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Overview
Combining history, economics, and commonsense political wisdom, The Fight for $15 makes a deeply informed case for a national fifteen-dollars-an-hour minimum wage as the only practical solution to reversing America’s decades-long slide toward becoming a low-wage nation.
Drawing both on new scholarship and on his extensive practical experiences organizing workers and grappling with inequality across the United States, David Rolf, president of SEIU 775—which waged the successful Seattle campaign for a fifteen dollar minimum wage—offers an accessible explanation of “middle out” economics, an emerging popular economic theory that suggests that the origins of prosperity in capitalist economies lie with workers and consumers, not investors and employers.
A blueprint for a different and hopeful American future, The Fight for $15 offers concrete tools, ideas, and inspiration for anyone interested in real change in our lifetimes.
“The author’s plainspoken approach and stellar scholarship illuminate in-depth discussions about the deliberate policy decisions that began to decimate the middle class at the start of the 1980s as well as the insidious new ways in which big business continues to attack American workers today via stagnant wages, rampant subcontracting, unpredictable scheduling, and other detrimental practices associated with the so-called ‘share economy.’” —Kirkus Reviews
“David Rolf has become the most successful advocate for raising wages in the twenty-first century.” —Andy Stern, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781620971147 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New Press, The |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 130 |
| Sales rank: | 914,544 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
America at 200
The American Dream Versus the War on the Middle Class
Imagine an alternative history of the 1976 presidential election. America is celebrating its bicentennial with fireworks, and two men — a Republican from Michigan and a Democrat from Georgia — are campaigning to be president. What if one of them had given a speech that predicted the future?
My fellow Americans, this difficult decade will soon come to an end. The national hangover from Vietnam and Watergate will slowly fade. There will be no more lines for gasoline, no more stagflation. In fact, soon the Berlin Wall will crumble, the Cold War will end, the nuclear threat will recede, and there will be no more foreign military threats to our soil. The last of the formal legal barriers to full economic participation for women and people of color will fall. China, Korea, Brazil, India, and South Africa will join the global economic community and lift hundreds of millions of people out of life-threatening poverty.
Americans will invent or reinvent industries that will create more wealth than has been created in the history of human kind. Technology will dramatically improve the lives of almost all Americans and most people around the globe. And America will continue to be the world's wealthiest nation with the most productive workers.
That would have been an incredible, truly astounding, set of predictions, all of which, as it turns out, would have come true. But imagine that the speech continued:
Of all of the new wealth our country produces, 95 percent will go to the top 1 percent of income earners. A few hundred wealthy families will amass more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of households combined. The bottom 80–90 percent won't see a penny of increased income, and in fact the bottom 50 percent will have to take a pay cut. We are going to export manufacturing, import Third-World wages, divest from our infrastructure, de-tax, deregulate, globalize, and privatize.
We are going to break the unions, bankrupt our pension system, shred the funding for rural and urban public education, and make debt- free college a thing of the past. We will turn our backs on the middle class and replace old Jim Crow laws with a new economic apartheid for black and brown Americans. The net economic impact of women doubling their workforce participation from 1977–2012 will be zero dollars in take-home pay for the bottom 90 percent of income- earning families. So the same family that can live a reasonably comfortable middle-class life on a single person's income today will need two or even three incomes to live the same life a generation from now.
Obviously, giving such a speech would have doomed anyone's presidential candidacy. His party probably would have been out of power for years. No one in America would have voted for such a vision. And yet, just like the optimistic first part, that second part of our fictional presidential campaign speech would also turn out to be true. And it became true not because of some historical accident, but because our economic system was intentionally rigged to favor large corporations and wealthy Americans over everyone else. "Trickle-down economics" was woven into the national consciousness as if it were written into the founding documents of our country. Two hundred years of struggle and progress have been intentionally reversed over the course of the past forty years. If a foreign power had announced that was its plan for America, we would have gone to war.
WHERE WE STOOD AT AGE 200: WORLD'S LARGEST MIDDLE CLASS AND AN INCREASINGLY ACCESSIBLE AMERICAN DREAM
By America's two hundredth birthday, we had created a nation in which workers shared the benefits of a growing economy. For much of the twentieth century, the United States experienced high levels of growth and rising levels of equality, a combination that "confounded historical precedent and the theories of conservative economists." Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, doubling between the late 1940s and early 1970s. The poorest fifth of households, in fact, saw faster growth than other groups — while the top 5 percent saw the slowest.
As worker productivity increased, so did wages: a worker in 1973 was almost twice as productive as in 1948 and earned nearly twice as much. The result was that the bottom 90 percent of families reaped more than two- thirds of the gains during this period, up from only 16 percent in the early 1930s.
Driven by strong labor, civil rights, and antipoverty movements, and by constant pressure to show that American capitalism functioned better than Soviet communism, politicians of the time kept expanding economically inclusive policies. During his 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy said he would accelerate economic growth by increasing government spending and cutting taxes. He advocated for medical help for the aged, aid for inner cities, and increased funding for education. Congress enacted much of his policy agenda after his death in 1963.
