going to depend, above all, on the level of consciousness of the workers, and the level of commitment to achieving workers’ control among the workers themselves.

Because we’ve seen what happened elsewhere, when workers’ control and workers’ democracy were defeated and replaced with bureaucracy. In the Soviet Union a new bureaucracy was created which crushed the soviets themselves. What existed in the Soviet Union wasn’t socialism; it was a brutal, Stalinist bureaucracy. And we don’t want that to happen here, so we’re working very hard to build consciousness around workers’ control and workers’ democracy.

Socialism is the only path that exists for the world’s poor, their only alternative, because capitalism by its nature oppresses. So, in order to succeed, we need to work ceaselessly in the area of ideology, building a consciousness around workers’ control, self-governance, and autonomy.

What are the specific challenges facing the workers in this workplace?

Really, the main challenge is to consolidate the commitment to workers’ control. This continues to be the main challenge. We have to transform the idea of workers’ control into an authentic struggle in trenches as we push toward socialism.

We first have to debate and discuss openly the idea of workers’ control in this workplace and to consolidate its practice, and then it is essential to bring this debate to the streets, to extend this into other areas, and not to restrict this to our workplace.

As Trotsky suggested in his theory of permanent revolution, the idea of socialism in one country, or even in one continent is impossible. With one socialist continent, and the other four still capitalist, we’d be surrounded.

In our immediate situation we need to move out from our workplace inside this industrial zone to establish workers’ control in the other enterprises here, to construct a socialist industrial zone, and to keep extending outwards.

Ultimately we need to take on the bourgeois state and to replace it with a communal state, to establish control by the workers at all micro and macro levels, and to consolidate the idea that the oppressed need to govern themselves.

Can you elaborate on the importance of workers’ control within the wider Bolivarian process, and the processes of nationalization in various sectors?

You can’t have a revolution without the workers. This is the importance of workers’ control. And we have criticisms of the current process. Chávez, for example, has declared himself a Marxist, but sometimes there are practices that contradict this position.

In order to guarantee the triumph of this revolution, its authenticity, exploitation of the working class has to end, and workers have to have self-governance. This is the fundamental criteria of the revolution. Socialism is a society in which participation, ideas and politics have to come from the grassroots, from the workers. Chávez has declared his commitment to this, but at times he makes deals with segments of the private sector, and this isn’t our idea of revolution, this isn’t what we truly want.

Therefore we need to build an alternative to negotiating with capitalists, another form of pushing the revolution forward, pushing consistently for the control of workers from below. Chávez came to office in 1999, and over ten years later the concrete advances toward workers’ control have been very minimal.

So the most important objective is to carry this forward, to struggle for this consistently.

In what ways has the political situation for workers changed over the last decade under Chávez?

A lot has changed for the workers in this country. The ministers and politicians managing the state apparatus are now interested in debating with us, whereas before this possibility never existed.

Look, fifteen years ago, if you went to Plaza Simón Bolívar, which is in the centre of Caracas, you’d find people drinking, lying around, and things like that. If you go there today, you’ll see that the plaza has been transformed into a centre of constant debate.

People today understand the constitution, they know what PDVSA is, how it works. They debate issues of production and development in the country. On his weekly television program Aló President, Chávez talks about education, suggests that people read this or that book.

There have been advances in political education and political life. And Venezuela has become a reference for revolutionaries all over the world – Australians, Mexicans, Canadians, Germans, Dutch – we’ve talked to everyone.

What does Socialism for the Twenty-First Century mean to you?

The meaning and significance of the twenty-first century socialism has become a fulcrum of debate. But, look, this is more than a question of semantics. We are starting to understand what socialism is, and that it’s the only alternative. Today across the world there is an energy crisis, an environmental crisis, an economic crisis, and the only way to overcome these crises is to defeat capitalism.

Socialism can be a path toward liberation, whereas capitalism offers no opportunities for the world’s poor. We believe in a society in which everyone has possibilities, where health and education are a right, not a privilege for the few, for example. These can’t be the privileges of the few, they must be the rights of everyone.

But capitalism structures society in such a way that the poor have no possibilities. Or, take the issue of crime. Crime is not going to be solved with more police, with more repression. The only way to address this issue is through education, through nation-wide projects. In order to overcome violence, as such, it will be necessary to build socialism.

From your perspective, what have been the advances toward socialism thus far, and what still needs to be done in order to make this transition?

A tremendous amount still needs to be done, of course. There should be no illusions. In terms of advances, I think all revolutionaries have to respect President Chávez insofar as he’s made it possible to enrich our culture on a general level.

The sphere of education is one example. The education missions have been an important advance. People who never had access to higher levels of education are now able to educate themselves. Conventional universities were never accessible to the people in the past, for example. Now we have the Bolivarian University.

But the Bolivarian University must not become a conventional university, a traditional centre of education. It must be a place to develop the most important and radical revolutionary ideas. And there are various revolutionary student initiatives, which are still in their incipient stages, struggling to make this a reality.

Workers at the Vivex plant, which makes windshields, demanding nationalization in 2008.

In health there have been many advances, with the assistance of Cuba. We have to salute the Cubans, because Cuban doctors have such a strong commitment that they treat us like their own brothers. In the poorest barrios, through Misión Barrio Adentro, the health care is delivered to the impoverished.

Again, the general level of political consciousness is much more advanced than it was before.

If we look back to the 2002 [coup attempt] against Chávez, the people understood what was at stake and defended the Boliviarian process in the most courageous way. It should be recognized that Chávez is one of the few presidents in the world who has a commitment to his people.

So, there have been important advances. But there is also a great deal missing; there are many things to be done. We have to build much stronger links with the left in countries close to us, like Ecuador and Bolivia. Like Simón Bolívar, we believe in the necessity of uniting South America into one, huge, socialist country, in which everyone is equal.

Susan Spronk teaches in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is a research associate with Municipal Services Project and has published several articles on class formation and water politics in Bolivia.

Jeffery R. Webber teaches politics at the University of Regina. He is the author of Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia (Brill, 2010), and Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket, 2011).

for Full Employment!

The Progressive Path

Out of Our Crisis

A Project of the Labor Committee of CCDS

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

www.cc-ds.org

The Struggle for Full Employment:

A Strategy to Defeat the Neoliberal Assault

on the US Working Class

by Randy Shannon

Treasurer, PA 4^th CD Chapter,

Progressive Democrats of America

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“In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.

Among these are:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;”

- President Franklin D. Roosevelt: State of the Union Address, January 11, 1944

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“Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.”

- United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

I. Introduction

The “Great Recession” that began in 2007 has caused the greatest percent of job losses since the Great Depression of 1929. This crisis is the end of an era of unrestrained ‘neo-liberal’ capitalism that became public policy during the Reagan administration. The crisis marks a new level of instability with the growth of a global financial elite that targeted US workers and our trade unions after World War II.

The election of President Obama reflected the growing struggle of America’s progressive majority to reverse the neo-liberal policy of war and austerity that has undermined the social advances established by the New Deal and the United Nations. It also begins a long period of readjustment for capitalism as it responds to multiple crises, struggles to maintain its system of social control, and seeks a new system of profit accumulation.

Serial Crises

During the seven decades since World War II, US workers have faced ten periods during which the economy lost jobs for over twelve months. Each successive recession in employment lasted longer than the previous downturn.

In the above chart, each line represents an employment crisis since World War II. The vertical axis shows the percent of jobs lost each month and the horizontal axis shows the duration of the crisis in months since the last peak in employment. The right end of each line is the point at which employment returned to its former high.

In the crisis of 1990 the economy lost jobs for two and one half years. Then in the 2001 recession, it was four years before job losses ended. Although these last two downturns were prolonged, and the recoveries were weak, job losses at around 2% were not enough to cause widespread protest.

The New Reality

The 2007 recession started just two years after the end of the four year downturn of 2001. After 28 months the number of jobs lost remains at over 5%. Unlike previous instances of sharp declines followed by quick rebounds, this recession has seen five months of job losses over 6% with little recovery. The recent growth in manufacturing and construction resulting partly from the ARRA stimulus has resulted in new hiring that has slightly slowed the rate of job losses.

These job losses correspond to a current official unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent. Add the underemployed, and the rate goes to 17 percent. One out of five males of working age is jobless. Some 35 percent of African American youth are jobless. Many younger workers now in their thirties have never seen regular employment in living wage jobs. In sum, 25 million workers out of a work force of 153 million are unemployed or underemployed.

The social infrastructure built over the decades since the Great Depression has also suffered. Neo-liberal policies focus on defunding the social network that allows families, communities, and states to survive. The long term decline in wages has been matched by a long term decline in access to quality healthcare, education, pensions, and social services that maintained a minimal equality among different income levels.

Questions and Answers

We all naturally look to our own resources to improve the chances of finding or keeping a job. But as we see more people out of work, it becomes apparent that we must look to our social networks for help. Beyond that, we must explore our collective power through political action to change the economic climate from war and austerity to peace and prosperity.

The trend of employment crises will continue. The bankers’ control of the levers of power accumulated under Clinton and the Bushes guaranteed their access to the public purse to cover their losses. Their hijacking of the public treasury is the root cause of current and future crises.

Only a fundamental restructuring of the system that thrives on crises will end them. The struggle for full employment and for democratization of our economic system must find expression in the political aspirations of the progressive majority that won the 2008 election. The progressive majority can achieve democratic economic and social planning based on human rights that supplants greed and market chaos.

Our top priority must be passage of legislation that makes full employment the primary goal of economic policy. The US Government, as the employer of last resort, must provide an employment “public option” for all who are able and willing to work but cannot find a job in the private economy.

II. First, Stop the Bleeding!

Each job that is lost imperils the next job due to the loss of workers’ purchasing power and the loss of tax revenues to local governments. The social and economic costs of the job losses snowball regardless of the underlying cause. The US Government can borrow or create money to reverse the loss of jobs, and must take immediate action.

The demands for action and the response of our Government deserve an evaluation.

Labor Calls for Immediate Action

The AFL-CIO issued a Five-Point Jobs Program that President Richard Trumka calls “a short-term jobs program:”

The AFL-CIO is calling on Congress and the Obama administration to take five steps now to care for the jobless and put America back to work.

1. Extend the lifeline for jobless workers. Unless Congress acts now, supplemental unemployment benefits, additional food assistance and expansion of COBRA health care benefits will expire at the end of the year. They must be extended for another 12 months to prevent working families from bankruptcy, home foreclosure and loss of health care. Extending benefits also will boost personal spending and create jobs throughout the economy.

2. Rebuild America’s schools, roads and energy systems. America still has at least $2.2 trillion in unmet infrastructure needs. We should put people to work to fix our nation’s broken-down school buildings and invest in transportation, green technology, energy efficiency and more.

3. Increase aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services. State and local governments and school districts have a $178 billion budget shortfall this year alone—while the recession creates greater need for their services. States and communities must get help to maintain critical frontline services, prevent massive job cuts and avoid deep damage to education just when our children need it most.

4. Put people to work doing work that needs to be done. If the private sector can't or won't provide the needed jobs, the government should step up to the plate, putting people who need jobs together with work that needs to be done. These should never be replacements for existing public jobs. They must pay competitive wages and should target distressed communities.

5. Put TARP funds to work for Main Street. The bank bailout helped Wall Street, not Main Street. We should put some of the billions of dollars in leftover Troubled Asset Relief Program funds to work creating jobs by enabling community banks to lend money to small- and medium-size businesses. If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs.

U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and AFL-CIO

President Richard Trumka at dedication of a

Memorial to workers killed on the job

In November 2009, a coalition of national organizations including the Economic Policy Institute, the AFL-CIO, the Center for Community Change, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the NAACP, and the National Council of La Raza issued “An Urgent Call for Action to Stem the U.S. Jobs Crisis.” The call reiterated the AFL-CIO plan and reflected the widespread unity of sectors of labor, minority communities, social change, and academic leaders on the need for urgent action.

President Agrees to Stopgap Measures

According to the AFL-CIO News Blog, US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis told the AFL-CIO Executive Council meeting in February 2010 that

…creating good jobs that offer affordable health care and retirement security is the Obama administration’s top priority.

The first steps must be to pass long-term extensions of emergency unemployment compensation, full federal funding of extended benefits and the COBRA subsidy so the nation can keep in place the much-needed safety net that the Recovery Act established.

Solis said the administration’s job program also includes:

· Fiscal relief for state and local governments, which are facing a $178 billion budget shortfall this year alone.

· More large-scale infrastructure projects. This is the most direct way to bring jobs to people.  

· Aid to small businesses—an important engine of economic growth—through tax cuts and a Small Business Lending Fund, using $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

III. Deficit Hawks and Tax Cutters

Deficit Fetish

In his November 2009 Nation magazine article “In the Shadow of Hoover,” William Greider wrote:

While he was in China, Barack Obama made a bizarre declaration that the US government must reduce its budget deficits in order to avoid “a double-dip recession.”…In an interview with Fox News, the president said: “It is important to recognize if we keep on adding to the deficit, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point people could lose confidence in the US economy in a double-dip recession."

In a November 2009 article on Huffington Post, Ryan Grimm wrote:

Centrist political pundits, House Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats and -- on Monday's front page -- the New York Times, have all raised alarms about the growing deficit. [Cong. Steny] Hoyer told the Huffington Post that he is actively working with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to institute "statutory pay-as-you-go" (PAYGO) -- a law that would require all congressional spending to be offset by revenue increases or spending cuts elsewhere. That statute would contain emergency exemptions that allow for present spending on jobs to increase, said Hoyer.

In January 2010 the New York Times reported on President Obama’s proposed budget cuts to reduce the deficit:

The freeze would cover the agencies and programs for which Congress allocates specific budgets each year, including air traffic control, farm subsidies, education, nutrition and national parks.

But it would exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

At the May 2010 G20 Summit finance ministers abandoned support for fiscal stimulus to end the economic crisis and instead declared their support for “measures to deliver fiscal sustainability.” Global financiers are demanding that the cost of their crisis be born by the working families of the world.

Military Spending

The New York Times, upholding a widespread media taboo, has deliberately omitted discussion of the $trillions of “off budget” costs of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other global projections of US military force in its reporting on the US deficit issue.

