Howie Hawkins for Congress

Labor Agenda

Howie Hawkins for Congress
www.howiehawkins.org

Media Release
For immediate release: September 2, 2008
For more information: Howie Hawkins, 315-425-1019, hhawkins@igc.org

Hawkins Calls for Labor's Political Independence as
Best Means to Advance Labor's Agenda

Howie Hawkins, the Green Populist candidate for Congress in the 25th district, today released the following Labor Agenda and a Labor Day Statement advocating political independence by the labor movement as the most effective way to advance labor's agenda.

Howie Hawkins is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and US Labor Against the War. Howie works unloading trucks and rail cars at UPS.

LABOR LAW REFORM

Increase NLRB funding and staffing so complaints against employers are handled in a timely fashion and employers receive strong and speedy penalties for breaking labor laws.

Enact the proposed federal Employee Free Choice Act, providing for:

Majority card-check recognition of unions.
Triple back pay for workers fired for union organizing.
Mandatory contract arbitration at union request after 90 days bargaining for first contract for newly recognized bargaining unit.

Repeal Taft-Hartley and Other Repressive Labor Laws: Repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, the Hatch Act, and other labor laws which have crippled labor's ability to organize by outlawing or severely restricting labor's basic organizing tools: strikes, boycotts, pickets, and political action.

A Workers' Bill of Rights: Enact a set of legally enforceable civil rights, independent of collective bargaining, which (1) extend the Bill of Rights protections of free speech, association, and assembly into all workplaces, (2) establishes workers' rights to living wages, portable pensions, information about chemicals used, report labor and environmental violations, refuse unsafe work, and participate in enterprise governance, and (3) establishes workers' rights to freedom from discharge at will, employer search and seizure in the workplace, sexual harassment, and unequal pay for work of comparable worth.

Expand Workers' Rights to Organize and Enjoy Free Time:

Ban striker replacements.
Triple back pay for illegally locked-out workers.
Unemployment compensation for striking or locked out workers.
Binding contract arbitration at union request.
Full rights for farm workers, public employees, immigrants, and "workfare" workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Ban prison slave labor: End the use of US prisoners to produce goods and services for sale to the public.
Double-time pay for all overtime.
Prohibit mandatory overtime.
6 weeks paid vacation annually in addition to federal holidays.
1 year paid educational leave for every 7 years worked.
1 year parental leave for each child born with no loss of seniority.
Right to work shorter hours: No discrimination in pay and promotion against workers who choose to work short hours; no two-tier wage systems between part-timers and full-timers.

PROGRESSIVE TAX REFORM

Progressive Taxation of Income and Wealth

Simple, Progressive Income Taxes: Enact a noloopholes, graduated personal income tax with equal taxation of all income, regardless of source. Provide an income tax credit for each dependent to replace and fully compensate for the current exemptions and deductions that benefit to the average taxpayer, such as the home mortgage deduction and medical deductions.
Eliminate Regressive Payroll Taxes: Fund Social Security, Health Care, Unemployment Insurance, and Workers Compensation out of progressive income and wealth taxes.
Guaranteed Minimum Income: Build taxable Basic Income Grants into the progressive income tax structure to create a Universal Social Security system that ensures everyone has income for at least a modest standard of living above the poverty line.
Cap CEO Salaries: Cap the tax deductibility of any compensation for executives at 20 times the lowest paid worker in the company.
Close Offshore Tax Shelters: An estimated $5 trillion has been hidden from taxation by wealthy individuals and corporations in offshore tax shelters.
End Corporate Welfare: Put subsidies that sever the public interest in the federal budget where they can be publicly debated and scrutinized instead of hidden as tax breaks in complicated tax codes.
Progressively Graduated Corporate Revenue and Asset Taxes
Wealth Tax: Enact a progressive tax on the net wealth of the top 5% of households.
Inheritance Tax: Replace the loophole-ridden estate tax with a no-loopholes, progressive inheritance tax on inheritances over $1 million.
Federal Revenue Sharing: Reduce state and local government dependence on regressive sales and property taxes through federal revenue sharing that combines centralized collection of progressive taxes with decentralized decisions on spending.

