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On Labor Day, Hawkins issues Economic Justice Program
· $10 Minimum Wage and Cap on CEO Salaries
· Full Employment through Public Works and 30-Hour Work Week
· Universal Health and Child Care
· Repeal Taft-Hartley
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Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, called today for: an increase in the minimum wage to $10 an hour; a government guarantee of a living-wage job; strengthening of workers’ rights, including the right to unionize, starting with a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act; increase government support for employee ownership; enactment of single-payer national health insurance to provide universal health care; extending federal labor laws to protect farm workers; and mandatory six week vacations for all workers.
Hawkins also supports the establishment of a Universal Living Wage, where the minimum wage is based on local housing costs. The wage would be calculated based on local Fair Market Rents established by HUD so households spend no more than one-third of their income on housing. The Living Wage would be phased in over a ten-year period. In New York City, the Living Wage would be set today at $16.31 an hour.
“It is time to reverse the bipartisan tradition of the Democrats and Republicans of taxing the poor and middle class to pay for tax cuts and giveaways for the wealthy and large corporations. The US leads the world’s industrial democracies in income inequality, and the gap is greatest here in New York. We need to end corporate welfare. The rich must pay their fair share of taxes. And we need public works and investment in sustainable infrastructure and public services to create jobs that will put New Yorkers back to work in our inner city neighborhoods and upstate communities,” stated Hawkins.
“In recent decades, Corporate America has systematically destroyed millions of decent paying jobs for working people. Politicians from both major parties have given hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to their campaign contributors while CEO’s have awarded themselves with obscene compensation packages. They slashed jobs for Americans workers through mergers and runaway shops, subcontracting, and outsourcing in repressive cheap labor countries abroad. We are in the midst of the first so-called economic recovery that did not result in an increase of jobs and many of the jobs that do exist pay poverty level wages or are part-time, without health care or pension benefits,” added Hawkins.
Hawkins noted that Clinton has been a national leader in raising funds from corporate interests. In the current election cycle, Clinton was the most favored candidate nationally of 13 industries, including lawyers and law firms, real estate, health professionals, securities and investment, entertainment, accountants, publishing, and food and beverages, among others. She is the second largest recipient nationally of donations from the health care industry.
A recent report by the Fiscal Policy Institute found that in New York real wages for most workers are not yet back to where they were in 2002, even with reasonably strong growth in total output and worker productivity.Workers and jobs especially faired poorly in Western and Northern New York (the upstate area that extends from Utica west to Buffalo, including the Southern Tier and North Country).
Since 1990, the overall CEO-worker pay gap in the United States has grown from 107-to-1 to last year’s 411-to-1. Minimum wage workers have lost 9 percent after inflation in the same 15 years. If the federal minimum wage had risen at the same pace as CEO pay, it would now stand at $22.61 per hour, over four times the current $5.15. CEOs in the defense and oil industries have been able to translate war and rising oil prices into personal jackpots, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, “Executive Excess 2006.” With Americans now paying over $3 per gallon, petroleum profiteers are raking in nearly three times the pay of CEOs in comparably sized businesses. In 2005, the top 15 U.S. oil CEOs got a 50 percent raise since 2004. They now average $32.7 million a year, compared with $11.6 million for all CEOs of large U.S. firms. Since the “War on Terror” began, CEOs at the top 34 military contractors have enjoyed average paychecks that are double the compensation they received in the four years leading up to 9/11. These 34 CEOs combined have pocketed almost a billion dollars since 9/11 enough to employ more than a million Iraqis for a year to rebuild their country. In 2005, defense industry CEOs walked off with 44 times more pay than military generals with 20 years experience, and 308 times more than Army privates. “Individuals who work should make enough to support their families, starting with providing them with decent housing, food, and clothing. Instead, our politicians refuse to give the poorest workers a pay-raise while CEOs raid their companies to pad their own pockets. We need an immediate minimum wage hike to $10 an hour while enacting a reasonable maximum wage as FDR proposed back in the ‘40s,” added Hawkins. In addition to enacting a Universal Living Wage, Hawkins supports federal legislation to cap excessive CEO salaries. He would also empower the true owners of American