However, there are cracks appearing in the code of silence around the effect of the military budget on the debt and energy crises. A February 15, 2010 article in Time, “How to Tame the Budget Deficit,” by the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Jeffrey D. Sachs states:

Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, slashing pay to overpriced contractors and eliminating unnecessary weapons systems could perhaps save 2% to 3% of GDP each year. These are areas where the US is squandering its income and blood, yet the President’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2011 would actually increase military spending to more than $750 billion, from around $720 billion this year.

Military spending dwarfs almost everything else. In the White House’s proposed budget, military spending would be nearly six times the federal outlay for education and 26 times the outlays for development assistance and humanitarian aid – despite the fact that the Administration often promotes development as a central pillar of our national security strategy.

Deficit Fetish Debunked

Nobel Prize Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz debunked the “deficit fetish” in a February 2010 Politico column, excerpted here.

The deficit hawks from the banking system went on vacation from the fall of 2008 through the spring of 2009, while they demanded money be doled out freely - to themselves. But now that the public clearly won’t stand for another free lunch at its expense, the deficit hawks are back at work, more vocal than ever about the need to cut government spending.
They say it was necessary to the health of the economy to dole out money to the banks; but not necessary to the health of our society to make sure everyone has access to health care. It was…acceptable to break the social contract between America’s elderly and the rest of society, by cutting back on Social Security.

It was a mistake to give in to bankers’ pleas for deregulation before the crisis; a mistake to give into their demand for a bailout without constraints and without appropriate compensation for the government during the crisis; and even more wrong now to give into demands for unfettered deficit reductions, including an end to the stimulus.
There are no easy ways out of the mess that the financial sector has created. But giving into mindless deficit fetishism risks higher unemployment and a larger long-run debt.

The bankers’ political offensive against the working class was openly displayed in early March 2010 by Republican Senator Jim Bunning’s filibuster against extension of unemployment and healthcare benefits for the long term unemployed as a “protest” against deficit spending.

In another concession to the bankers’ demands to intensify the austerity regime, President Obama announced an executive Deficit Reduction Panel. The Senate had rejected a proposal for a legislative panel that would have the authority to force through legislation cutting Medicare and Social Security with only an up or down vote.

Tax Cut “Jobs” Program

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allocated 37% of the total $787 billion stimulus to tax cuts. This was the price for their votes demanded by then Republican Sen. Arlen Specter and Blue Dog Democratic Senators to halt the precipitous losses of jobs and housing. The tax cuts do not stimulate spending or hiring in an economic downturn. They are simply the tribute extracted by the bankers who control the Senate majority.

The Bush cash rebate of 2008 was a similar ‘stimulus’ that mostly went to pay off consumer debt and resulted in no job creation nor slowing of the crisis, but served to transfer more wealth from taxpayers to the banks.

In a time of national crisis only the greed of bankers is so ruthless as to demand a tax cut ransom to allow the stimulus bill to pass. The power that can extract more tax cuts even in an economic crisis was plainly explained by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin in 2009:

And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.

The bankers see the jobs crisis as an exploitable opportunity. The mass political pressure to do something to rescue the victims of the bank-engineered financial crisis provides the opening. Tax cuts were a major part of the March 2010 so-called jobs bill passed by the Senate. The $33 billion tax cuts to small businesses will go to pay off debt or current wages. The bill contains no jobs creation measures, but extends subsistence support for the unemployed and Medicaid.

This $33 billion ‘tax boost’ for small business is only 2% of the $1.5 trillion reduction in small business borrowing over the last year due to the embargo on lending by the banks. This jobs bill “is really not a jobs bill,” said Cong. Barbara Lee. It is only one tenth of the amount needed for each of the next three years to cut the jobless rate to 4% by the end of Obama’s first term.

Street Heat

The public acknowledgement of the unemployment crisis and the promises of forceful measures by the President, followed by extended legislative battles that produced ineffective measures by Congress, frame the growing anger in the face of widespread suffering. The AFL-CIO and other organizations, such as Jobs with Justice and Jobs for America NOW are organizing lobbying campaigns, marches and rallies across the nation to demand jobs.

October 2009 Massachusetts March and Rally for Jobs

Jobs for America NOW claims to be the largest national coalition agitating for jobs. Its program is similar to the AFL-CIO program and the jobs program outlined by US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, but with more emphasis on stimulus spending:

Jobs for America Now, is a broad coalition of 60 national organizations. Its members have endorsed a five-point program that would extend unemployment benefits; provide fiscal relief to state and local governments; create jobs in distressed communities that face severe unemployment; invest in infrastructure such as schools, transportation and energy efficiency; and spur private-sector job growth by providing incentives and credit to small and medium-sized businesses.

Jobs with Justice is an older organization with a broader agenda that includes organizing for equal pay, supporting workers unfairly disciplined for union organizing, advocating for health care and immigrant rights, as well as organizing the unemployed. Jobs with Justice is trade union supported and brings mainly young people into the labor movement. It works to build labor-community alliances.

Many grass-roots organizations are taking up the demand for jobs. In North Carolina, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, President of the North Carolina NAACP, and leader of HK on J, a broad coalition of grass roots movements organizing for economic and social justice in NC, issued “A Call for a Third Reconstruction.”

We don’t need Union soldiers ...But we do need massive infusions of capital to jump-start the economic and political energies in our region…

Funded by the national treasury to be sure – but created and run by our Southern Movement – we must demand massive infusions of federal funds to create millions of new jobs to reconstruct environmentally sound communities, schools, health care facilities, and new forms of justice across the South.

IV. Effects of Long Term Unemployment

The right to work is a fundamental human right because many of the other social and economic human rights proclaimed by the United Nations cannot be enjoyed without a paying job.

The above chart shows that while short-term unemployment is decreasing as a result of the stimulus, long-term unemployment is still on the rise.

Social Impact

An examination of the effects of long-term unemployment is essential to understanding not only where we may be headed as a nation but the present day reality of people of color in the US. This understanding frames our view of what’s at stake in the struggle for full employment. The March 2010 issue of The Atlantic carried an extended discussion of the severe social effects of long-term unemployment in the article “How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America” by Don Peck.

Even if the economy were to immediately begin producing 600,000 jobs a month…it would take roughly two years to dig ourselves out of the hole we’re in…But the U.S. hasn’t seen that pace of sustained employment growth in more than 30 years.

A slowly sinking generation, a remorseless assault on the identity of many men; the dissolution of families and the collapse of neighborhoods; a thinning veneer of national amity—the social legacies of the Great Recession are still being written, but their breadth and depth are immense. As problems, they are enormously complex, and their solutions will be equally so.

We are in a very deep hole, and we’ve been in it for a relatively long time already...We are living through a slow-motion social catastrophe, one that could stain our culture and weaken our nation for many, many years to come. We have a civic—and indeed a moral—responsibility to do everything in our power to stop it now, before it gets even worse.

Long Term Discrimination The long-term character of poverty and unemployment that is disproportionately high among African-American workers is a legacy of the crime of slavery. Black people labored in the United States for 200 years without compensation, without the right to own property, without the right to establish families, and without the right to education. The militaristic institutions formed in the South to protect slavery survived to overthrow Reconstruction. From the reign of lynch terror, the defense of the anti-democratic Jim Crow system, resistance to the Supreme Court desegregation decisions, to undermining the War on Poverty, they continue to use the rhetoric of state’s rights to mobilize racist opposition to unemployment compensation, Medicaid, and healthcare reform.

Racist employment and educational practices continue to enforce an economic apartheid against workers of color. The status of single African-American and Hispanic women, victims of long-term unemployment and discrimination, was covered in a March 2010 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5.”

Researchers at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development based in Oakland, Calif., analyzed data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, a voluminous report the Federal Reserve Board issues every three years that examines household finances in this country.

Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600…the median wealth for single black women is only $5.

For all working-age black women 18 to 64, the financial picture is bleak. Their median household wealth is only $100. Hispanic women in that age group have a median wealth of $120.

Claudia Jones - in 1949 developed

the theory of the triple oppression

of Black women based on sex, race, and class

The Plutocracy

The shocking income disparity based on race and sex is a pale reflection of the greatest income disparity in the US, that based on class. Wealth is so massively concentrated in the upper 1% of the population that the bottom 90% has very little wealth at all. In “The Plutocracy Reborn” Rhonda Winter shows that a minute fraction of the wealthiest own 976 times the total wealth of the bottom 90% of Americans. “This is not sustainable, and makes for a very volatile economy...This dire economic situation just didn’t happen by accident either.”

The marked disparity of wealth in the US is rooted in the excess profits derived from the ‘superexploitation’ of people of color. A Journal of Political Economy article estimates the lifetime loss of wages of a black worker is $115,000 due to the “racial wage gap.”

V. Industrial Policy

A successful strategy for winning full employment must address the current lack of a comprehensive US industrial policy that supports domestic wealth-creating jobs. Growth and consumption based on international borrowing and dollar supremacy is not sustainable. The US must rebuild a substantial manufacturing sector to sustain itself as a major center of global economic stability. The neo-liberal “free trade” policy that is simply the unregulated flow of capital must be replaced with democratic control of capital that invests in industry to promote full employment.

Political economists in academia and in labor-associated think tanks have responded to the new jobs crisis with various proposals. Building on the immediate demands by labor and jobs advocacy groups, and going beyond the legislative proposals of the White House and the Democratic Party, these proposals attempt to address the problem with a new industrial policy.

'We’ve Lost Our Industrial Base'

In his keynote speech to the January 2010 Pennsylvania Progressive Summit, USW President Leo Gerard focused on the loss of wealth-creating manufacturing jobs.

We’ve lost our industrial base. We’ve lost our manufacturing base. And for those of you from the public sector, you can’t have a public sector if we’re not creating real wealth. And we don’t create real wealth by manipulating stock. We don’t create real wealth by having phony asset bubbles; we don’t create real wealth with tech bubbles…

We create real wealth when we take raw material, ingenuity, creativity, engineering, and people’s work and we put it together, and we make something. We add value to it. Then we take those things that we’ve made and we put them together with something else that adds value…and first thing you know, you have…a car that can get 35 miles per gallon.

Those manufacturing jobs going from 25% to 10% of [US] GDP didn’t happen by accident. Since the passage of NAFTA America has accumulated a $6.5 trillion trade debt to the rest of the world. Last year America had a $600 billion trade deficit of which $250 billion was with China.

Exporting Wealth Production

The 2009 Alliance for American Manufacturing book Manufacturing a Better Future for America describes the dramatic loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States that are the wealth-creating engine of economic growth.

The furniture industry lost at least 60 percent of its production capacity in the U.S. from 2000 to 2008 with the closure of 270 major factories during that period.

U.S. printed circuit board manufacturers accounted for less than 8 percent of global production in 2007, down from 26 percent in 2000, yet printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products.

The U.S. steel industry produced 91.5 million tons of steel in 2008…China’s steel industry produced 500 million tons in 2008…

There was only one American company among the top 10 worldwide in photovoltaic cell production in 2007. There is only one U.S. wind energy company ranked among the top 10 largest in the world.

The U.S. machine tool industry – the backbone of an industrial economy – produced $3.6 billion in equipment in 2007, less than 5% of global output. Since 1998 U.S. machine tool consumption has fallen by 30 percent.

U.S. luggage producers account for 1% of the American market. U.S. production of high-performance outerwear…accounts for less than 2% of all the outerwear sold to Americans. Only one American manufacturer of ceramic tile remains…Of the 80 major chemical plants either on the drawing boards or under construction, none are in the U.S.

In 2007, only 2% of all new semiconductor fabrication plants under construction in the world were located in the U.S. None of the 1.2 billion cell phones sold in the world in 2008 were manufactured in the U.S.

Approximately 40,000 U.S. manufacturing plants have closed in the seven years ending in 2008

Innovation vs Industrial Policy

Various interest groups are offering one-sided or narrow solutions. An example of a narrow approach is a discussion on jobs by an MIT roundtable titled “The Future of Manufacturing – Advanced Technologies” covered in the March 2010 MIT News.

“To recover from the current economic downturn, it has been estimated that we need to create on the order of 17 million to 20 million new jobs in the coming decade,” noted Hockfield in her opening remarks at the event, which was co-sponsored by the Council on Competitiveness, an industry group. “And it’s very hard to imagine where those jobs are going to come from unless we seriously get busy reinventing manufacturing...”

Hockfield also directly addressed the commonly held notion that the United States cannot compete in manufacturing against low-wage countries, citing the success of Japan and Germany, both of which feature trade surpluses and high wages. “I take this as positive proof that building a strong advanced manufacturing sector is not impossible, but very much worth pursuing…A key hope for progress lies in tapping unprecedented new manufacturing technologies.”

Technical innovation alone will not sustain the US manufacturing industry because of the rapid globalisation of new technology. Technical innovation without an industrial policy serves to create a new level of higher productivity that will cause more unemployment.

Professor Joan Fitzgerald of Northeastern University explains how countries such as Germany are able to compete against low wage countries such as China in “Losing Our Future.” She also contrasts Germany and China’s industrial policies that support green energy jobs to the lack of such U.S. protection.

Germany's soft mercantilist approach favors German firms. Both national policy and the preferences of German companies to use domestic suppliers have led to the development of strong supply chains. While Germany has turned to Chinese and other foreign suppliers of some components, both the government and the industry seek to keep high-end manufacturing in Germany. These policies have put Germany among the world's leading exporters of wind and solar technology. Comparative advantage was created by public policy.

In addition to rules enacted in 2006 requiring utilities to purchase more wind and solar energy, China raised tariffs on imported wind turbines and dramatically reduced import duties on components, many of which are in short supply. To develop its own supply chains, China has gradually increased domestic content requirements for wind-farm developments -- from 40 percent in 1996 to 70 percent since 2004.

…the U.S. needs to pass an energy bill with a strong portfolio standard to create a larger U.S. market for renewable energy. Then we need to combine our energy policy with a coherent industrial policy whereby industries that aim to become global winners thanks to government subsidies do not just produce offshore for global markets but provide good jobs in the U.S.

Further, we need to require more local sourcing of components of foreign wind and solar companies in the U.S. and help our manufacturers retool to fill this demand. And we need to insist that foreign competitors like China play by fair rules of trade. It is committing industrial suicide if we leave our remaining great corporations and our start-ups to negotiate one-sided trade and production deals with nations whose policies are far more strategic than our own.

