Occupy Port Shutdown Round-up

The establishment on the West Coast port shutdown of Dec 12th, the second such shutdown:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/us/occupy-oakland-angers-labor-leaders.html

The most inflammatory stuff was saved for the international press:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/10/occupy-shutdown-west-coast-ports

Labor Notes' take:
http://labornotes.org/2011/12/west-coast-port-shutdown-sparks-heated-debate-between-unions-occupy

more opinions after the jump

Re: Occupy Goes Underground

 In response to: http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/12386/occupy_goes_underground

Thanks for this article - I think you lay out recent developments in a reasonable way. With one exception: your central premise is incorrect.

Not having a central assembly point has not "allowed" the flexibility and mobility which you, correctly, praise. This kind of autonomy was always a key part of the movement.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that actions were supposed to be "approved" by the GA. Maybe some parts of the movement put out that idea, but in NYC when the working group that I'm part of (the Jobless Working Group) approached the GA early on to approve one of our actions, we were told in no uncertain terms that it was unnecessary. I was informed several weeks ago during a GA (by the facilitator) that the GA "no longer approves any actions."

So it is not correct to say that a shift towards autonomy has been allowed by the weakening of central institutions. The tension between consensus and autonomy - both core values of the Occupation - while it has modified, has not definitively changed as a result of the eviction.

What has shifted is the ability to inform and involve a diverse cross-section of the movement about upcoming plans with relatively little notice. This, in my mind, can only be seen as a loss. This does not, of course, mean that we should despair. To follow your metaphor of "going underground," soundly founded parties never *choose* to go underground unless they are forced to, but they do figure out how to operate underground as effectively as possible.

Thank you again for your quality reporting.

In solidarity,

Sam

http://followingsylvis.blogspot.com

Two Immigration myths

Comment on: http://labornotes.org/2011/10/alabama-workers-meet-harsh-immigration-law-wildcats

Nice article, thanks!

However, I take issue with this section:

Farmworkers, their families, and tax dollars have fled harshly anti-immigrant states like Arizona and Georgia in search of friendlier states, so farm owners have turned to probationers and prisoners on work-release programs to fill the void.

But those workers have been unable to keep up with the requirements of these backbreaking jobs, many quitting after just hours in the sun and leaving farm owners to watch their crops rot in the fields.

In the process, they dispel the myth that immigrants are “stealing our jobs,” confirming that citizens are simply not interested in such exhausting and low-wage work.

Fox News Latino reported that on one Georgia cucumber farm, some Mexican and Guatemalan laborers were accustomed to filling 200 buckets before lunch, bucking for incentive pay. The fastest probationer filled only 134 buckets in a day.

 This section, unfortunately, may dispel a myth, but actually perpetuates a far more pernicious one: that immigrant workers are "a breed apart." To suggest that immigrant workers are so fundamentally different in makeup from native-born that they won't hold the same jobs re-creates the kind of "alienism" that kept black workers in a subordinate position for so many years - and was also used as a reason to bar them from white unions. By denying that one worker can be replaced by another, you remove a key element of solidarity.

I know that this is not your intent. I understand that you are trying to allay fears that immigrants undermine native-born wage earners. Unfortunately, any workers who are denied their civil and economic rights will inevitably undermine the wages of other workers.

In your eagerness, you are committing a serious error.

Thanks again for your otherwise very useful reporting.

In solidarity,
Sam

Goodwin: Chaotic Economic Dynamics (1990) PREFACE

 Preface to "Chaotic Economic Dynamics" by Richard M. Goodwin (1990)


THE origin of this collection of short essays was a series of seminars given in 1988 at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. My aim has been to elaborate the central conceptual framework of the modern industrial economy. In this sense it derives from the formulation of the problem by my teacher and friend Joseph Schumpeter. Though a neoclassical economist, he perceived the essentially evolutionary nature of the industrialized nations.

By comparison with the natural sciences, economics suffers from the lack of a solid empirical foundation based on generally valid experimental data. To make up for this deficiency, an ingenious substitute has been elaborated with great subtlety and considerable success. The method consists in asking what would a rational man (now fashionably called an 'agent') do when confronted by the manifold problems of an economic nature: he is alleged to maximize his utility or his satisfactions, by minimizing his costs and maximizing his profits or his gains of whatever sort he desires.

Under the banner of General Equilibrium Theory, this has been developed into an imposing analytic web of how a system of a large number of such agents would interact in a unified market mechanism. This programme, in an increasingly mathematical form, has produced impressive results, which may be considered 'mainstream' economics. Some tentative efforts at a kind of experimental economics have raised serious doubts about this 'rational' behaviour.

John Halle reports on #occupywallstreet

Very good report on #occupywallstreet reposted from Facebook http://www.facebook.com/notes/john-halle/wall-street-protest-sept-24-2011/10150384437470050

Hi Everyone,

The following is a report from the Wall Street Occupation protest march which I am now on the train returning home from.