Tax Bads, Not Goods

Ecological Taxes: Tax pollution, resource extraction, harmful products, and the use of our common wealth of natural capital (land sites according to land value, public timber and grazing lands, ocean and freshwater resources, oil and minerals, electromagnetic spectrum, satellite orbital zones).
Stock and Bond Transfer Tax: Encourage a shift from speculative to productive investments through a federal stock and bond transfer tax on all securities transactions.
Currency Speculation Tax: An internationally uniform tax on currency conversion to discourage speculation. Revenues from the currency speculation tax should be channeled through international agencies into ecologically sustainable, democratically controlled development in poor countries.
Advertising Tax: A tax on advertising earmarked to fund a decentralized, pluralistic media system of real public broadcasting, public service broadcasting on commercial media, and independent nonprofit, noncommercial media.

ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS

Jobs for All at Living Wages: Public works and services to guarantee living wage jobs for all. The government should be the employer of last resort providing jobs meeting community-defined needs for infrastructure, public amenities, and services.
A Minimum Wage that is a Living Wage: Raise the federal minimum wage to a level that can support at family of four at a modest standard of living.
A Guaranteed Minimum Income: Build taxable Basic Income Grants into the progressive income tax structure to create a Universal Social Security system that ensures everyone has income for at least a modest standard of living above the poverty line.
Social Security: No privatization. As an immediate step, secure funding for the indefinite future by raising the cap on the Social Security tax for high incomes. In longer run, fund Social Security through progressive income and wealth taxes, not regressive payroll taxes. Also, restore the 65 year old retirement age. Social Security is not in crisis. The government has a general fiscal crisis and has used the Social Security surplus to cover some of the revenue shortfall. The answer is not to cut Social Security, but to restore the fiscal integrity of the federal government through progressive tax reform and military spending cuts.
Medicare for All: Health insurance for all through a single public insurer.
Affordable Housing, Energy, Food, and Mass Transit: To make these basic necessities affordable requires public investment aimed at providing them. Leaving these to the market alone has failed.
Lifelong Public Education: Tuition-Free from Head Start through University.
Secure Defined-Benefit Pensions for All Workers: Make corporations pay 10% of profits annually in new shares to a universal defined-benefit pension system in which all workers are vested and which is administered by workers' elected representatives.
The Right of Small Farms and Businesses to Free Enterprise and Fair Competition: End government favoritism and subsidies for the giant banks and corporations. Strengthen and enforce anti-trust laws.
Fair Trade: Repeal NAFTA, WTO, Permanent Normal Trade Relations for China, and other corporate-managed “free trade” agreements that undermine democratic regulation and domestic manufacturing. Negotiate new trade agreements that make companies meet rising labor, consumer, and environmental standards. Protect important industries with tariffs like we protect endangered species.

Political Independence:
The Most Effective Way to Advance Labor's Agenda

Labor Day Statement, September 2, 2008
By Howie Hawkins, Green Populist candidate for US Congress (www.howiehawkins.org)

The Jerry Rescue Reminds Us How to Fight for Labor's Agenda

The ability of workers to organize unions, to bargain freely, and to strike when necessary has been largely destroyed by employers and their political representatives from the two corporate-financed major parties. Today, employers illegally fire nearly 1 out of 10 workers involved in union organizing drives with impunity because labor laws are largely anti-worker and the pro-worker protections are weakly enforced. That is a big reason why union membership has fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s. As union membership has fallen, so have the wages and benefits of all working people, union and non-union alike.

The labor movement has disarmed itself in this fight by making itself dependent politically on the corporate-sponsored Democratic Party. Since 1980, when the corporate anti-union offensive went into full swing, unions have poured over $10 billion into the Democratic campaigns with absolutely no payoff for workers. All the Democratic Party has done in return is take the labor vote for granted while implementing the anti-labor corporate agenda. From anti-labor laws and anti-labor appointments to regulatory agencies and the courts, to making the tax structure more regressive and cutting in wages, benefits, and the social safety net, the Democrats have posed as the party of working men and women while acting as the second party of Big Business.

I'm releasing my Labor Agenda by the Jerry Rescue Monument because the Jerry Rescue of October 1, 1851 reminds us of how to fight back. As the monument inscription notes, the rescue of Willam “Jerry” Henry from federal marshals trying to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act coincided with the state convention in Syracuse of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, whose delegates joined in with 2,500 Syracuse abolitionists to free Jerry from the Federal Marshals.

Just as the Liberty Party supported direct action by abolitionists, it is time for the labor movement to fight for labor law reforms that restore the right of workers to take nonviolent direct action in such forms as wildcat strikes, solidarity strikes and picket lines, and “hot cargo” boycotts that were outlawed by the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act.