Main Street Recovery Program

In December 2008, as the economic crisis picked up steam, the Institute for America’s Future, a Washington, DC think tank with broad union support, issued “A Main Street Recovery Program.”

With a deep and long global downturn now more likely, any plan for reviving the economy should be substantial, strategic, and sustained.

Restoring economic growth will require a strong and multifaceted plan. Reviving the financial system itself will require far more than the hastily assembled and badly designed $700 billion bailout passed in September. We must 1) remedy the costly defects in the current plans; 2) put it place a systematic program of real mortgage relief for homeowners, and 3) enact comprehensive reform of financial markets.

Beyond these immediate steps the union-endorsed plan called for $450 billion a year to be invested in green infrastructure projects, infrastructure modernization, aid to states, public education, and research and development. It also called for increasing access and lowering the costs of health care, extending unemployment compensation, and increasing food stamps and other aid to the poor.

This program represented the optimism of the labor-led progressive majority that the change promised by candidate Obama would quickly become government policy. This hope was dashed by the reality that changing the President was, as Obama himself said in Chicago the night of the election, “only the beginning of the change you seek.”

A Permanent Jobs Program

In February 2009 the Chicago Political Economy Group (CPEG) issued “A Permanent Jobs Program for the U.S.: Economic Restructuring to Meet Human Needs.” It posits that the economic train wreck of neo-liberalism provides the political basis for a new economic reconstruction in the US based on a jobs program.

The Program …addresses the underlying structural problems of the real economy. We …believe that a significant and sustained effort to expand long term employment is an essential part of any solution to our larger economic difficulties.

In addition to the current stimulus plans, we propose the creation of 3.5 million new high quality jobs each year for five years.

We propose that the federal government create and/or subsidize private sector job creation in three broad areas:

(1) Investment in public infrastructure such as transportation, educational and health care facilities, and parks;

(2) Current social services, which will include a major upgrading of pay and working conditions of human service jobs such as those in child, elder and health care;

(3) Industries of the future, particularly the areas of energy, agriculture, and other broadly defined “green” technologies.

The CPEG calls for jobs that are “necessary for our country’s economic and social development,” paying good wages with union rights. They would be financed by taxes on wealth and financial transactions, by a reduction in wasteful military spending, and by increasing the money supply. The implementation of the jobs program will require “substantial public mobilization that pressures the national political leadership.”

Whether in the updating of decaying infrastructure, providing needed additional social services in health, education, and human services, or developing forward-looking industries in areas such as green technology, the gap between what the economy does produce and what it could produce and use is significant. We believe the best approach to addressing that gap is a job creation plan.

Our [leaders’] preoccupation with building the financial sector has resulted in an implicit acceptance of the acceleration of deindustrialization… However, instead of investing in high value added production and for displaced industrial workers such as has been done in…Europe, we have passively accepted the loss of jobs, urging education as a cure all for lagging incomes and job opportunities. The result has been that manufacturing, a sector that accounted for more of the GDP than finance in the 1970s, is now a shrunken skeleton…

Energy, its sources, uses, and costs should be at the core of our forward-looking industrial policy. It is clear that, left to their own devices, the major private sector energy companies have little incentive to shift our energy consumption in a direction that is either more efficient or less costly to the consumer.

High-speed rail reduces emissions by 80%.

Public Investment

In December 2009 “Public Investment, Industrial Policy and U.S. Economic Renewal” by Robert Pollin and Dean Baker was jointly released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Political Economy Research Institute. This document further developed the political and economic analysis proffered by the Chicago group.

“Public Investment” gives a detailed economic and historic analysis debunking the right wing’s contention that public investment inhibits rather than encourages private investment. It also shows that manufacturing corporations’ own speculation on Wall Street dramatically exceeded their investment in plant and equipment.

This pattern supports our central point: considering the U.S. economy for roughly the past 30 years, there has been, in general, no shortage of funds available to corporations. The corporations have not experienced financial crowding out. Rather, credit has been abundantly available, as long as the funds were channeled into Wall Street speculation and related forms of financial asset purchases rather than into productive investments.

“Public Investment” defines industrial policy as a key element within a “developmental state.” It examines past and present industrial policy practiced in the US, focusing on the success of the Pentagon in financing and sustaining the development of revolutionary technologies. The paper concludes with a detailed jobs proposal related to modernization and rationalization of the transportation system and development of a green energy system.

The United States has had a long, varied history grappling with the idea and practice of industrial policy, beginning in 1791 with then Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s proposal to Congress, “Report on the Subject of Manufacturers.” Hamilton’s proposals included measures to manage international trade, subsidies for domestic industries, and investments in infrastructure...

Focusing on the 20th century, various forms of subsidies and preferential tax treatments were provided for agricultural producers, railroads, air carriers, as well as the automobile and housing industries. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was formed in 1932 by the Hoover Administration, as a means of providing subsidized credit for distressed businesses.

The enormous success of Pentagon-based industrial policy in the U.S. raises the basic question: can the only way U.S. policymakers manage industrial policies successfully is for the Pentagon to be in charge? As we have emphasized, the key factor of Pentagon-centered industrial policy is the combination, on a massive scale and over a sustained time period, of R&D investment spending plus the maintaining of a guaranteed market through procurements.

Here then, is the overarching challenge in trying to design industrial policies to advance clean energy, a reconfigured transportation system, and a renewed manufacturing sector. As a technical matter, we do already have the policy apparatus to successfully implement such policies. But we lack the experience and political will to advance this agenda outside of the Pentagon.

VI. Green Jobs Movement

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism Goals and Principles relates the “Crisis of Climate Change and Unsustainable Resources” to jobs:

The depth of the climate crisis demands an end to the exceptional waste of natural and human resources under capitalism. The crisis demands that billions be invested and tens of thousands employed replacing carbon-based fuels with energy drawn from the sun, wind, and geothermal sources. The country needs new energy grids, non-polluting mass transportation, and homes retrofitted to curb carbon emissions.

Blue-Green Alliance

Leo Gerard, President of the USW, the largest US industrial union, is calling for a new ‘green industrial revolution’ to reconstruct the U.S. manufacturing sector. This USW policy is a major effort in its program to rebuild the union’s base and the US industrial working class.

The USW and the Sierra Club have formed the “Blue-Green Alliance” of several hundred environmental, community, and trade union organizations. In Tough Battle Ahead on Green Jobs and Climate Crisis on, Carl Davidson described the May 2010 third gathering of the Blue-Green Alliance in Washington, D.C. Thirty five hundred labor and environmental activists heard speakers from the Obama administration and the trade unions address the issue of climate change and jobs.

The USW blog covered AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka’s remarks at the conference:

With the oil platform explosion that killed 11 workers now spilling millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico as a sobering background, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told delegates to the 2010 Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference:

“Never before has the need been so urgent to produce clean energy, to use energy more efficiently, to prevent climate change and to protect our natural environment.

And not since the Great Depression have so many Americans needed new and better jobs with secure benefits and promising futures–jobs that can’t be off-shored, downsized or downgraded into temporary or part-time positions.”

A green jobs industrial policy must be based on restructuring the carbon energy base that drives the economy so that economic incentives reward energy-saving innovations. Central to this agenda is a tax on the carbon content of coal, oil, and gas that will rise in a planned escalation over a number of years. This will produce a growing revenue stream that can be used to fund capital investment and to raise personal income, stimulating new job-creating consumption of low-carbon products.

The green jobs agenda faces an uncertain future in a Congress dominated by the energy-military-financial complex. The American Power Act of 2010 is another giant give-away to the nuclear, oil, and gas corporations and the commodity traders on Wall Street with crumbs for green jobs. The Carbon Tax Center, which supports a tax on carbon at the source and carbon revenue sharing with US citizens, claims the bill is “worse than nothing.”

The Blue-Green Alliance statement on the American Power Act was more nuanced:

"The BlueGreen Alliance strongly believes that properly crafted comprehensive climate change legislation will achieve the critical goals of creating good jobs, reducing carbon emissions and increasing our nation's energy independence.

"While many provisions we believe essential to creating good clean energy jobs are addressed, we must strengthen critical areas of this legislation. By continuing to constructively work with the U.S. Senate, we can achieve a stronger American Power Act that achieves our goals of creating millions of clean energy jobs...

The Green Jobs movement is an important movement that addresses climate change, industrial policy, and the jobs crisis. As Davidson summarizes in his article:

…the ‘Good Jobs, Green Jobs’ conference and the Blue-Green Alliance behind it, is part of a new historic bloc against the GOP, Blue Dog Democrats, and the far right. Its core is a three-way alliance of trade unions, environmentalists, and advocates for inner city youth and the unemployed. It reaches up to include top officials of the Obama administration, Members of Congress, leaders of ‘high road’ green industries, and state and city government.

At the May 6, 2010 Steelworkers Rapid Response conference, USW members mobilized to lobby Congress to pass the “SEAM” Act, HR 5041. This act would provide $5 billion in credits to build and install solar or wind energy facilities using domestic steel and other materials, a first step in a green jobs industrial policy.

VII. The Full Employment ‘Public Option’

Unemployment Is a Necessary Feature of Capitalism

In his 2002 book After Capitalism, Loyola University Professor of Philosophy David Schweickart writes:

If aggregate demand declines, which it will if average wages decline, which they will if the search for low wages dominates the movement of capital, then production – and hence employment – will also decline. That is to say, if the search for lower wages comes to dominate the movement of capital, the result will be not only a lowering of worldwide wage disparities but also a lowering of total global income.

Unemployment is not an aberration of capitalism, indicating that it is somehow not working as it should. Unemployment is a necessary structural feature…Unemployment is the invisible hand – carrying a stick – that keeps the workforce in line.

Full Employment as Social Policy

To the extent that efforts to create jobs rely on stimulating private enterprise, the goal of full employment is unattainable. Today’s neo-liberal deficit hawks believe that full employment prevents monetary stability, and undermines bank profits. They are determined to sacrifice the stability of society for profit stability for the wealthy. Because of this, the green industrial policy proposals must be supplemented by an employer of last resort (ELR) program, so that no one is left jobless.

Our conception of employment must expand the personal, social, and economic frameworks to include the human rights framework. The right to work is a human right. The people, acting through the government as a last resort, can provide full employment to all willing to work. The US government should adopt a policy of full employment as a social and economic necessity. This principle should be the foundation of new full employment legislation that creates an ELR program.

An ELR program serves as the “public option” for those who cannot find private employment. It does not substitute for stimulus programs that incentivize private hiring. Because ELR programs put all the jobless to work, tax revenues and aggregate demand are increased. Social programs for the unemployed and poor are greatly reduced or eliminated. These factors make the cost of a model program approximately one half of 1% of US GDP.

In The Employer of Last Resort Programme a paper for the U.N. International Labor Organization (ILO), L. Randall Wray discusses the social and economic benefits of Government as employer of last resort. He draws on the experience of Argentina and other successful employer of last resort (ELR) programs.

One straightforward way of ensuring that any person who is able and willing to work can [work] is through an “Employer of Last Resort Programme” (ELR). An ELR is a direct job creation programme that provides employment at a basic wage for those who cannot otherwise find work. It is not meant to be an emergency programme or a substitute for private employment, but rather a permanent complement to private sector employment.

…an ELR programme is more effective and preferable than “Keynesian pump-priming”, which tries to stimulate full employment by raising aggregate demand through investment incentives, tax cuts, and government spending. With ELR unemployed workers are employed and their spending has multiplier effects on the economy which boost aggregate demand and facilitate their incorporation into the private sector labour market. Because ELR ensures that deficit spending is at the correct level to achieve full employment, there is no risk of inflation. Moreover, because it is an anti-cyclical policy, macroeconomic stability is improved.

…only government can guarantee the right to a job because no capitalist society has ever operated at anything approaching true, full, employment on a consistent basis without direct job creation on a large scale by government. Further, the burden of joblessness is borne unequally, always concentrated among groups that already face other disadvantages...Finally, only the government can offer an infinitely elastic demand for labour (offering to hire all who cannot otherwise find employment) because it does not need to heed narrow market efficiency concerns...Government can take a broader view to include promotion of the public interest, including the right to work. For these reasons, government should and must play a role in providing jobs to achieve social justice.

A universal ELR program—which takes anyone who is ready and willing to work—is the only type of program that can ensure that the human right to employment is continuously met. If the ELR program wage is a “living wage”, it also helps to ensure that other human rights are met—by providing sufficient income—at least for those who are ready and willing to work. A properly designed ELR program will not only produce socially useful goods and services, but it will also promote feelings of self-worth and accomplishment among program participants.

Wray’s paper continues with a study of the economic, monetary, and fiscal implications of ELR and a detailed analysis of the ELR program in Argentina.

VIII. Finance Capital

The enormous growth of finance capital and the globalization of production are the interdependent dynamic that threatens the survival of civil society and democracy in all countries. Financialization has radically diminished the historic role of industrial capital and industrial unions as a determinant of national industrial policy. This is especially true in the US where industrial unions are weak compared to those in the Eurozone and in the socialist market economies.

The above chart shows that finance capital represents almost 75% of the capital assets of the world’s 2000 largest corporations as of 2008.

Finance Capital

In his article, “Critical Globalization Studies: An Empirical and Theoretical Analysis of the New Imperialism,” published in the April 2010 issue of Science & Society, Christian Fuchs of the University of Salzburg discusses current data on the dominance of finance capital in the global economy. He finds that finance capital continues to control almost all of the money capital, which gives them huge economic power for controlling the economy. He writes:

Its assets are so large that it has the power to influence all other economic sectors. Since the beginning of the 1980s, finance capital has increased its influence, importance, and concentration ...The emergence of liberalized global financial markets has enabled these developments.

Fuchs explains that the liberalization of global finance increased short-term profits. At the same time it resulted in instability of most financial instruments, precipitating the current crisis.

Excellent examples are sub-prime lending and mortgage-backed securities, high-risk financial mechanisms that have been at the heart of the financial crisis that originated in the financialization of the US housing market and hit the world economy in 2008.

Fuchs concludes that “…the economic crisis [of 2008] did not undermine the inner-capitalist hegemony of financial capital.”