Wednesday Orgdown 9/21/11

Brandworkers International is an interesting organization, they specialize in business-to-business boycott tactics, such as persuading restaurants to drop suppliers with bad labor practices. I was reminded of them today because they are publicizing an international day of action against Tnuva, a NYC distributor with a truly horrible record of wage theft, intimidation of workers, and illegal firing.

The action against Tnuva is part of the "Focus on the Food Chain" campaign, which, according to its facebook page is "a joint effort of the non-profit organization Brandworkers and the Industrial Workers of the World (NYC) labor union" to "[organize] recent immigrant workers in New York City's food processing and distribution sector to challenge and overcome sweatshop conditions."

A recent article in Crain's New York talks about Brandworkers, FFC, and the Tnuva campaign: http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110821/SMALLBIZ/308219981

Bill Fletcher on Black Power at Work

Book Review republished from Industrial and Labor Relations Review, vol. 15 July 2011

Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative
Action, and the Construction Industry.
Edited by David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010,
265 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-7431-6, $24.95
(paper).

I did not actually meet and speak with Leo Fletcher (no relation) until the 1980s, but in the fall of 1972 as a freshman at Harvard, and as a student radical, I quickly discovered who he was. Leo was the chief leader of an organization known as the United Community Construction Workers (UCCW). This group of Black and Latino workers was on the frontline in the struggle to desegregate the racist building trades industry of Boston. Leo and his colleagues were at one and the same time worker-leaders at the tail-end of the Black Power phase of the Black Freedom Movement while also serving as champions of a radical vision of labor unionism.

The UCCW was not an isolated initiative. It was part of a national phenomenon that has been largely ignored by both labor historians and historians of the Black Freedom Movement. Black worker organizing, whether from the early 1950s and the National Negro Labor Council or much later in the 1960s/early 1970s with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, has been marginalized by historians as almost being an enigma. The reality is that such efforts, along with many others—including the famous 1968 Memphis, TN sanitation workers organizing and strike where Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered—were essential components of the Black Freedom movement as well as attempts to construct a different vision of labor unionism in the United States.

In this light, David Goldberg and Trevor Griffey’s edited volume Black Power at Work: Community Control, Affirmative Action, and the Construction Industry is an invaluable resource.

Conversation with Gregory Butler re: associate membership programs

Sam Calvin
New Union Approach in New Zealand (2 articles) "undertaking...to build a modern union movement capable of offering easy, low threshold membership to any worker that wants to participate, including having plans and capacity to support unions to change and organize in new sectors."
LISTSERV 16.0 - PORTSIDELABOR Archives
https://lists.portside.org/cgi-bin/listserv/wa?A2=ind1109A&L=PORTSIDELABOR&F&S&P=92
LikeUnlike • • Share • Sunday at 4:37pm
Sam Calvin Also: "Together is a values based organization - by its nature and by the nature of the workplaces of its members, bargaining is not an option at this stage for most members but participation and organization is."
Sunday at 4:38pm • LikeUnlike
Gregory A. Butler
This sounds a LOT like the various "associate membership" schemes that the AFL-CIO have tried over the last 30 years.

Those schemes have to date been a resounding failure.

Bottom line, if a unoin can't get workers more money in their paycheck and protect them from abuses on the job, its useless to them.

Workers aren't stupid. They aren't going to join some amorphous labor social club and pay their hard earned money in dues unless it does something concrete for them.See More
Sunday at 5:10pm • UnlikeLike • 1 person

Arguing in terms of Virtue

David Brooks - The Vigorous Virtues (New York Times)

This article is interesting because of the comments it generates. Moving the debate onto the terrain of virtue produces more profound, more populist responses than are typically seen in "policy" centered debates, where many of the moral issues are submerged. Union supporters take note, this shift is very effective, and something that needs to be understood by folks who want to move popular opinion...

It's tempting for those who have seen the effects of the moral style of argumentation used by the right so effectively since the time of Regan to conclude it is demogogic, but in fact it would be more accurate to call it persuasive persuasive...

Aronowitz quote

The rest of his piece on the split-off of the Change to Win coalition from the AFL-CIO is fairly mundane, if reasonably accurate, but this quote has a bit of fire:

Whatever its practices, until the 1970s, the Teamsters paraded an image of economic power that was unrivalled by its AFL-CIO competitors most of whom were making nice to the bosses. The Teamsters had success because they offered a program of resistance. Are there any sections of Organized Labor that even remember how to talk the talk of class power when for decades, they have assured workers that they can secure justice by peaceful means, that the old methods of baptism by fire were outmoded and the labor movement had become “responsible”?

Can't remember the last time I read the phrase "class power"...

The Rights Revolution

Originally published in New Labor Forum in 2003. Maybe I'll make a digest, but for the time being I'm just posting this for reference...

By Nelson Lichtenstein

A GREAT PARADOX EMBODIES THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HUMAN RIGHTS AND LABOR rights in the world today. Institutional trade unionism is not doing so well. This is most obvious in Anglo-America, where union density has declined dramatically during the last quarter century, and where unionism's influence, under both Labour and Democratic Party Administrations has been less than potent. With some notable exceptions-South Africa, South Korea, Brazil-one can say the same for union membership and power all over the world.