Just as the Liberty Party was formed to give abolitionists their own political voice in opposition to the pro-slavery Democrats and Whigs of its day and grew until it elected abolitionist Free Soilers and Radical Republicans to Congress, it is time today for labor to speak for itself politically instead of being politically dependent on the pro-corporate Democrats. It is time for labor to break with the Democrats and form its own party in opposition to both corporate-sponsored major parties and to elect its own representatives who are accountable to the votes of the working class majority instead of the money of the corporate elite minority.

The State of Workers and the Labor Movement

Worker's hourly wages have been frozen for 35 years. When regressive tax changes in payroll and state and federal taxes are factored in, the buying power of an average workers' take home pay has declined by 15 percent over the last 35 years. The lowest waged 50 million workers have had a $1 to $3 hourly pay cut over this period. The federal minimum wage has declined from half to a third of the average wage. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be $10 an hour instead of the $6.60 it was raised to in July.

Wages have not increased with productivity gains for 35 years. Since 1973, labor productivity increased three times more than median income. If workers' real pay had increased at the same rate of productivity, as it did between 1947 and 1973, in 2005 the average wage would be $26 an hour instead of $15.89 an hour.

Labor's share of national income is at a record low and profits at a record high. In 1970, labor's share of national income was 59.3 percent. By 2006, it was down to 51.6 percent, the lowest since 1929 when records began. The 13.8 percent profits share of national income in 2006 was also the highest since records began in 1929.

Wealth and income inequality has been increasing for 35 years. The incomes of the richest 1 percent have increased from 100 times the median income in 1970 to 560 times the median income in 2004. The shift of income from the working class to the richest 1 percent has totaled about $9 trillion over the last 35 years. The top 1 percent got 23 percent of all income in 2005, the most unequal distribution of income in the US of any year except 1928 since records started in 1913. The top 1 percent received 70 percent of all capital gains income in 2005. Wealth is also more concentrated, with the top 10 percent owning 80 percent and the top 1 percent 40 percent of all assets. Meanwhile, the poorest 20 percent's share of national income declined from 5.5 percent in 1973 to 4.0 percent in 2005. In New York, the basic welfare grant has not been raised for 18 years and the value of welfare benefits has now fallen to less than 50 percent of the poverty line.

35 years of tax cuts for the rich and tax hikes for workers now make workers pay taxes at higher rates than the rich. Due to decades of repeated hikes in payroll taxes, cuts in taxes on capital gains, profits, and interest, and reductions in the progressivity of the income tax, the federal tax structure is now shifts income from the bottom 80 percent to the top 5 percent. The combined federal tax rate for median income tax payers is higher than it is for the top 5 percent. The regressive nature of sales and property taxes at the state and local level makes the regressivity of the total tax structure even worse. The federal tax shift from the wealthy to the workers is illustrated by the decline of corporate income tax revenues and the rise of payroll tax revenues over the last 35 years. In 1972, the corporate income tax accounted for 15 percent of federal revenues. By 2003, that was down to 6 percent. In 1972, payroll taxes accounted for 15 percent of federal revenues. But 2003, they accounted for 40 percent. Two out of every three US corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.

Workers want unions but unionization rates are at record lows. More than half of unorganized workers want union representation today. Unionized workers earn over 30 percent more than their non-union counterparts. But from the high point of 35 percent of workers organized in 1953 when the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged, the unionization rate has declined and rapidly since 1980. In 2007, the unionization rate was down to 12.1 percent overall, and down to 7.5 percent in the private sector, which is lower than at any time since the 1920s.

Labor Law Reform

Unions have become very hard to organize over the last 25 years. Because the National Labor Relations Board is under funded and staffed, acts upon complaints too slowly, and is stuffed with anti-labor appointees, employers have been able to break labor laws with impunity and illegally fire tens of thousands of workers for trying to organize. Since 1981, employers have taken advantage of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 to cripple labor's ability to fight back against union busting and concessionary bargaining.

The labor movement is now focused on passing the Employee Free Choice Act, which would establish card check recognition of unions as in Canada, stiffen penalties for employers who fire union organizers, and force companies into arbitration if they refuse to negotiate with a newly recognized union after 90 days. These are all good reforms and I support them.