Financialization

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism analyzed financialization as the basis of the current economic crisis in Goals and Principles:

With the weakening of the industrial structure, financialization has become capitalism's cash cow. Reduced corporate taxes increased the after-tax rate of profit, financed by additional public debt. Investments in production of goods and services were increasingly shifted to shady financial instruments with money being created solely from debt, with no new value created from real production. The surplus value appropriated by capital no longer found outlet in material production and spilled into financial schemes and speculative bubbles, spreading pain and upheaval throughout the global economic system.

The banks intensified the crisis by withdrawing support from key productive sectors of the US economy, forcing them to radically downsize, suddenly terminating thousands of workers. The subservient media and Congress pilloried US auto manufacturing, while contracts with autoworkers and retirees were abandoned. US workers, homeowners, and taxpayers suffered the losses collectively and individually.

Make Wall Street Pay

The growth of the financial sector at the expense of productive industry is the single most important force behind the growth of income and wealth inequality over the past three decades. It has fueled growing unemployment, helped atomize the working class in the developed countries, marginalized trade unions, and consolidated power in the hands of the most reactionary political sectors.

Finance capital has the power to crash the economy, extort the wealth of the nation, and mobilize Congress to oppose the demands of the people for relief. It has the power to wage war across the globe and manufacture media consent. Full employment and social stability require the taxation, regulation, control, and eventual social ownership of finance.

Protesting Bonuses and Bailouts on Wall Street

The AFL-CIO is mobilizing its members to focus public opinion on this issue. “Make Wall Street Pay” protests were held across the nation from March through May 2010 at major banks demanding taxes on financial transactions and executive bonuses to pay for a new jobs program. The New York Times reported:

This month, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the nation’s main labor federation, has organized 200 protests nationwide to publicly shame bankers, calling for new taxes on bankers’ bonuses and on speculative short-term financial transactions — in the hope of collecting tens of billions of dollars to finance a job creation program.

“They played Russian roulette with our economy, and while Wall Street cashed in, they left Main Street holding the bag,” Richard L. Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s president, said last Friday at a rally in Philadelphia. “They gorge themselves in a trough of taxpayers’ dollars, while we struggle to make ends meet.”

A key demand of the current AFL-CIO agitation is a financial transaction tax (FTT), originally called the ‘Tobin Tax’ after its author, and now popularly known as the ‘Robin Hood Tax.’ The FTT is a progressive way to fund a full employment program and is a powerful tool to combat the cancerous growth of finance capital.

An FTT of one quarter of one percent on all financial transactions in the U.S. would generate an income of $600 billion per year according to estimates of the Chicago Political Economy Group. These revenues would be sufficient for the government to transition to a green industrial economy and guarantee a job to all who are willing to work.

The FTT is currently a subject of debate in several European countries. It must be imposed by agreement of the countries with major financial centers to prevent the banks from moving their trading operations offshore to avoid the tax.

The National Union of General and Public Employees, one of Canada’s largest unions is urging passage of the financial transactions tax by Parliament.

Clancy says action to support a global tax on financial transactions is needed now, partly because the G8 and G20 meetings offer a serious opportunity to advance the issue and partly because the tax is badly needed to encourage economic recovery and to prevent another global financial meltdown from occurring.

"Considered from this perspective, we believe that a financial transactions tax (FTT) is an economic policy initiative that Canada must support," Clancy writes.

The proposed Robin Hood tax would exclude most consumer transactions but levy a small tax of one twentieth of 1% on all financial market transactions such as the trade of stocks, bonds, foreign exchange and derivatives.

Social Ownership of Finance

The most salient dynamic of the present economic crisis is the inability or unwillingness of the banks to finance productive industry or small business in the US in order to put revive the economy.

The neo-liberal Republican and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress oppose any use of the public treasury to stimulate demand. Congress failed to pass legislation before the 2010 Memorial Day recess that would extend unemployment benefits, subsidize COBRA healthcare benefits, maintain Medicare compensation, and subsidize school funding. But they did pass $53 billion for global war.

Finance capital stands as the political roadblock to progress both in the economy and in politics. A rational economic system with an industrial policy that supports manufacturing and full employment, health, and education of the people must have social ownership and control of finance. The ‘Robin Hood’ Tax is a key step to diminishing the power of these banks to block recovery.

The Banking “Public Option”

The experience of the Bank of North Dakota shows that social control of finance is both possible and healthy for the economy. Under state law the bank is the State of North Dakota doing business as the Bank of North Dakota. All state and local government agencies are required to place their funds in the bank. Previously, all public corporations in the state were also required to deposit their funds in the bank, but an initiated measure in 1919 eliminated that requirement.

In the general sense, the Bank of North Dakota is a socialist bank. As such it has contributed to the economic and social stability of the state. It plays the role of a central bank backed by the general fund of the State of North Dakota itself and the taxpayers of the State. The bank also guarantees student loans, business development loans, and state and municipal bonds.

The bank had almost $4 billion in assets and a $2.67 billion loan portfolio at the end of last year, according to its most recent quarterly financial report. It made $58.1 million in profits in 2009, setting a record for the sixth straight year. During the last decade, the bank funneled almost $300 million in profits to North Dakota's treasury.

An article recently named the bank “Banking’s Public Option.” A Mother Jones magazine article called it the envy of Wall Street. Public ownership of banks through state governments would cut the power of the Wall Street oligarchy and help secure the financing for an economic recovery with full employment.

IX. Problems of Globalization

Globalization not only means every nation faces an offshore assembly line under the command of global financiers. It also means a global unemployment crisis that causes a diaspora of thousands of displaced workers seeking employment in wealthier countries.

Global Unemployment

In a January 2010 press release from Geneva, Switzerland, the International Labour Organization (ILO) reported that global unemployment had reached 212 million in 2009, the highest level on record.

The report says that coordinated stimulus measures have averted a far greater social and economic catastrophe; yet millions of women and men around the world are still without a job, unemployment benefits or any viable form of social protection.

“As the World Economic Forum gathers at Davos, it is clear that avoiding a jobless recovery is the political priority of today” said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. “We need the same policy decisiveness that saved banks now applied to save and create jobs and livelihoods of people. This can be done through strong convergence of public policies and private investment”.

Global Jobs Pact In 2009, upon adoption of the Global Jobs Pact the ILO Director stated: “Urgent action is required now to boost economic recovery and job creation whilst preparing for a greener, more balanced, fairer and sustainable global economy. This pact provides a path crafted together by all members of the ILO and based on tried and tested policies.”

The ILO will hold its annual International Labor Conference in June 2010 in Geneva at United Nations offices one year after the adoption of the Global Jobs Pact. A High Level Panel at the annual Conference will discuss the Pact with regard to achieving the ‘Millennium Development Goals.’

With only five years remaining to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Secretary General has called a special summit meeting in New York for September 20-22, 2010 to accelerate progress.

The global economic crisis also threatens to destabilize progress, as a better future for the world’s most vulnerable people could fall victim to contraction of trade, remittances, capital flows and donor support. At a time when investing in development is more vital than ever to ensure social stability, security and prosperity, donor governments are called upon to renew rather than revoke their commitment to reaching the Goals.

The United States is a signatory to the UN Millennium Development Goals, in which it pledges to slash poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths, and provide jobs to all. US workers should join workers around the world in demanding implementation of the goal of full employment by the UN member states in connection with this summit.

Global Assembly Line

In his 2002 book After Capitalism, Loyola University Professor of Philosophy David Schweickart predicted the crippling effect of globalization on the effectiveness of government stimulus spending to solve the problem of unemployment:

There is another problem with the Keynesian solution, which is more acute now than it used to be. Keynesian deficit spending depends on a “multiplier effect.”

However, if an economy is wide open to imports, which contemporary capitalist economies increasingly are, then the multiplier effect is attenuated…Hence to reinflate the economy, a government must go much deeper into debt than in the past. Since the costs of this debt must be borne by the nation’s citizenry, while the good effects spread globally, governments, not surprisingly, are now reluctant to apply the Keynesian remedy; when they do, it no longer works so well.

In November 2009 USW President Leo Gerard lambasted Congress and the Department of Energy for spending ARRA stimulus funds on wind power projects that used foreign manufacturers. It was reported in various internet news sources.

Nearly $2 billion in money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has been spent on wind power, funding the creation of enough new wind farms to power 2.4 million homes over the past year. But the study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop found that nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.

"Today, we are demanding the Obama administration suspend this program immediately," said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. The senators are especially alarmed about a project highlighted by ABC News in West Texas that uses turbines manufactured in China. The Texas wind farm is eligible for up to $450 million in stimulus funds.

The global assembly line means that US problems of employment and economic stability cannot be solved without measures that replace ‘free trade’ with fair trade policy based on cooperation.

Immigration and Unemployment

As part of its effort to build international solidarity, the USW is actively forming alliances with union organizations in other countries. It is using its resources to support industrial workers in South America who face harsh repression of their efforts to organize in the shops and mines of the global corporations.

Central to building a movement for full employment is unity in combating efforts of the right wing to divide the working class with appeals to xenophobia and racism. The right seeks to blame joblessness on immigrant workers from Latin America who have been driven from their own lands by NAFTA trade policies.

The Immigration Policy Center, the research and policy arm of the American Immigration Council, issued a series of reports, “Untying the Knot: Unemployment and Immigration.”

Opponents of immigration reform frequently argue that immigrants “take” jobs away from many native-born workers, especially during economic hard times. Yet an analysis of data from the U.S. Census Bureau clearly reveals that… recent immigrants comprise 3.1 percent of the population in counties with the highest unemployment rates (over 13.4 percent). But recent immigrants account for a higher share of the population (4.6 percent) in counties with the lowest unemployment rates (below 4.8 percent).

One of the most contentious issues…is whether or not the presence of immigrants in the U.S. labor force has a major adverse impact on the employment prospects of African Americans. However, data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that…in the 10 states with the highest shares of recent immigrants in the labor force, the average unemployment rate for native-born blacks is about 4 percentage points less than in the 10 states with the lowest shares of recent immigrants.

…unemployed natives and employed recent immigrants cannot simply be “swapped” for one another since unemployed natives and employed immigrants tend to have different levels of education, live in different parts of the country, and have experience in different occupations and different levels of work experience.

The fight to defend our society and improve our living conditions will be a complex global battle. Workers must expand cooperation across borders to solve common problems that result from unfair trade policies. US workers can defend their own jobs by recruiting undocumented workers into their unions and defending their rights as workers.

Trade with China

US trade with China has the greatest impact on US manufacturers and industrial workers and it is a focus of efforts by the USW. The USW has won two major disputes with China over subsidies that are illegal under WTO rules. As a result of the disputes, tariffs were imposed on steel pipe and rubber tires imported from China.

In a Spring 2010 article in the business magazine Capacity, USW President Leo Gerard wrote:

In a victory for the domestic steel industry and its workers in the Ohio Valley, the U.S. government has levied duties of up to 16 percent on imported Chinese pipe used in the oil and natural gas industries.

China’s massive manipulation of its currency and illegal subsidies has continued for years, giving it an unfair advantage against U.S. manufacturers. Its labor and environmental protections are grossly inadequate. We need to insist that China abide by the rules they agreed to after joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2000...

We should do business with China, but we will not be pushed around or talked to death while they continue to steal our markets.

The United States must confront the challenges of globalization. But we cannot do so by ignoring the deleterious impact that our current international trade and economic policies are having on our nation’s productive capacities, and on the standard of living of the vast majority of our citizens.

The USW has formed a political alliance with some US manufacturing corporations called the Alliance for American Manufacturing. The AAM seeks to overturn NAFTA and punish China for unfair trade. In the Fall of 2008 three hundred retired steelworkers, union activists, and community leaders attended a AAM sponsored town hall meeting in Aliquippa, PA. The attendees were welcomed by USW officials and offered a Keep It Made in America program that centered on China’s unfair trade policies.

But the essential problem is the policy of global finance capital and its control of US trade policy and the World Trade Organization. The ability of the trade unions to build a progressive majority to confront finance capital over trade policy will depend on their ability to convince US workers to support fair trade and international solidarity. This will cause tension with the manufacturers in the AAM. They will not bite the hand that feeds them by opposing the neo-liberal ‘free trade’ policy of the bankers.

Border Tax Equity

Under the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO), direct taxes, such as corporate income taxes, if rebated or refunded upon the export of goods, are viewed as export subsidies and prohibited. However, indirect taxes, such as sales taxes and Value Added Taxes (VAT), may be rebated or refunded upon the export of goods and such rebate is not defined as constituting a subsidy.

The disparate treatment of taxes at the border detrimentally affects United States agricultural producers, manufacturers, and service providers, thus depressing employment. US exporters are subject to double taxation by paying both direct US taxes on domestic production and an indirect border tax on their exported product or service to the importing country. Foreign exporters are refunded the indirect VAT taxes which effectively subsidizes their exports.

The top twelve countries exporting goods to the U.S. with a VAT as part of their taxation and trade policy constitute 70% of total U.S. imports. The National Textile Association points out that foreign export to the US encounters minimal tariffs averaging 1.3% and no VAT, while US exports face tariffs averaging 40% plus VATs averaging 15.7%.

US manufacturers represented by the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition (AMTAC) supports HR2927, the Border Tax Equity Act, to stem the flow of manufacturing jobs offshore.

Manufacturers in the United States are at a great competitive disadvantage to foreign manufacturers as a result of the disparate treatment of tax systems under the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. With the exception of the US, nearly every developed nation in the world employs some type of border-adjusted consumption tax, also known as value added tax (VAT) on manufactured goods…VAT taxes rebated on exports and assessed on imports resulted in an estimated $474 billion “border tax” disadvantage to US producers and service providers in 2007 alone.

AMTAC believes the border tax disadvantage is the greatest contributing factor to the more than $4.7 trillion in US foreign trade deficits racked up from 2001 to 2008.

The neo-liberal Republican leadership is enforcing discipline on Congresspersons who initially endorsed the Border Tax Equity Act according to a May 2010 article carried by several financial publications.

Facing withering and unfounded criticism from the right, a trio of Republican lawmakers have removed their names from a bill that is a key piece of trade legislation that would have gone a long way toward remedying the border tax inequities that hamper the U.S. due to the fact that the value-added tax (VAT) is utilized by most of America’s trading partners.

