On Sunday's Weekend Edition, Jim Zarroli reported on the situation of workers who were laid off two years ago after Carrier Corporation shut down a plant and laid off workers from its Syracuse plant - Workers Face a Cold World After Carrier. The story repeated over and over again for these workers is that they are barely getting by after losing their manufacturing jobs. But something important was missing from the discussion.
In fact, Carrier has been laying off lots of workers and moving their work out of the country. As in the closure of its McMinnville, Tenn plant., in 2005, eliminating 1,300 jobs.
As for the Syracuse plant, in 2004 Carrier
rejected a $210 million package of state, federal and union assistance intended to keep Carrier from moving 1,200 manufacturing jobs out of the state and overseas. The package included wage cuts and other savings offered by one of its unions. Carrier officials said the aid package did not deal with the company's economic realities. On Oct. 6, Carrier said it would close the two plants at its East Syracuse site and move them to Georgia, Singapore and China.
Just after listening to this story, I turned to Ben Stein's N. Y. Times Business Section column in which he reflected on the astounding amount of money corporations have been amassing this past year. He reports that
the members of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index alone had more than $2.6 trillion in cash and equivalents at the end of 2006. That is a stunning amount.
The corporations simply do not know what to do with it.
Since they have a lot of cash, many are figuring that the best use for it is to buy back their own stock and go private. In a way, they don't have much choice. There is so much money sloshing around compared to what a corporation can legitimately spend it on.
Or is there? Not too much money. Is there nothing legitimate they could spend it on or invest in.
Both stories and the corporations overlooked the best possible use of their money, and that is to give their workers a big raise and health coverage.
We all know that many workers are in terrible shape these days. Many have lost health insurance or have poor quality health insurance. And corporations are cutting jobs like crazy. Working class parents cannot afford decent childcare.
Poverty and lack of health care means we have a workforce that is unable to operate at peak efficiency. And it's not as if the workers had nothing to do with amassing that money. US workers have been highly productive, but they have not been rewarded for that productivity. Rather all the rewards have gone to the corporations.
Why is this?
It is because we now have a seriously unbalanced system in which corporations, aided and abetted by their friends in the administration, have amassed power so overwhelming that workers lack the power to demand fair treatment.
One reason is that unionization rates are declining. Another is that unemployment has stayed high enough that workers fear being replaced by un- or underemployed workers. Why is unemployment so high? One reason is the the Fed's policies and NAIRU. When the Fed sees unemployment fall, it raises the prime rate to keep unemployment up. The idea is that if unemployment is low workers will have the bargaining power to demand and get raises and this will increase inflation.
The second reason is the treaties and government policies that encourage companies to shut down their US plants and move abroad. Globalization. It is not inevitable. It is the result of cheap petroleum and our country's policies.
Stein understood these problems just a few months ago. link So it is amazing that now he misses this point.
The point is that workers need more power and the way workers get power is through unions. But unions have been torn apart through globalization.
The result is what we see - rich, filthy rich corporations who have so much money the don't know what to do with it - and yet can't bring themselves to do the one thing they should - share that money with those whose labor created it.
Comments
Add Comment