But the Employee Free Choice Act should be just the first step in labor law reform. We must also put the repeal of Taft-Hartley back on the agenda. The 1947 Taft-Harley Act outlawed sympathy and solidarity strikes and "secondary boycotts" where workers refuse to cross picket lines when they were not directly party to a labor dispute or refuse to handle "hot cargo" coming from or going to a struck enterprise.

The major result of the Taft-Hartley restrictions on labor action has been to divert unions from direct action to cautious administrators of contracts with no-strike clauses so the company cannot sue the union for violating the contract. Unions now devote most of their resources to handling grievances through "proper channels" and defending themselves from lawsuits by corporations with far more resources to go to court. These legal arrangements reinforce the business unionism prevalent today, which has the culture of an insurance company, where the workers are clients and the officers are managers taking in our dues payments and doling out our benefits.

Passing the Employee Free Choice Act and nothing more could reinforce this culture of business unionism because most of the unions have become highly centralized with little rank-and-file democracy. The staff, not the members, makes political endorsements in most unions. Contracts are marketed to the members in ratification votes by the same methods of robocalling, direct mail, and media spinning by which corporate-sponsored political candidates are sold. Without additional labor law reforms as well as organizing by the rank-and-file for union democracy, the Employee Free Choice Act alone could end up expanding the union dues funding base of unaccountable union bureaucrats.

The Democrats had repeal of Taft-Hartley in their national platform between 1948 and 1992, but never moved to repeal it when they had congressional majorities under Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Instead, anti-labor Democrats in Congress have coalesced with their Republican counterparts to black any pro-labor law reform since the passage of Taft-Hartley.

The more limited reform of repealing Section 14(b) of Taft-Hartley, which gave states the right to enact anti-union so-called Right-to-Work laws, failed repeatedly despite Democratic congressional majorities throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

The so-called "Common Situs Picketing" Bill, which the labor movement pushed during the post-Watergate Congress between 1975 and 1977, would have allowed building trades unions to picket construction sites when general contractors hired non-union subcontractors. Congress passed the bill in 1975, but failed to override a veto by President Ford. The Democratic majority Congress failed to pass it in 1977 under President Carter, who expended no political capital to support it.

In 1978, labor backed a Labor Law Reform Act, which would have increased penalties to employers for labor law violations and required the National Labor Relations Board to make timely decisions on complaints. It was also defeated under the Democratic majority Congress, which Carter again spending no political capital to help it pass.

The next campaign for labor law reform by the labor movement was conducted between 1991 and 1994 is support of the Kennedy-Metzenbaum “Striker Replacement” Bill. But the Democratic majorities in Congress failed repeatedly to pass the bill, which would have penalized employers for hiring scabs to replace workers striking over wages and benefits. President Clinton did nothing to encourage the bill's adoption, which he had said he supported as a candidate in 1992.

Given this history, can we count on the Democrats to enact the Employee Free Choice Act? Why hasn't the current Democratic majority in Congress adopted it, forced President Bush to veto it, and made it a campaign issue? Why wasn't this reform mentioned in Obama's acceptance speech or his stump speeches? The words “labor” and “union” were nowhere in Obama's acceptance speech, let alone any mention of the Employee Free Choice Act.

While the Democrats have failed to enact labor law reform, they helped pave the way for the anti-union offensive that took off in 1981 with the busting of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, which was planned under the Carter administration and executed under the Reagan administration.

Aside from labor law reform, it was the Democratic administration of President Clinton that completed the pro-corporate Republican agenda, including NAFTA, WTO, and normalized trade relations with China, as well as the repeal of federal welfare guarantees for families in poverty. Even Robert Reich, Clinton's Labor Secretary and his cabinet's most liberal member, dismissed the labor law reform as a “symbolic battleground” that was less important than the job training and labor-management cooperation he advocated to adapt workers to the new era of corporate-managed “free trade.”

Labor Needs Its Own Political Party

Imagine if labor had spend the over $10 billion they gave to the Democrats over the last 25 years instead building an independent labor party and movement. Today we would have scores of labor party organizers in every state supporting a broadly based, grassroots democratic party of working people. We would have blocks of independent labor representatives in municipal, county, state, and the national legislatures. We would have a national labor daily newspaper and labor networks on radio and cable. The two corporate financed parties, the Democrats and Republicans, would no longer monopolize US politics. Public policy would undoubtedly be more pro-labor and the majority of working people would not have seen their real wages and living standards decline over the last 25 years.