The bill “appeared to be one such solution to protect American jobs by ensuring American manufacturers received rebates to neutralize the discriminatory effects they face by border taxes,” the three Republicans said in a joint statement. “While the main intent of the bill is to protect American jobs, we have withdrawn our support after further examination revealed the legislation could be at odds with our conservative principles.”

The glaring contradiction between the interests of global finance capital versus US industrial workers and small businesses is most evident in US trade policy. This contradiction also illuminates the narrow financial interest that controls the Blue Dog Democrat and Republican majority in the United States Congress.

X. Structural Reform

The regular succession of jobs crises, the depth of the current crisis, and the likelihood of another crisis before a full recovery, are symptoms of an unstable system. The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism describe “capitalism today” in Goals and Principles published in July 2009:

Today, capitalism is a mature system that is unable to utilize the powerful creative forces it has developed to serve human progress. As technological developments increase the ability of the productive forces to meet all human needs, capitalism’s implacable quest for ever higher profits renders it unable to place these productive forces at the service of society.

Fewer and fewer workers are needed to produce the necessities of life. This results in higher unemployment instead of fewer hours of work. Production is increasingly socialized while the wealth created by that production is privatized into fewer hands. That is the core contradiction of a system whose relations of production can no longer accommodate advances in its productive forces without impoverishing working people in growing numbers

'New Vision of Capitalism'

Ending the chapter on the social costs of deindustrialization to U.S. workers, the AAM’s Manufacturing a Better Future for America concludes:

Unfortunately, public policy toward globalization, outsourcing, technological change and unemployment has largely remained wedded to discredited neo-liberal economic concepts.

We should advocate a new vision of capitalism that takes social and human capital every bit as seriously as it does materials and money. And we should advocate policies that encourage forms of economic development that build strong communities as well as strong companies.

The Obama administration is a transitional phase overseeing conflicting forces, on one hand trying to return to the past, on the other seeking change from the past. The exhausted neo-liberal regime of capitalism is attempting to rescue itself from the disaster it has created. As capitalism tries to reinvent itself, sustainable alternatives to capitalism can take root if the seeds of structural reforms are planted now.

Whether the future is a “new vision of capitalism” or a vision of “after capitalism” the struggle for full employment is the way ahead. A more secure future can be achieved by working for structural reforms that empower workers and their communities in the global economy.

The Six-Hour Work Day

The movement for an eight-hour day originated among Chicago workers in 1864. It eventually became a global movement, winning legislative sanction in the U.S. with the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.

In his book Kellogg’s Six-Hour Day, Benjamin Hunnicutt describes the innovative response to the jobs crisis of the Great Depression by W.K. Kellogg at his Battle Creek, Michigan cereal plant. While workers were losing their jobs across the nation, on December 1, 1930, Kellogg cut the workday from eight to six hours and added a fourth shift. He raised wages over the next two years by 25%.

During World War II, Kellogg followed the government mandate for longer hours but promised to return to the six-hour day. By the end of the war, bankers had gained control of the Kellogg Company and opposed returning to the six-hour day.

The workers, mostly women, fought to keep their six-hour shifts until 1985, and preserved the century-old vision of "progressive shortening of the hours of labor." The book describes the economic, health, and social benefits enjoyed by those working a six-hour day.

The 30-hour workweek was raised at least as early as 1922 during a national strike of coal miners. In 1932 the Black-Connery bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate. It would have required employers to pay time and a half after 30 hours; it also established a minimum wage and set limits on child labor.

In 1934 both the San Francisco longshore workers’ strike and the national textile strike kept the 30-hour week demand alive. Other workers during the 1930s struck for a 35-hour week.

The Cold War attack on the New Deal gains of workers was codified when President Truman signed NSC-68. This document outlined the Cold War military and economic buildup, which encompassed the control of the US workforce and effectively countered the growing demands of US workers for a six hour workday. In his 1951 message to Congress, Truman stated:

In terms of manpower, our present defense targets will require an increase of nearly one million men and women in the armed forces within a few months, and probably not less than four million more in defense production by the end of the year. This means that an additional 8 percent of our labor force, and possibly much more, will be required by direct defense needs by the end of the year. These manpower needs will call both for increasing our labor force by reducing unemployment and drawing in women and older workers, and for lengthening hours of work in essential industries.

Since the 1970’s, the U.S. workday has lengthened and productivity of workers has skyrocketed. Instead of shorter hours, workers are faced with growing unemployment and part-time work that threatens the fabric of society while 35% of production capacity lies idle. Workers on the job are stressed due to intensification of the labor process. Research by Paul Landsbergis at State University of New York showed that workers in privatized sectors experienced a 45% increase in heart disease, and the health disparity gap is growing between low and high income workers.

Several nations have imposed limits on working time in an effort to combat unemployment. This has been done both on a national level, as in France's 35-hour workweek, and on the company level, as in the agreement between Volkswagen and the German Metalworkers Union to temporarily reduce the workweek to 29 hours to preserve jobs. As of 2004, the OECD reports that US workers average 1777 hours per year, British workers 1652, German workers 1362, and French workers 1346.

National Health Insurance

In January 2009, the California Nurses Association released an econometric study of the US health care industry and the impact of converting to a national single payer healthcare system. “Single Payer/Medicare for All: An Economic Stimulus Plan for the Nation” by the Institute for Health and Socio-Economic Policy analyzed data published by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the US Department of Health Medical Expenditure Panel Survey using the IMPLAN input-output model that is widely used by government planning bodies.

The study showed that a Medicare for All system covering all US residents, as embodied in the Conyers Bill – HR 676, would create 2.6 million permanent new jobs. It would stimulate $317 billion in new business revenue, over $100 billion in wages, and $44 billion in new tax revenues. The net cost of this stimulus to the US government is $63 billion, only 10% of the cost of the Obama administration’s ARRA. Overall, every direct healthcare dollar creates nearly three additional dollars in the U.S. economy.

This stimulus plan was endorsed by 93 members of the US Congress and, according to several polls, has the support of from 59% to 65% of US residents. Once Congress took up the task of writing healthcare legislation both President Obama and Congressional leaders stated that Medicare for All was “off the table.”

National health insurance as proposed in HR 676 currently enjoys widespread acceptance among the U.S. populace. Enacting this program would deprive the health insurance industry, one of the most consistent profit centers for the financial oligarchy, of $113 billion of capital assets returning a profit margin of 15.6%. This value would be transferred to working families as low cost healthcare, and it would relieve U.S. manufacturers of the competitive cost disadvantage of employer-financed healthcare.

Worker Owned Production

Cleveland is breaking new ground with worker owned service industries. The worker owned cooperatives are new innovations in the structure of capital ownership that avoid the historic pitfalls of cooperatives. Each worker owns an equal voting share in the company. These shares can only be sold back to the company. The banks cannot gain control of these cooperatives.

The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry and Ohio Cooperative Solar were established in the heart of the mostly African-American community hard hit by long-term unemployment. Local businesses granted loans to the cooperative and local institutions agreed to buy laundry services or solar panel installations from the cooperatives. Unemployed workers were selected, trained, and educated to become worker-owners of the new enterprises. As well as their dividends from operations, the workers are building wealth through their ownership interest in the cooperative.

Worker owners on the job at new Cleveland cooperatives

The structure is modeled on the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain, an innovative form of worker ownership of commodity producing enterprises, born in the Basque region of Spain in a period of economic devastation under the dictator Francisco Franco. From a small cooperative producing paraffin heaters it has grown into the seventh largest enterprise in Spain with 120,000 worker owners.

Based on the wealth accumulated from commodity production, the workers were able to fund second level cooperative service enterprises, retail businesses, banks, hospitals, and colleges. The colleges are incubators for high tech innovation in products and the production process.

In 2009 the USW signed a cooperation agreement with the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation to undertake the establishment of worker owned manufacturing enterprises in the United States. “We see today’s agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada,” said USW International President Leo W. Gerard.  “Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants.  We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

The Employer of Last Resort program in Argentina has been an incubator for worker-owned coops. Workers in the Argentine ELR program are paid for only four hours labor per day. Many began working longer to produce and sell their goods or services cooperatively and start their own enterprises.

XI. Political Realignment

Jobs or Income Now!

The battles in the 101^st Congress around the economic stimulus, health care reform, expanded rights of workers to organize unions, reform of financial institutions, for a humane immigration policy, and for extension of unemployment benefits all represent the first wave of reform efforts following on the election of President Obama.

The social forces now arrayed around the agitation and proposals for jobs can be the basis for a national campaign in support of new full employment legislation that carries forward the demand originated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s for “Jobs or Income Now.”

In 1978 Congress passed the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act establishing a maximum unemployment rate of 4%. This bill was the last gasp of the New Deal generation’s struggle for economic justice. Its passage occurred at the beginning of the neo-liberal campaign to reverse the New Deal policies.

Thus, finance capital began the neo-liberal era by shuttering the major steel producing centers in the US. By 1985 the Chicago Save Our Jobs committee and the National Congress of Unemployed Organizations responded to the decimation of the US steel industry by presenting a petition for a jobs bill to Congressman Charles Hayes.

Hayes introduced the Income and Jobs Action Act of 1985, which required the President to submit a plan to Congress for federally funded public works jobs. The bill provided for an equivalent income for unemployed workers. Hayes gathered sixty-six cosponsors and proceeded to hold hearings across the country including at the Croatian Club in Aliquippa, PA in April 1986, that was supported by the Beaver County Labor Council and the Beaver County Fight Back Coalition.

Political Realignment

Most current proposals for a new industrial policy seem to overlook the reality that unemployment and crisis are a means of expanding economic control and increasing profits by finance capital. They don’t address the conflicting class interests of our society or come to grips with the question of how these eminently logical programs will come to be implemented without a political realignment.

A movement for full employment is a key element to developing a mass base for a political realignment in Congress. New legislation is needed modeled on the Income and Jobs Action Act of 1985 that makes government the employer of last resort. This new bill should be expanded or packaged with legislation to include a shorter workday, support for manufacturing jobs, preference to worker-owned enterprises, national health insurance, and fair trade, funded by a tax on financial transactions.

A key political goal of the movement for full employment is the removal of the ‘tax cut’ and ‘deficit fetish’ Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats from Congress. These politicians oppose jobs legislation and aid to the jobless. Their objectives are to slash social security and Medicare benefits and raise taxes.

This goal requires new thinking about the two-party system that still traps many in the progressive majority. Progressive Democrats and progressive independent candidates need the financial and shoe-leather support of the trade unions and the jobs movement to break the grip of the neo-liberal majority in the House and Senate.

Youth Shape the Future

The head of the ILO, Juan Somavia commenting on the jobs crisis said: “Each year, the global labour market has expanded by 45 million people, therefore recovery measures must target job creation for young men and women entering the labour market for the first time.”

In his paper on Employer of Last Resort, L. Randall Wray states: “young people have more difficulty in labor markets than adults…labor force participation rates have actually fallen over the past decade, especially for youth.”

In July 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the youth unemployment rate in the United States was 18.5%, which is the highest ever rate on record. The youth unemployment rate includes people aged 16-24, and was first tracked in 1948.
The number of young people employed in the month of July 2009 was just 51.4%, the lowest July rate on record. July is traditionally the peak month for youth employment, due to the fact that many youths are off from school and looking to earn money.

Millions of young people are now entering the workforce annually with poor prospects for finding a job. This prevents the young generation from integrating with the older generations that are employed and heightens social tensions. The AFL-CIO reports:

Since the current recession began in December 2007, some 1.3 million young workers have left the workforce, while the participation rate of workers ages 55 and older increased, according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

This means many older workers are not retiring or are re-entering the labor force because they have suffered a sharp decline in retirement security, say authors Kathryn Edwards and Heidi Shierholz. 

At the same time, workers ages 16 to 24—who face an unemployment rate of 18.9 percent, compared with 6.8 percent for workers ages 55 and older—are having a hard time finding jobs. Many who do find work end up in low-paying jobs with few or no benefits.

A militant movement for full employment must be based on the young generation, which has the most at stake in finding a job and building for a future.

The AFL-CIO has recognized the need to organize young workers and is holding an AFL-CIO Youth Summit in Washington, DC in June 2010. The Young Worker Summit advertises the opportunity for young workers to socialize, share ideas, learn from experts, and network with the progressive movement.

The key to building this effort into a long term success is engaging local labor councils in building youth activity within the unions and relating to the vast army of young unemployed.

Social support networks of young unemployed like the 405 Clubs can become venues for engaging the unemployed around the policy and political issues of unemployment in addition to their self-help and networking functions.

The Young and Unemployed blogspot asks the question for all unemployed youth:

So once again, what is a young unemployed guy to do? Being that most my ideas involve comical and at times illegal means of generating revenue I thought I'd just leave it up to your opinions.

Maybe someone out there has a good idea for me to bring in some cash? Let me know your ideas and if there's a chance I'll live through it I'll give it a go!

The jobs “public option” or employer of last resort is an important program that assures young workers that a job is waiting to give them the opportunity to learn the skills needed to advance to private employment.

XII. Conclusion

A 2007 UNICEF study shows that the United States has the highest child poverty rate among industrialized nations. A report issued by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2008 revealed the United States has the third worst level of income inequality and poverty among the group’s 30 member states, ranking above Mexico and Turkey.

Millions of new workers face economic instability, lower wages, joblessness, home foreclosures, unaffordable healthcare, and hunger. A broad social movement must respond with the demand for full employment and economic democracy as the centerpiece of a progressive agenda that can united the progressive majority to defeat neo-liberalism and challenge the dominance of finance capital.

Full Employment The US government must guarantee the human right to a job as the employer of last resort. Legislation for full employment must be at the top of the progressive agenda. A new bill that funds a full employment program and reduces working hours should be introduced in the 112^th Congress. The labor movement can build a strong allied social movement by organizing the unemployed, especially young workers, to fight for full employment legislation.

Industrial Policy Rebuilding a substantial manufacturing sector must replace currency manipulation and debt as a basis for consumption. A successful industrial policy must include reduction of carbon fuel consumption and conversion of military to civilian production. The neo-liberal regime of “free trade” must be replaced with a “fair trade” policy that protects the jobs of US workers with equitable trade rules. Fair trade supports environmentally sustainable global growth and respects the human rights of all workers.