Kennedy's successor Lyndon Johnson sought to build a "Great Society" by expanding the benefits of America's thriving economy to more citizens. Federal spending increased dramatically, as the government launched such new programs as Medicare, food stamps for the poor, and a host of initiatives to increase the quality of education and make college more affordable.
Here is a picture of America at the peak of our prosperity:
• In 1980, Americans at every level (except the 5th percentile) had the highest incomes in the world.
• The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners fell to a historic low of 8 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, with income inequality hitting its low point in 1968.
• In the late 1960s, more than half of households were squarely middle class by income, earning $35,000 to $100,000 a year in today's dollars.
• In 1970 two-thirds of families lived in middle-income neighborhoods.
• By the 1950s, nearly 85 percent of American teenagers were attending high school full-time, compared to less than 20 percent of teenagers in most European nations.
• Black poverty declined dramatically through the 1960s, falling from a rate of 55 percent in 1959 to 32 percent ten years later.
• By 1973, the share of all Americans living in poverty bottomed out at a historic low of 11 percent, having been cut in half in just fifteen years.
Our tax policy supported these widely shared gains; a report by the International Labour Organization and World Trade Organization found that the inequality prevalent before World War II did not rebound afterward due to the introduction of progressive taxation and estate taxes.
The heads of many corporations believed that their workers mattered, and that they had a responsibility to treat them fairly. "Maximizing employee security is a prime company goal," said General Electric's manager of employee benefits in 1962. Whether such sentiments were heartfelt or merely a reflection of the social and cultural norms of the times, they helped.
We were beginning to see success in the civil rights and feminist movements, as African Americans and women demanded and won real progress in labor force participation, wages, and job opportunities.
We arrived at this moment with a great American Dream unfolding, and not because it was handed to us — generations of workers had fought hard for shared prosperity, and both companies and politicians had responded. Most Americans held the view that we had the best economic system in the world, and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to prove it. We were number one.
THE WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASS: 1976–PRESENT
And then the dream began to unravel. At the same time the War on Poverty was beginning to give people a shot at the middle class, a new War on the Middle Class began, which would eventually pull the rug out from under American families. Even while civil rights and women's movements were establishing new expectations of equality, a radical new strain of laissez- faire capitalism was establishing its dominance in economics, business, and politics.
Most people were first exposed to these ideas when Ronald Reagan became president, when they were told that what they had long believed was the road to prosperity — good wages, strong unions, sensible regulations, and a reasonable safety net — was actually the road to ruin. They were told that prosperity instead "trickled down" to workers from the "job creators" in big business, and that they should be grateful to these powerful and beneficent institutions for their jobs, opportunities, and middle-class lifestyles. The American public, feeling burned by high inflation and unemployment, began to accept this narrative and the antigovernment, pro–big business agenda that came with it. Many working-class Americans — often white, male, older, or southern — also responded with discomfort to increasing racial and gender equality by voting against their own pocketbook interests for politicians who appealed overtly or more subtly to racism and sexism.
So, beginning in the 1980s, financiers and corporate leaders began to achieve their long-sought goal of returning to the "opportunity" of the Gilded Age, freed from unions and government regulation. Americans were told that wealth would trickle down to regular families, with everyone sharing a bigger piece of a bigger pie. As part of the new "market fundamentalism," we were told that markets were basically infallible, and government tinkering could only distort the economy and impede economic growth. The unregulated market began to be seen as fundamentally beneficent and government as the enemy of growth.
As the financial sector soared in the 1980s, these beliefs crystallized into a cultural sensation. One of the more memorable movie moments of the decade was a monologue by Wall Street's Gordon Gekko: "Greed ... is good. Greed is right. Greed works. ... And greed — you mark my words — will not only save [this company], but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA!"
The speech, which director Oliver Stone intended as satire of what he saw as ruling-class selfishness in the Reagan era, instead frequently drew raucous cheers from movie audiences. Big business lobbying groups and public relations campaigns had convinced many Americans that the principle of considered self-interest could, indeed, empower individuals, liberate companies, and restore the faded luster of the United States. "Greed is good" became a kind of de facto motto for 1980s America.
According to the new zeitgeist, the wolves of Wall Street weren't dangerous. They had sharp teeth, but we would all benefit from their kills. Plus if you worked hard, you too could be a wolf. Americans began to believe these new stories and glorify extreme wealth with a fervor that was shared by everyone from conservative preachers to the president, from Wall Street to Madonna as the Material Girl, throwing money in the air.
It is now thirty years later, and we have seen a savings and loan crisis, wild interest rate spikes, a couple of housing busts, a few major bubbles, two recessions and a third that was more like a depression. It is obvious that — though the belief that greed is good may have mellowed — those stories are still driving our basic economic agreements as a society. And it has begun to destroy us.
The American economy no longer works for most people in the United States. We know this from a raft of economic data showing the trends: a small percentage of the population reaps the lion's share of economic growth while most workers face weak job prospects, stagnant wages, and increasing financial strain as the cost of education, housing, and health care grow ever more expensive.