That is what the labor movement has done in every other industrial nation. Those labor movements built labor-based parties independent of corporate money and control. They have been to organize the working class majority to take political power and exercise it for the benefit of the working class majority. If we are ever going repeal the Taft-Hartley amendments and institute public policies that create economic security for working people, it is going to come from an independent political party based on the working class majority.

After World War II, these labor-based parties won many rights and benefits for working people, including universal health care, affordable public transit, free public college education, secure pensions, four to six weeks of paid vacation for all workers, paid maternity and family sick leave, and labor laws that protect their rights to organize and strike.

An Economic Bill of Rights

The same kinds of rights and benefits were proposed for America by President Roosevelt in 1944 in his State of the Union Address, which called for “a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for allregardless of station, race, or creed.” The Economic Bill of Rights enumerated by Roosevelt included the right to a job at a living wage; affordable housing, food, clothing, and recreation; social insurance against old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment; and fair trade protections for farmers and small businesses from unfair competition by monopolies at home or abroad. He asked Congress “to explore the means of implementing this economic bill of rightsfor it is definitely the responsibility of Congress to do so.”

But a coalition of conservative Democrats and Republicans blocked any movement toward implementing Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights. As the major parties moved to the right, Henry Wallace, who had served Roosevelt as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President, and then Secretary of Commerce, tried to pick up the torch with his Progressive Party presidential campaign of 1948. Wallace drew crowds as big for his day as any Obama has drawn this year. In his July 24 nomination acceptance speech in Philadelphia, Wallace filled Connie Mack's Shibe Park, home to the American League's Athletics, to capacity with a ticket paid audience of 32,000. On September 10, Wallace spoke to 50,000 supporters in the rain in New York City at Yankee Stadium (65,000 tickets were sold, but the event was postponed a day due to rain). Music at both events included singing by Paul Robeson.

The movement behind the Progressive Party was intimidated and defeated largely by purges of progressives from jobs, especially in unions, as the loyalty oaths of Taft-Hartley, McCarthyism, and the Cold War were used against them. And with that last gasp of independent labor politics, which had been a tradition in American through the labor, populist, and socialist parties of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the labor movement lost its independent voice.

The reforms in Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights have consistently had the support of the majority of Americans in public opinion polling over the subsequent decades. These reforms are long overdue. What stands in the way are the politicians paid for by the corporate interests.

Tax Cuts Create Bubbles, Not Jobs

What we are left without an independent labor party with are the kinds of pro-corporate programs offered by my congressional opponents. They only tinker at the margins when fundamental reforms are needed. Instead of breaking with the economic policies that have undermined workers over the last 35 years, my opponents want to continue them. Republican Dale Sweetland repeats the mantra of cutting taxes, spending, and regulation. Democrat Dan Maffei's job creation plan recycles Republican favorites like tax credits for businesses that create new jobs and Jack Kemp's tax-free enterprise zones to create jobs in the inner city. None of these approaches have worked as advertised. Both candidates' programs remain within the realm of trickle-down economics, the theory that if we give tax and regulatory breaks to the rich they will invest in the real economy and create jobs, and that if we cut spending on social benefits for working people, they will be motivated for work instead of welfare.

The reality is that given the excess capacity in most industries prevalent since the 1970s, the tax and regulatory cuts for the rich have led to speculative bubbles, not investment in the real economy of production. And for workers, who never needed more incentive to work than providing a decent living for their families, the cuts in social benefits combined with financial deregulation have only helped to freeze workers wages while indebting them to financial companies hawking usurious credit card and mortgage loans.

Progressive Tax Reform and Budget Priorities

Instead of hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks for the rich and the big corporations written into the tax code, we need to close these loopholes and put that money in the federal budget for use employing workers at living wages in the real economy of producing goods and services. That money should be invested in public works and services so that everyone willing and able can work. They can work rebuilding our infrastructure on a sustainable basis and meeting the needs of working families for good schools, pre- and after-school programs, child care, and affordable housing, energy, public transit, and public higher education.

Progressive tax reform, not more tax cuts for the rich, is central to financing an Economic Bill of Rights that creates economic security for all. The other essential change must be deep cuts in the bloated military budget and investing the savings in building a solar-based sustainable infrastructure for the economy at home and abroad. That redirection of public resources to the real economy will ignite a global engine of economic recovery and job creation that can build a sustainable economy for climate stability and energy security.