Socialize Finance Every nation must gain sovereignty over finance capital, the source of speculation, economic chaos, political reaction, inequality, and international tension. The financial transaction tax can be a first step in reducing their power and transferring wealth to the people by funding a full employment program. Public investment should target worker-owned enterprises. Federal policy should support state-owned banks. The vast socially produced wealth controlled by a handful of unscrupulous banks must become the social property of the people. The accumulated wealth of society must be invested to benefit society with full employment as a primary goal.

Peace and Prosperity The never-ending war begun in the 1950’s has always been a war against democracy that represses the aspirations of American workers. The austerity imposed by our war economy is a major roadblock to social progress and full employment. Peaceful relations with other nations are essential to national and global prosperity. Slashing military spending and ending the policy of force abroad is the keystone to a full employment economy.

Contradictions of the Mosaic Left:

Perspectives for Protests within the Crisis

25. Mai 2010

By Florian Becker & Christina Kaindl

http://www.zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/

'There is no question that immediate economic crises can in themselves not bring about fundamental changes; they can only prepare more favorable ground for the diffusion of certain approaches for thinking through, posing and solving, the questions that are decisive for the whole further development of the life of the state. ' – Antonio Gramsci, Analysis of the Situation: Relations of Force. Prison Notebooks, 13th Notebook, § 17

When the public became aware of the economic crisis through the collapse of some of the big banks in the Fall of 2008, it took a while before the left and social movements took up the challenge of posing fundamental questions, of shifting “the further development of the life of the state” (Gramsci). Neoliberalism’s legitimation was undermined; still, the question of whether capitalism itself was in crisis was more typically discussed in bourgeois Sunday supplements than in influential groundbreaking strategy papers of the left and social movements.

The left was caught by surprise by the scale of the crisis, and its initial silence shows that analyses, policies and politics were hardly conceived in such a way that its own concepts could become practicable [=wirklich] (or even germane).

Left critique was strong where it addressed the manifestations of the crisis of the neoliberal model of politics and socialization, and stood on the side of the excluded and the surplus population [der Überflüssigen]. There was a lively and forceful critique of the social costs of neoliberalism. In 2003, a (fragile) anti-neoliberal bloc could be organized, in which left wings of trade-unions, anti-Hartz IV protests, the global-justice movement, critical intellectuals and the party Die LINKE formulated – despite all the differences between them – a critique of neoliberalism with a common direction.

Other struggles were carried out in a rather isolated way, for example the defensive battles against pensions at the age of 67 – and these hardly resulted in broadly shared concepts. Debates on societal alternatives (such as unconditional basic income, global social rights or solidarity economy) had limited public exposure, and they hardly resulted in broadly shared concepts. Added to this is the lack of worked out alternatives for the political regulation of high-tech modes of production. The relative weakness of the alternative concepts was, and is, to an important extent part of the “passive consensus around the hegemony” of neoliberalism, even if this has become more porous.

None of the protagonists and spectrums of the social left can at present credibly represent this project alone; a common grammar of struggles has still to be developed. The challenge of building an alliance and of debates around a project of a plural social left overlap.

In 2009, two parallel alliances, formed out of trade-union lefts, the party Die LINKE,  trade-union structures and anti-capitalist groups, organized the March 28 demonstration in Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, in which about 50,000 people took part.

The slogan “we won’t pay for your crisis” is an attempt – in the face of the general call for “common responsibility” for rescuing the banks – to name various interests as well as those who are politically responsible and those who profit economically [from the crisis]. Taxation of large assets, the reining in of financial markets, the drying up of tax oases [tax shelters], the rescinding of Agenda 2010 and of pensions at 67, and that the crisis not be dealt with at the cost of the South, are, among other demands, positions around which people can unite.

In the case of some concrete demands, there are often roadblocks: Some concrete demands – for example, from the spectrum of social protests and of the trade-union left, the demand for an immediate 500 euros ALG 2 standard rate [Unemployment Compensation II (“Hartz IV”)], for a 30-hour work week with full wage and personnel compensation as well as for a 10 euro minimum wage – contradict motions passed by union leadership bodies or don’t reflect the interests and mobilizing issues of the core work teams. Many employees in the automobile part supply sector, for example, know that work-time reduction with full compensatory wage increases would lead, on the level of a single company, to quicker bankruptcies and to unemployment, and they reject this demand. In this sense, it would be necessary to absorb into the demands forms of social or state mediation such as the redistribution of work, state equalization funds and offensively to take up radical work-time reduction as a society-wide concept. The demands “500 – 30 – 10” are the result of struggles and agreements of diverse spectrums in the movement against the Hartz reforms, but these movements in the last analysis remain weak. They express an agreement between jobless and social-protest initiatives and a part of the trade-union left against the division fostered between the jobless and the employed by neoliberalism’s low-wage and workfare policy. In the context of the crisis, this concern is very real; however, the defensive forms coming out of perspectives that cut across the boundaries between groups, recall lost struggles of the past.

Only to a limited extent are the positions connected of different spectrums connected to each other. Seldom are the perspectives of other spectrums recognized as concrete concerns; rather they are understood as reflecting institutional power. The more concretely the demands are formulated the greater seems to be the danger that the spectrums will move away from each other. At the same time, the retraction of concrete positions represents a possible breaking point, if, for example, social protest initiatives see their concrete demands as being tied to the acknowledgement of “their” life realities. Out of the struggles around Agenda 2010 the experience still shows that abstract demands have no prospect of being realized and of bringing about concrete improvements – and that is consciously taken into account by the “bigger” protagonists, like the trade-unions. The mistrust of the party Die LINKE and of the trade-unions is profound. The fact, for example, that the party, even before a demonstration, takes over the demands as their own is hardly seen as a success for the movement. In this, the contradictions of the relations of forces becomes evident. The dynamics of alliance formation are (still) not characterized by strong social struggles with “vital” demands which drive and inspire processes of agreeing upon a common project. As a result of the relative marginality of individual movement forces (such as the movement of the unemployed), the decisive strategic questions, which are posed in the organization of jobless and “poor,” are in danger of disappearing from the field of vision, questions such as: How are the splits between the various groups of the “precariat” (casual and temp workers) to be overcome? How are solidaristic alliances possible between the precariat and the middle strata who are threatened by downward mobility?

The trade-union leaderships kept their distance and mobilized for their own day of demonstrations on May 16, 2009. The demonstrations on the European Trade-Union Day themselves were, as an after-effect of the March 28 demonstrations, clearly characterized at the rank-and-file level by left statements, and they pushed the unions toward a more intensive mobilization. The education strike by students in June attracted broad public attention. Many organizers and participants saw this activity within the context of a critique of the way the crisis is being handled and of neoliberal (educational) policy. In an action known as the “bank hold-up,” large groups visited banks and drew connections between the bail-out of the banks and the financialization of study and education.

Despite the success of the mobilizations, it became apparent that diverse strategic assessments were blocking the development of the further capacity to act together. The fact that the March and May demonstrations were not followed by mass protests, sowed the seeds of resignation among some activists. In part social unrest, protest and movement are expected “if the crisis really reaches people,” that is, if, after the national elections, the cushioning policies reach their limits. The expectation that “then it will explode” is very minimally mediated in terms of the political and cultural relations of forces, and this kind of Adventism leads to abstinence from politics. In the best case, this attitude leads to political engagement for the strengthening of local alliances and for the construction of cooperation that can then be activated “in case of emergency.” Within the alliances (except in regional and local associations, which are closer to the trade-union left), the unions hardly appear as primary protagonists capable of mobilization. In the context of the crisis, they emphasize corporatist solutions. In the mostly plant-level attempts to rescue “what can be rescued” through concessions, no social-political offensive is emerging, and even jobs and work conditions cannot be secured in the middle term through such methods (see Urban 2009, p. 72 f; Riexinger 2009). Renewal efforts, alliances with social movements and an orientation to offensive wage struggles, which could compensate the loss in real wages of recent years, are in danger of being pushed to the background.

In this, the unions are in part strengthening their alignment with the SPD and orienting themselves toward the goal of negotiating concessions in the case of a Grand Coalition – they have little to expect from Die LINKE after the election except for its sharing the same struggle. What works against this is involvement in crisis management: The so-called “car-scrappage scheme,” crisis packages and reduced working hours are parts of a “national competitive-position-based crisis management” with which the government is trying to maintain social stability. Fierce internal confrontations around the demonstrations of March 28 and May 16, 2009 have shown that these orientations are objects of contention within the unions. Through the project of a new public deal, that is, of a reining in of privatization and the market by the enlargement of the public sector and of social infrastructure, common perspectives of Ver.di, social movements and other parts of the social left are thinkable (Riexinger 2009). Another “entry-project” of a plural “mosaic left” within an offensive strategy for dealing with the crisis could be tying discussions of securing jobs with work-time reduction, ecological conversion, cost-free mobility infrastructure, conversion of key sectors into public property and new forms of economic democracy (Urban 2009).

In order for these diverse fragments of the protest movements to find their way to being a “mosaic,” they need a process of communication and agreement over shared goals, or at least a common strategic perspective of how diverse but not antithetical goals can be linked together. In order to present something that can compete in the debate with liberal – and right-wing – populism, it is necessary to connect popular-democratic positions to a critique of capitalism and to egalitarian-solidaristic forms that includes global dimensions.

Focusing on Rosa Luxemburg’s concept of “revolutionary Realpolitik” – which, however, due to the very different social situation of today’s politics can if needed be conceived instead as “radical Realpolitik” – could be a contested area of agreement for linking the diverse initiatives of strategic center – left alliances to socialist “entry projects.”

Literature:

Riexinger, Bernd, 2009: Perspektiven des Protestes. Wie weiter nach den Demonstrationen in Frankfurt und Berlin?, in: Sozialismus, H. 7/ 2009,

Urban, Hans-Jürgen, 2009: Die Mosaik-Linke. Vom Aufbruch der Gewerkschaften zur Erneuerung der Bewegung, in: Blätter f. dt. u. intern. Politik, H. 5, 2009, 71-8

 

Wave Power Potential:

A Whole New 'Cool'

for West Coast Surf Lovers

By Ron Ruggiero

Apollo News Service

April 14, 2010

If you mention “West Coast” and “waves” in the same sentence, most people think of tanned, Bermuda shorts-clad California surfers.

The work of Clackamas-based Oregon Iron Works (OIW) could change that in the coming years.

Oregon Iron Works is building the first-ever commercial wave energy system in North America. In December 2009, Ocean Power Technologies, a renewable energy company that specializes in wave-powered electricity generation, awarded Oregon Iron Works a contract to build buoys for its latest project off the coast of Reedsport, Oregon. Phase one of the project includes the production and installation of one “PowerBuoy,” while phase two includes an expected nine additional buoys that, when finished, will generate 1.5 megawatts of electricity.

Though today’s wind farms and solar arrays generate much more power than a small array of buoys, this project is an important stepping stone in the development of wave-power technology. According to David Gibson, project manager for Oregon Iron Works, “Wave energy is about where wind was 20 to 30 years ago. So, there will be a long curve in improvement as we develop wave systems. The United States is very good at innovation. This is an opportunity for us to step up and make an enormous contribution to the development of this new technology.”

Gibson’s excitement about the possibilities for wave-energy innovation doesn’t end there. He also sees enormous job potential: “As we develop this technology, we can export it. America can compete with China and India when it comes to products with highly sophisticated manufactured requirements.” Wave buoys meet that definition and thus present an opportunity to create highly paid manufacturing jobs, which, on average, pay $25,000 more per year than service sector jobs.

The economic opportunity inherent in manufacturing clean energy components is what led the Apollo Alliance to support the Investment in Manufacturing Progress and Clean Technology (IMPACT) Act, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown’s bill to help small and medium-sized manufacturers expand into the clean energy marketplace. The IMPACT Act would help states develop loan programs to help manufacturers like Oregon Iron Works retool or expand their operations to make clean energy products and components. Ingredients to Success The quality of its work—and its workforce—has long distinguished Oregon Iron Works.

“Without a doubt, the quality of the workforce was a significant factor in our decision to award the contract to OIW,” said Phil Pelligrino, vice president of business development for Ocean Power Technologies. As Oregon Iron Works produces the first PowerBuoy for commercial application in North America, quality work is important. OIW’s workforce is experienced, and most employees have been at the company long-term.

The company’s workforce is mostly unionized, represented by members of both the Ironworkers Local 516 and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 48. Chandra Brown, vice president of Oregon Iron Works, gushes about the company’s employees and refers to what their craftspeople do as “art.” The wave power project provides ample opportunities for employees to perform.

The first buoy will employ approximately 30 employees. Phase Two of the project will create approximately 180 jobs over two years. Oregon’s potential for wave power was another driving factor in Ocean Power Technologies’ choosing to site its first wave park in Oregon.

“Their wave front is among the best in the world. They have the most significant wave power you can find,” said Pelligrino when assessing Oregon’s unique advantages. According to the Renewable Northwest Project, “Oregon and Washington have the best wave energy resource in the lower 48 states…and could eventually generate several thousand megawatts from wave power.”

A steady stakeholder process was another reason that Oregon was an attractive location for the first commercial wave power development in North America. Several years ago, when wave power was first under consideration, the Oregon Solutions process brought together a host of stakeholders to discuss bringing wave power to the state. Oregon Solutions was created by the Oregon State Legislature, and a specific team was convened for the Reedsport project at the request of the governor. For Ocean Power Technologies, the process was a significant help in building support, allaying concerns, and streamlining the permitting process.

Looking forward, Pelligrino said, “We very much look forward to working with all the stakeholders. This won’t be a snowball project. We want to work in a consultative and collaborative way, study impacts, and ensure environmental protection.” Although the first buoys off Oregon’s coast will be small in scale, when compared to wind, the generation potential of wave power is enormous. As noted by Bracken Hendricks and Jay Inslee in their book Apollo’s Fire, “There is enough wave energy in a section of our coastline ten miles wide by ten miles long to entirely supply California’s grid.” Other estimates note that wave power could supply over 10 percent of America’s electricity needs. As wave power reaches its full potential in the coming years, a new anthem, a la the Beach Boys, just might be needed.