companies mainly workers through their pension plans to vote their shares, rather than the financial managers of such funds. Hawkins called for a Jobs-for-All program that would guarantee every person willing and able to work a living-wage job in the public sector if that person could not find a job in the private sector. Hawkins said his full employment program be implemented through a combination of job creation in public works and human services and a more equitable sharing of available work through a reduction in standard work hours with no loss in pay. Hawkins said the public jobs program would be administered locally with federal funding so each community could identify their own public works and human services priorities. He said the work hours reduction with no loss in pay would be implemented through a “second paycheck” for workers enabling them to receive 40 hours pay for 30 hours work. Hawkins proposed that workers in the lower 80 percent of the pay scale would qualify for the supplemental paycheck, which would be paid for out of progressive federal income and wealth taxes. “The second paycheck would represent a Social Dividend for workers that gives them their fair share of social productivity gains, which have been going almost exclusively to corporate managers and owners,” Hawkins said. "We can create millions of living-wage jobs through public investment in infrastructure restoration, public works, and human services. It's time to stop pretending that tax cuts for the corporate rich are a jobs program. This decades-old trickle-down approach to job creation is a proven failure. Private jobs are good, but public jobs are necessary to create decent jobs for everyone willing and able to work," stated Hawkins.
Hawkins called for a 10-year, $300 billion a year, public investment program in renewable energy, with the money coming from cuts in the US military budget. “Global warming, the impending peak of oil production, and an effective strategy for national security and world peace make it imperative that we redirect a major portion of US military spending into a global public works program to build a renewable energy infrastructure for the world. Based on solar, wind, geothermal heating and cooling, and biofuels, a renewable energy system would render nuclear and fossil fuels obsolete and remove the security and environmental dangers that nuclear and fossil energy create. We would make friends with clean energy instead of enemies in wars for oil. We would spread good energy and good will around the world instead of resentment at US military occupations. That would do more to enhance our national security and world peace than all the military force in the world,” said Hawkins, a former Marine who organized opposition to the Vietnam War.
In calling for the Taft Hartley Act to be repealed, Hawkins noted that Taft-Hartley makes it extremely difficult for employees to organize unions. The rights to organize unions, bargain freely, and strike when necessary is being destroyed by employers and their representatives in government. Today, employers illegally fire nearly 1 out of 10 workers involved in union organizing drives. That is why union membership is declining. And as union membership falls so do the wages of all working people, union and non-union alike. The buying power of the average worker’s wage has declined by 15 percent over the last 25 years.
Hawkins supports legislation to make the workplace supportive of workers and their families. This includes measures such as paid family leave, flexible work schedule, and universal child and elder care. Hawkins supports Fair Trade rather than the “free trade” corporate globalization policies of the Democrats and Republicans and calls for the repeal of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization.
Hawkins is an advocate of publicownership and planning where private ownership and markets fail. He calls for more public ownership and planning in two key industries and services, such as energy and health care. "I definitely support the social ownership in the energy sector, especially oil. When profit matters above all else, we end up with sky-high prices and damage to the environment and public health. Our health and environment must come before the super profits of the oil tycoons,"said Hawkins.
Noting the 47 million Americans without health insurance, Hawkins called for Medicare for All, a national health insurance system with a single public payer. “Unlike the failed private insurance system, everyone will be fully covered, everyone will be free to choose their doctors, clinics, and hospitals, and we will still save hundreds of billions of dollars now wasted in the inefficient private insurance system.”
Hawkins also said the pharmaceutical companies should be publicly owned. "The research performed by the drug companies is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, but we have no say in what drugs are developed or how they are marketed. Drug company profits are driving up health care costs for everyone while they spend more on advertising their drugs than they do on research and development," said Hawkins. |
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 *Website by David Doonan, Labor Donated to Hawkins for Senate Campaign* |
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