America has long been a beacon of economic opportunity to the world, a place where anyone can achieve success through hard work. But today the United States lags behind most other developed nations in levels of inequality and economic mobility. Deeply rooted structural discrimination continues to hold down women and people of color, and more than one-fifth of all American children now live in poverty.
So how could so many important people be so wrong about how the economy fundamentally works? Perhaps because the storytellers behind the curtain had an incredible incentive for selling their theories to all of us, doing with rhetoric what could not be done with force. The point of foisting trickle-down economics, deregulation, and union busting on the American public was never to share the gains with regular workers. It was to turn the economy into a wealth-generating machine for the people who already had the most.
The rosy stories of trickle-down economics were mostly make-believe, but one part was real: the wolf of Wall Street, which by the Great Recession was emboldened enough to come for our middle-class jobs, our homes, and our retirement savings. Over the past thirty-five years, America's policy choices have been grounded in false assumptions. But inequality is not inevitable: it is a choice we make that follows from how we structure our economy. The rise of a strong middle class in the United States was not an accident, and its decline was not an accident either.
Working Americans built the middle class by shaping the political process to produce shared prosperity and economic security, by building unions and bargaining collectively with their employers, by pressing for better wages, better working conditions, and better benefits. And when the clout of the middle class and labor unions declined, starting in earnest in the late 1970s as business mobilized on a scale never before seen and money became more and more important in politics — the middle-class share of national income declined as well.
The current moment is one of reckoning, of acknowledging that we are casualties in a multi-decade war on American workers. Of realizing that we've been had.
THE WIDEST WEALTH GAP ON RECORD
The wealth gap is one of the starkest measures of this war's twisted success. Wealth is not merely income, but also includes a household's savings, home equity, investments, and debts. As pointed out by economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, U.S. wealth concentration has followed a "U- shaped" evolution over the past hundred years: high in the beginning of the twentieth century, falling from 1929 to 1978, and increasing continuously since then.
The share of wealth owned by the middle class followed the inverse pattern: increasing from the early 1930s to the 1980s, peaking in the mid- 1980s, and declining since then. Saez and Zucman find that:
• The top 1 percent — 1.6 million families with net assets above $4 million — now control 42 percent of total household wealth.
• The next 9 percent of families, each with a net worth between $660,000 and $4 million, hold 35 percent of total household wealth.
• The bottom 90 percent of families now hold an average of $84,000 in wealth, representing only 23 percent of total American household wealth.
The last time our nation saw wealth concentration like this, we were headed into the Great Depression.
But post-Depression financial regulation sharply limited the Gilded Age model of the fabulously wealthy financial-industrial baron. New Deal legislation stabilized the economy and reduced wealth concentration for more than fifty years. As these policies were reversed from the 1970s through the 2000s, the average wealth of the top 1 percent began to grow again, at an average rate of 8 percent per year. By 2012, the wealth share of the top 0.1 percent was close to the 1916 and 1929 peaks, and three times higher than in the late 1970s.
These trends accelerated markedly during the Great Recession of 2007–9, as the gains from the recovery flowed almost exclusively to the richest Americans. From 2009 to 2011 alone, the mean wealth of the top 8 million households rose 22 percent, while the remaining households actually saw a reduction in household wealth. Eight million households now control more than $3 million in wealth per household, while the rest hold about $140,000 each. The top households gained $5.6 trillion in two years, while the bottom 90 percent lost $600 billion. The trend of wealth flowing to the top holds even as we zoom in on the earnings of the 1 percent — the lion's share of gains have gone to the top tenth of one percent. Fewer than 200,000 families now control 22 percent of all American household wealth, enjoying estates ranging from $20 million and rising into the billions.
The aftermath of the Great Depression featured New Deal programs that aimed to correct the issues that had caused the crash and to mitigate its effects — including financial sector regulation, programs to directly create jobs, and new policies to distribute wealth more evenly. But the Great Recession sputtered out with only a single major progressive legislative accomplishment (health care reform) while the government bailed out Wall Street, insurance companies, banks, and automobile manufacturers. In the wake of the recession, the bottom 90 percent found their home equity lost or devalued and a weak labor market that didn't allow them to fully recover to even their mediocre prerecession baseline. Research shows that one of the primary drivers behind the decline of the bottom 90 percent has been the evisceration of home equity, formerly the bastion of middle-class security along with pensions, which have also been slashed.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Fight for Fifteen"
by .
Copyright © 2016 David Rolf.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. America at 200: The American Dream Versus the War on the Middle Class,
2. The New Work: Fissured, Flexible, Insecure,
3. It Doesn't Have to Be This Way: Resistance, Unrest, and Innovation,
4. The Little City That Could: Winning a $15 Wage in SeaTac,
5. Fifteen for Seattle,
6. An American Wage for a Stronger America: The Case for $15,
7. But Won't the Sky Fall?,
8. Toward a Different Future: $15 and Beyond,
Afterword: Something's Happening,
Notes,
Index,