'Sovereignty of Labor:'

A Deeper Look at the

Mondragon Principles

A series on the core principles of

the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain

By John McNamara

http://www.cooperativeconsult.com

The Mondragon principle “Sovereignty of Labor” created departure from the cooperative movement. While the Rochdale Pioneers had good intentions, they abandoned worker cooperation in the 1870’s. The Fabian Socialist moved even further from the ideals of Robert Owen declaring consumerism as the lowest common denominator for human relationships eschewing workers as merely another stakeholder group. Even the French cooperativist Charles Gide turned away from worker associations. Sadly, this act left the labor movement adrift from the cooperative world even as organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World and the Congress of Industrial Organizations developed worldviews akin to the ideal of cooperation.

In the US, as in most of the Capitalist dominated world, the idea of labor being sovereign is almost non-existent. Business schools spend a lot of money teaching future managers how to manage workers—increase their productivity and the companies profits Except in the more enlightened firms, managers treat workers as errant children. Likewise, the dominant culture makes work something to be avoided and champions obstruction as “fighting the man”. People who do work hard tend to be treated as suck-ups and “upwardly mobile”. We mock the Ragged Dick stories in which “by luck and by pluck and good boy may succeed”. We have been conditioned to hate work and to distrust anyone who suggests that we work hard. The wobblies ran a cartoon called Blockhead who ridiculed the “company man”.

A part of me says, “damn straight!” why should workers gleefully assist the people exploiting them? The life of a worker under capitalism is not any better than it was under feudalism. In some ways, it is worse. The bond between serf and lord was based on land, food and safety. Capitalism replaced those bonds of survival by monetizing them and making currency the commonality of humanity. The chattel slave became the wage slave in the first round of outsourcing that allowed the owner to reduce or eliminate the cost of housing and feeding the workers in their employ.

The Jesuits had a different tradition, thankfully. St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit Order, took his vows of celibacy just a few kilometers from Mondragon in the foothills overlooking Onati. The Basque followers of St. Ignatius believed that work could lead to transformation and salvation. In the Spanish Empire they attempted to covert the native Americans of the Tipu-Guarni* through worker collectives known at Jesuit Reductions and immortalized in the movie, The Mission. It was a modern day member of their order, Don José María Arizmendiarreta (DJMA) who would bring that ethic to the small town of Mondragon and teach five young mean the value of cooperation.

The Principles of Mondragon Cooperative Corporation state:

“The Mondragon Cooperative Experience considers that Labour is the principal factor for transforming nature, society and human beings themselves, and therefore:

a) Renounces the systemic contracting of salaried workers

b) Gives labour total primacy in the organization of cooperatives

c) Considers Labour to be worthy, in essence, in the distribution of the wealth created.

d) Manifests its will to extend the options for work to all members of the society.”

There should be a different culture in worker cooperatives, where the workers truly own and control the company. However, waving a magic wand cannot do it. To this end, it is important for worker cooperatives to adopt the notion of the sovereignty of labor. We need to instill a cooperative work ethic in our organizations. Not a work ethic based on enriching others (or even consumers for that matter), but of social transformation or us and our peers based on honesty, openness, and solidarity and caring for others.

Don Jose spoke often on this topic. “Man transforms and makes nature fertile through his labour,” he wrote”, and labour is the greatest asset that the community possesses: to live with dignity, one must embrace work.” Of DJMA, did not mean a mindless embrace of the protestant work ethic to benefit the sputtering Franco economic engine. He meant that workers should own their labor. They should be, as another Jesuit priest from the previous generation argued, “Masters of their Destiny”.

That is the point of this principle. We, as workers, should honor work. We should give to our cooperatives 100% of our effort. When we do this, we begin to transform ourselves and our community creating something of greater value. We must honor all work and recognize that all of those who work as members of our cooperative (or as people who may become members). Sometimes, this work ethic can turn itself on its head and we regard the presence of “management” or “leaders” as we would in the outside world. This is an incorrect understanding of this principle. Sr. Ormaechea denounces the “duplicity of individualism” which might make those of us in the US wince a bit.  However, the sovereignty of labor is in relation to capital not individuals. In the capitalist world, we have learned that managers and leaders tend to be the agents of capital, not labor (sadly this is even true of some labor leaders). The role of the cooperative should be to empower all workers. Management or leaders (as we shall see) come from the workers and belong to them—they are not alien to the work force, but part of it.

We do not invoke this principle by emulating Talyorist strategies or adopting a proprietor’s attitude towards co-workers. Treating our fellow members as our employees is not the correct method of expressing the sovereignty of labor. Instead, we embrace this principle by developing each other as co-leaders in our enterprise. We operationalize this principle by making decisions that enrich the lives of the workers (in terms of safety, education, and health) over the base need for profit. We honor this principle by treating each other as equals and as humans deserving of our respect and love. By doing these things, we change the nature of work from an act of necessity to one of social transformation. We overcome the cultural animosity acquired from being a wage slave to create a new culture of mutual self-help and self-responsibility.

*The currency of Paraguay is the Guarni, which represents the historic measure of wealth in the region (how many Guarni were owned by the Spanish slaveholders)

A Left Role, Renewed Identity,

and How-To, in Campaigns for

National Service Jobs Programs

By John Case

Socialist-Economics Group

Does the current crisis justify an expanded role for government as an employer of last result?

Consider the following facts from EPI research:

Number unemployed: 15.4 million (up from 7.5 million in December 2007) Portion of official unemployed considered structural: 3.9 million Portion of unemployed who have been jobless more than six months: 38.3% Total jobs lost during the recession: 8.0 million Jobs needed to return to pre-recession unemployment rate: 10.9 million Number of job-seekers per job opening: 6.1 Unemployment rate: 10.0% Underemployment rate: 17.2%; Share of workers un- or underemployed: more than 1 in 6 States with double-digit unemployment in October, 2009: 15 White unemployment: 9.3%; African-American unemployment: 15.6%; Hispanic unemployment:12.7% Manufacturing jobs lost since the start of the recession: 2.1 million (15.5% of sector's jobs) Construction jobs lost in the recession: 1.6 million (20.8%, nearly one in five construction jobs) Mass layoffs (50 or more people by a single employer) in October 2009: 2,127; jobs lost:217,182 Under- and unemployed, marginally attached and involuntary part-time workers: 26.9 million

Americans with no health insurance in 2008: 46.3 million Annual Social Security benefit for average retiree: $13,922; Share of older Americans receiving all their income from Social Security: more than 1 out of 4 Number of children in poverty in 2008: 14.1 million (over one-third) Drop in real median income from 2007 to 2008: 3.6% (largest one-year drop since 1967) Growth rate of nominal, hourly wages of production workers over the last three months:1.7% Additional people covered by Medicaid/SCHIP in 2008: 3 million

Not since the Great Depression has structural unemployment been so intense or sustained. Despite faster and smarter liquidity and fiscal efforts by government than occurred then, employment decline has merely decelerated 24 months into what is now dubbed 'The Great Recession'. It is not yet near enough to avert 5-10 years of unemployment rates above 6% (the level at which the 'Great Recession' started). The foundation of New Deal anti-depression actions, and one of the most successful and long lasting in its effects, was directly putting men to work in public works projects that became associated with several national service programs. The economist Hyman Minsky coined the term 'Employer of Last Resort' to describe government full employment efforts, which were part of his economic prescription, discussed more below, for countering capitalism's inherent vulnerability to financial instability.

This article explores the appropriateness, precedents and how-to's of national service programs (the chief US version of employer of last resort). in responding to the current crisis. The moral and social virtues of putting the unemployed to work in the creation of useful and meaningful public goods, instead of subjecting them to sustained idleness, should be self-evident.

The path to national service

1933 was the worst year of the Great Depression with unemployment peaking at 25.2%. Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and opened the first concentration camp at Dachau. Tens of thousands traveled the road and rail in America looking for work, and the US banking system which was under great strain was propped up by the US banking act of 1933 to try and stop the panic of people withdrawing their money from the banks. The continuing drought in the Midwest cursed even more of the land into dust bowls.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as the 32nd US President on March 6, 1933. A bill known as the Emergency Work Progress Bill was introduced in Congress on March 21, enacted into law March 31. This bill spawned numerous federal agencies, such as the Public Works Administration (PWA), its successor the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civil Works Administration (CWA) and its successor, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). There were approximately 5,000 camps of 200 enrollees set up in all states, plus the American Territories. The enrollees enlisted for periods of six months at a time and were paid $1.00 per day, of which $25.00 per month was sent directly to their families. The CCC was made up of approximately 3.5 million men, 225,000 World War I veterans, the balance young American boys, unmarried, between the ages of 17 and 28 years. The CCC existed for over nine years until June 30, 1942, at which time it was absorbed into America's Armed Forces. General George C Marshall, Army Chief of Staff under Roosevelt, testified before Congress at the end of World War II that the early training given to the men of the CCC was a major factor in America winning that war.

Direct government employment is the most practical and realizable path to capping unemployment, and adding credibility to the much needed stimulus efforts. This is especially true in a major economic crisis -- but also should be a permanent feature of government intervention to address structural unemployment -- lost jobs that are never coming back. Various programs to provide tax incentives and sub-contracts to private contractors do not work nearly as well -- witness the poor response of hard-pressed homeowners to recent winterizing incentives, and the lengthy delays common with contracting. Picture the thankful and very direct response to the alternative: neighbors contacting neighbors to do energy audits, perform the winterization work, making the personal connection, making a difference.

President Obama's jobs programs need less PWA and more CWA!

The PWA was the Public Works Administration, led by Harold Ickes Sr. The CWA was the Civil Works Administration, led by Harry Hopkins. Both were New Deal agencies created in 1933 to get Americans quickly back to work at a time when unemployment reached 25 percent, its highest point in US history.

The PWA tackled unemployment indirectly by spending money largely through private contractors. Only $110 million of the program's authorized $3.3 billion was spent during the program's crucial first year. Frustrated by PWA's slow progress, Roosevelt yielded to the pleas of his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, to help get unemployed workers through the coming winter by putting them directly onto the federal payroll. Roosevelt had been reluctant to create a federal work program for fear of alienating Bill Green, the president of the American Federation of Labor, who believed such programs would undermine the private labor market where the average wage was about $1.35 per hour. Hopkins argued that Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, had in 1898 proposed essentially the same idea, and that the program could be kept from getting large enough to undermine private labor rates.

Roosevelt diverted not quite one-third of the PWA budget to CWA with the goal of putting to work 4 million people. As a percentage of the population, that would be the equivalent of putting 10 million people to work today. Under Hopkins leadership the CWA got this done in 2 months time. The current economic downturn has yet to bring us near the depths of the Great Depression, but the situation is dire. The official unemployment rate now stands at 10+ %, a figure that rises to more than 17 percent when you add in people who've given up looking for work and people working part-time only because they can't find full-time work. Further analysts calculate that at least 2.5% of the official unemployment rate is structural -- that is, jobs that are never coming back under market conditions. The economy shed more jobs last year than in any single year since 1945. The outlook for recovery -- given current stimulus efforts -- sees no return to pre-recession employment for at least 4 years.

The CWA benefited from Harry Hopkins noted adaptive leadership and organizational style. But the CWA was also structurally better able than the PWA to mobilize quickly because it could avoid the cumbersome -- and often corrupt, political --- process of putting contracts out to bid and all the other obstacles to swift action that arise with public-private partnerships. CWA enjoyed immediate carte blanche to apply directly the apparatus of the federal government. Hopkins shifted staff from the federal relief program he'd headed up, seized tools and equipment from Army warehouses, and cut checks through the Veterans Administration's vast disbursement system. The CWA laid 12 million feet of sewer pipe and built or made substantial improvements to 255,000 miles of roads, 40,000 schools, 3,700 playgrounds, and nearly 1,000 airports (not to mention 250,000 outhouses still badly needed in rural America). Most of the jobs involved manual labor, to which most of the population, having been raised on the farm, was far more accustomed than it would be today. But the CWA also provided considerable white-collar work, employing, among others, statisticians, bookbinders, architects, 50,000 teachers, and 3,000 writers and artists. This was achieved with a remarkable minimum of overhead. Of the nearly $1 billion—the equivalent today of nearly $16 billion—that Hopkins spent during the CWA's five-month existence, 80 percent went directly into workers' pockets and thence stimulated the economy by going into the cash registers of grocers and shop owners. Most of the rest went to equipment costs. Less than 2 percent was paid for administration. The Peoples Weekly World editorial board article on 'New Deal 2.0' has more extensive detail on the achievements of the CWA-CCC.  (http://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2F...).

The only serious obstacle the CWA encountered is the same one that President Obama would face today: right wing politics. Republicans and conservative Democrats in Congress screamed bloody murder about Roosevelt's dalliance with what they termed "state socialism"—Republicans like Landon who were willing to admit a government program might actually work were as rare then as they are today—and the segregationist Georgia Gov. Eugene Talmadge was apoplectic to learn that black laborers were being paid as much as white ones. Once winter had passed, Roosevelt, worried that the controversy would cost him Democratic seats in the coming midterm congressional elections, ordered Hopkins to shut the CWA down. A year later, though, with huge numbers still unemployed, Roosevelt put Hopkins in charge of the Works Progress Administration. Over its life, the WPA would create, on the model of the CWA, more than 8 million jobs, which today would be equivalent to creating more than 20 million.

The Kennedy and Clinton administrations (the latter to a lesser extent and with lesser success) also promoted National Service. The Peace Corp, VISTA, AmeriCorp were prominent initiatives.

A new national service provision incorporated into the first Obama stimulus package has nearly been drowned out by its vicious enemies on the right wing, who like to compare folks repairing the Appalachian Trail, or winterizing homes, to fascist Hitler brown-shirts brigades. In addition it has been made nearly invisible in the pressures of the immediate struggle to pass health care reform. But I believe it is a critical component in the economic recovery from this crisis. The debate over the shape and size and funding sources of the needed second stimulus is officially underway since the recent Obama Jobs Summit .

It is a good time to reintroduce an "employer-of-last-resort" proposal, which is the economic role that national service programs perform. Without the government stepping in as the employer-of-last-resort for all those whose jobs are not coming back -- an unsustainable level of long-term unemployment will ensue (for many this is already the case). To have 10-20% of the workforce idle can become a very corrosive and dangerous force. It puts continuous, punishing downward pressure on working people's incomes.  It inevitably provokes sharp divisions, including persistent anti-immigrant, racist outbursts and panics. Such pressures can bring down the best laid recovery plans, and presidents, including progressive ones.  Nowhere are the defects of advanced multinational corporate society more exposed than in a great depression. Only more socialist like measures, such as direct government employment, will work. In such crises, markets will not fix themselves, nor the social damage done, on their own. Free market apologists frequently counter that "in the long run" markets will return to "equilibrium". But, as JM Keynes famously observed: "in the long run, we are all dead".

In the struggle to compel the government to assume the "employer-of-last-resort" role, finally putting a cap on the unemployment rate, all progressive and democratic forces have a big stake in the outcome.

The values of both the public goods national service produces, as well as the social and moral values that progressive service projects nourish in both the participants and those whom are served, are as close to those envisioned and cherished by the founders of both socialist and radical democratic visions of social relations as one is likely to find in this era. To labor directly in service to the working people of the United States -- is a high calling to us. And with the exception of the word "working" this sentence and its intended spirit quotes the current president of the United States, on the purpose of national service -- a circumstance not seen since at least Kennedy. Distinct from some other political forces, we on the Left focus our understanding of service with a class bias. We see the expansion of the programs to include all who are structurally unemployed, including youth and seniors. And distinct from the 1930's we also envision self-organization of these workers as the bulwark that can best prevent their being turned toward reactionary purposes when the President may not be at all progressive, and at all times we champion the progressive goals and ideals of the service. But this is hardly a sectarian tendency, since public goods serving the working people of our country serve all the people as well.

None other than the Communist Manifesto identified as "communists" those who, among few other qualifications, distinguish themselves as follows: "in the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole." Progressive-led national service is not the only means by which advanced social qualities can be realized. But its timeliness and its potential to reconnect socialist and progressive ideals to tangible initiatives, demonstrable integrity and a better way of both working and living -- make it shine as a service and growth opportunity for the Left not seen in the US in many decades.

What socialist values are promoted in progressive national service?

1. National service represents, or can represent, a move toward full employment in an economy which is predominantly -- although not exclusively -- still capitalist and dominated by private property relations. It is a move which can do more to stabilize capitalism's inherent instability than any other reform. Economic development under any economic system must have an efficient means to allocate -- and reallocate -- people toward productive labor. Productivity and efficiency are in constant flux under the pressures of supply, demand, level of workforce culture and skills, technological change and many other factors. A government employer-of-last-resort program that is permanently targeted at structural unemployment effectively removes poverty, ruin and death as the consequences of capitalism's raw means of effecting structural change.

2. National service is dedicated to the production of public goods. The expansion of wealth in public goods, as contrasted commodities, is a key feature of the advance of a much less unequal society.

3. Since Paul Samuelson "public goods" have acquired a specific economic definition, independent of the range of goods and services already supplied by public enterprise. They are either "non-rival" [there is no scarcity] or non-exclusive [use by non-buyers cannot be prohibited]), or both. Their scope is much enlarged since the 1930's. This is evident in two ways: first, the proportion of government GDP to private GDP has steadily increased, stimulated by both market failures (health, education, etc) in various areas or externalities (environmental, security, etc); second, the proportion of intangible goods to physical commodities has dramatically increased. Intangible goods are considered very poor commodities by many economists and, barring certain monopoly conditions (eg Microsoft) have many qualities of public goods. In addition the average skills of the labor force today are much advanced since that time. To traditional public works such as roads, schools, hospitals, security, must be added (in degrees) health care, too-big-to-fail enterprises, more rental housing, and many educational, public health and environmental initiatives. In many ways the economic transition from capitalism to a more advanced society can be measured in the proportion of wealth in public goods relative to commodities.

4. As production of commodities becomes more and more automated, services (both public and private) gradually become the dominant form of work. The provision of services, with often very low capital accumulation thresholds for firms by comparison to industrial firms in the past, is more amenable to cooperative, non-profit, or shared-profit models of enterprise---if stability and growth can be sustained. Employer-of-last-resort programs focus exclusively on public goods and service.

5. From each according to his ability, to each according to their needs -- this was the slogan of the Communist Manifesto reflecting the ideal principle upon which an economy freed of commodity production and its inevitable divisions of labor, including the division between labor and capital, could be constructed. National service in its progressive vision models exactly this principle. It is even more advanced than the principle of socialism which merely envisions the fulfillment of bourgeois right -- the ideals of the enlightenment, and of the declaration of Independence, for all who labor -- from each according to his ability, to each according to his work. Equal pay for equal work + investment in people's abilities == socialism. Abolition of the division of labor in commodities == the foundation of the communist ideal.

Steps to take

Current status of national service, employer-of-last-resort, programs

Of course the biggest current national service program is the US military.  And in many ways the terms and benefits of military service will have a strong influence on terms, standards and benefits of national non-military service, if it truly evolves into an employer-of-last-resort alternative.

In his inaugural address, President Obama said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works."

That stands in contrast to the Republican orthodoxy, which says "government is the problem", or various Democratic accommodations to Republican orthodoxy, which say: "the era of big government is over".

If government can do the job best, let it.

On April 27th of this year President Barack Obama signed the Edward M.  Kennedy Serve America Act later today as part of his pledge to expand programs and funding for community and civil service opportunities across the nation. The legislation was named for longtime services supporter Sen.  Edward Kennedy, and authorizes nearly $6 billion, a 25% increase, through 2014 to benefit existing programs, including AmeriCorps and the Peace Corp, as well as new service programs. There are 75,000 active AmeriCorps volunteers today, and the law intends to expand that number to 250,000 by 2017.

Melody Barnes, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council said: “We really believe that this is just the beginning.” The Corporation for National and Community Service oversees AmeriCorps and other service programs,has received more than 40,000 online AmeriCorps applications were received in March—six times the number from a year earlier.

The CNCS is a federal agency created in 1993 by President Clinton and is overseen by a bipartisan board appointed by the president. Since it began, more than 570,000 have volunteered 718 million hours and received $1.6 billion in education awards to pay for college.

Counting youth, first time job seekers, seniors forced on fixed incomes, workers laid off whose entire occupations will not return -- upwards of 8 million workers could fully benefit from direct employment programs -- and do so without causing dangerous inflation in private or other public labor markets so long as the average size of the programs remains targeting structural unemployment, and so long as the pay in the programs corresponds to the original service principles -- less than the prevailing wage, but more than unemployment and not less than the minimum compensation.

Having Government play the role of the employer-of-last-resort, through programs like those in the national service tradition and spirit, cannot be the only component in a full recovery, full employment strategy. It may not even the most important component of broader public employment in the overall economy. Most Infrastructure development, for example, will require long-term capital investments and permanent jobs in the millions.  Employer-of-last-resort programs address specifically the structurally unemployed faction of the unemployed population: workers for whom there will be no recall, and whose occupation, in fact, is in long term decline.  In addition to compensation, participants must receive in exchange educational and retraining opportunities. We are, in a sense, investing in losers in the restructuring to ensure their successful re-entry into the overall labor market. And we are also helping create better citizens and more conscious forces who have helped lead efforts to materially and spiritually strengthen communities. By substituting service for unemployment benefits for these folks, we simultaneously place a cap on unemployment beyond which the employer-of-last-resort alternative kicks in.

Hyman Minsky

The late Post-Keynesian economist Hyman Minsky gave national service, employer-of-last-resort, projects like the WPA a key role in his strategies for countering (not eliminating, just balancing) capitalism's inherent tendency toward instability. His classic work, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, is -- now enjoying a celebrated revival in the post-monetarist age -- He favored, in a word, a "more socialist" capitalism, with lower investment and higher consumption; one that maintains full employment; one that fosters smaller organizations, especially in the private sector. He was highly skeptical that capitalism could ever achieve full employment without direct job creation by government. He argued only government can provide an infinitely elastic demand for labor, which a full employment program requires, and that such a comprehensive program would not exceed 1.25% of GDP. Experience in India, Argentina, China and Vietnam -- all of which embrace Minsky like employment philosophies -- validate this estimate. In addition, Minsky argued that, unlike welfare or unemployment, in which income is increased without an increase in supply of goods or services, employer of last resort programs are not inflationary.

Labor Ambivalence

The resistance to the WPA programs of the 1930's from the American Federation of Labor President William Green is mirrored today in the lukewarm at best support of national service in either of Labor's major federations, and for the same reason. Fear of competition with the private labor market. Yet the history of wage patterns in the years following the WPA launch in 1934 did not justify Mr Green's fears. In the first place the programs mirrored exactly advocated by Mr Green's predecessor, Samuel Gompers, and endorsed by Eugene debs. The effect of the programs were to tighten overall labor markets and reduce and in some cases reverse the dramatic fall in wages that occurred following the crash of 1929. The nearly 8 million men who passed through the WPA era programs were actually counted as part of the unemployed. The proportion of union wages to service compensation did not change throughout the era so there was no harm the service programs caused to average wages -- especially as the tightened labor markets gave strength to the great CIO organizing drives underway that would soon double the size of organized labor. Some have argued the tighter immigration laws in the 30's also tightened labor markets as well, but, in any event, national service played a positive, not a negative role in the union upsurge of the late 1930's.

In the new era the fight for full employment, including in the employer-of-last-resort efforts, could use a labor lead this time, to in fact preserve the base for the progressive interpretation of "in service to the people of the United States".

How Can the Left Make a Difference?

Below is an example "home audit" project scenario, adapted from the serve.gov website, exploring the mechanics of forming a progressive service project, and transforming it into a base for public direct green employment funding and management.

General suggestions for getting started on any project:

Create a team with your friends and neighbors to share the effort; Give a mission and name to your project that reflects the shared values of your team. Mission: Invoke themes that strengthen the project's ultimate political visibility. Set outcome-based goals and track your progress to those goals; Celebrate your successes together.

An environmental "Home Audit" project to audit potential saved charges and efficiency for all renters and homeowners for known energy investments.

Audit Facts

Every year, more than $13 billion worth of energy leaks from houses through small holes and cracks. That's more than $150 per family! A compact fluorescent light bulb uses 75 percent less energy than a regular bulb – and it can last up to four years. Across America, home refrigerators use the electricity of 25 large power plants every year. Some new refrigerators are so energy-smart they use less electricity than a light bulb! A hot water faucet that leaks one drop per second can add up to 165 gallons a month. That's more than one person uses in two weeks. An energy-smart clothes washer can save more water in one year than one person drinks in an entire lifetime! A crack as small as 1/16th of an inch around a window frame can let in as much cold air as leaving the window open three inches! An automatic dishwasher uses less hot water than doing dishes by hand - an average of six gallons less, or more than 2,000 gallons per year. This summer, commit yourself and a team of your friends, family, and neighbors to help save energy in your home and to help others do so, too.  Join United We Serve. This tool kit will give you the basics to start reducing our carbon footprint, recruit a team, organize your group, and make an impact this summer.

The Challenge: Many community-based organizations do not have enough capacity to manage a large number of volunteers, so they need people who can organize themselves in coordination with them. As an organized group you can either organize a group to be a positive addition to a community-based organization, or, if such an organization does not exist, to be a well-organized independently-run group that fills a needed gap in the community.

Step One: Identify Local Partners

Check out the organizations already doing good work in your area. Many existing service groups have identified community needs and built the expertise to provide solutions. Call or visit the websites of national and local energy and environmental groups and ask how volunteers can contribute. Examples could be your state's energy office, your local utility company, The Alliance to Save Energy, The Department of Energy, and the Sierra Club. If no environmental organizations exist in your community, you have all the tools needed to start an auditing team. Information on how to perform an audit can be found at the Department of Energy's website. If you want to learn more about saving energy, a simple Internet search on energy efficiency will bring tons of resources and information on how you can save energy. You can also contact your local home improvement store like Home Depot, Lowe's, etc. to find out about information and products they offer to help you save money in your home. Energy challenges vary in different parts of the country.

Step Two: Build a Team to share the work, motivate members and hold each other accountable.

Build community. Ask your family, comrades, friends, colleagues, faith group members, book club devotees -- you have a book group, right??? --to serve with you. Labor and other organizations that serve the unemployed can be important sponsors and partners. Tip -- serve good food at house meetings whenever possible. Encourage participation that reflects the racial, national, ethnic, age and sexual diversity within the working people of your community -- but do not let imperfections slow getting started.

Step Three: Set a Goal, including dates, and hold yourself accountable.

Commit as individuals and as a team to reducing carbon emissions by a certain amount and audit a certain number of homes. focus on communities who most need and would benefit by a public effort at energy efficiency. Set your goals high to stretch yourself. Keep track of how you are doing and designate someone to be responsible for updating the group on how you are progressing toward your goals. Commit, focus, and follow through.

Step Four: Serve Your Community --do the audits, reach out to your neighbors and colleagues, and reduce carbon footprints. Step Five: Report and Celebrate Successes and develop a campaign to implement the conclusions of the audit.

Your team members, your community, your city councils, Mayors, legislators and Congressional representatives, and the President want to know about your results and hear your stories. Share your accomplishments by reporting your results as widely as possible, including on the President's service blog: www.serve.gov. From recent efforts, it is almost certain the result of audits reveal many families who qualify for already existing winterization programs who either do not know they exist, or who found applying for them, arranging for contractors, equipment, etc too daunting to take advantage of in a recession, if at all. If the state will not intervene and serve as middlemen for the consumers, the winterization funds in the first stimulus will remain largely un-deployed. Ergo -- a strong argument for government directly using stimulus funds to hire the work done. Yet it will also show substantial saving that would accrue to families if relatively modest energy saving investments could be made. Using a national service program for such work gives a very large return for dollar invested, and a political foundation for expanding public work and putting people back to work directly through a funded winterization project, or other energy saving measures that will vary by area climate, resources and season. Demonstrating a strong, green job creating investment that also saves consumers money is a stronger issue than many successful candidates for public office have been afforded.

The president's serve.gov site has other examples and tool-kits to assist groups form and initiate their own service projects that reflect their particular concerns and interests, whether the domain of the effort is the environment, conflict resolution, education, health, or other issues.

Yes We Can!