Conversation with an NYC Labor Activist

Gregory Butler is a blogger construction worker, labor activist, and author of Disunited Brotherhoods...race, racketeering and the fall of the New York construction unions.

Here is the text of an (incomplete) conversation we had on Facebook.

Sam Calvin via UnemployedWorkers.org
A disturbing chart...btw I don't know why they don't use the actual percentages...chart should read 67.5% on the left down to 57.5% on the right...

Daily Kos: Workers' share of national income fails to recover after 21st Century recessions
www.dailykos.com
But after the 2001 and 2007-2009 recessions officially ended, workers' share of national income did not recover but continued a downward spiral. It is now at the lowest level it has been since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping records 64 years ago.
June 19 at 1:58am · LikeUnlike · · Share

Sam Calvin one note- part of the decline is attributable to the fact that this measures "wages and salaries" as opposed to "total compensation"...ie healthcare costs squeeze take-home pay...
June 19 at 2:00am · LikeUnlike
o
Sam Calvin The really interesting question is why there is no ability on the part of progressive elites to provide real support to unions, the only institutions which have proven capable of reversing this trend...
June 19 at 2:02am · LikeUnlike
o
Gregory A. Butler
The Democratic Party represents the liberal wing of the capitalist class - they want to keep workers as impoverished and unorganized as much as the right wingers in the Republican Party do. The only difference is, they see America's weak, timid, incompetent, cowardly, racist, sexist and pro corporate union leaders as useful sources of funding and volunteers for the Democratic Party and they understand that those guys act as a barrier against the rise of an effective and militant working class movement. So, they tolerate unions as long as they are small, weak and divided (and solidly in the Democratic Party camp).
June 19 at 2:17am · LikeUnlike

EXCERPT: The Financialization of the Economy

EXCERPT FROM "Addressing the Problem of Stagnant Wages," Frank Levy and Tom Kochan http://www.employmentpolicy.org/sites/www.employmentpolicy.org/files/field-content-file/pdf/Mike%20Lillich/EPRN%20WagesMay%2020%20-%20FL%20Edits_0.pdf

Beyond changes in technology, product markets, and labor-market institutions, changes in financial institutions have helped to create wage stagnation and wage inequality.
Four parallel trends are notable:

• heightened focus on shareholder value,
  
• increased use of debt financing,
  
• deregulation of financial markets, and
  
• expansion of the financial-services sector.[1]

Shadow-boxing

Comments in response to: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/bloomberg-administration-is-criticized-on-wages/

1.
Larry Eisenberg
New York City
May 12th, 2011
5:05 pm
Developers, subsidized, are
So fragile, so easy to jar,
Four hundred a week
Such great havoc would wreak,
And lifestyles would grow so bizarre.
Recommend Recommended by 1 Readers
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2.
Paul '52
New York, NY
May 12th, 2011
5:07 pm
I'd like to propose a "win-win" for the Council:

Get the City Council in a room with the Kentucky State Legislature. The Council can "win" by convincing the Legislature that its powers don't encompass amendments to the laws of geology, physics and biology. The Legislature's "win" is convincing the Council that its powers don't include amending laws of economics.

Both sides can then come away happy.
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers
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3.
Edward
New York
May 12th, 2011
8:44 pm
I believe there is a disconnect. The real estate developers are the owners of the mall or shopping center but they lease space to retailers. The wage bill is to be imposed on the retailers that lease space in the mall/shopping center. The retailers are not receiving any benefits that I am aware of, unless I am missing something in the overall transaction.

The retailers can be granted a sales tax credit for the increase in wages over the federal minimum wage so they are not at a competitive disadvantage to other retailers in other malls/shopping centers.

I do not appreciate the angry tone of the elected officials. Many residents in working class communities would welcome the jobs and new shopping opportunities in their neighborhood instead of traveling to Rockland, Nassau and Westchester counties to shop.
Recommend Recommended by 3 Readers
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4.
followingsylvis
New York City
@Edward I appreciate your sincerity on this issue, unlike some others (I'm looking at you, @Paul52) I believe you really are trying to find a just solution to this issue.

Even though the wage mandates will show up on the retailers' payroll, it is the owners of the mall property who will ultimately have to \"eat\" the difference.

Look at it this way - the goods and services provided in a mall have to correspond to local market prices. So total revenue is fixed within a fairly narrow range by the pricing structure of the retailer. After inventory is paid for, this money must be then divided up among employees, retailers, and the mall owners. Retailers, although they vary in the amount that they are able to lay claim to, operate within a relatively fixed margin, again depending on their business model.

Rent, on the other hand, is peculiar in that it has no costs associated with it (taxes being only an after-the-fact subdivision of profit in the case of commercial property) - it is pure ownership income. So when push comes to shove, it is the rentier who must lower his price.

To put it simply - the landlord will take as much of a retailer's profit as he can, but he doesn't want to kill the golden goose, except, occasionally, as a symbolic gesture to frighten goslings like our friend Paul52.

Wednesday Afternoon Orgdown

Been a while since my last orgdown, but this caught my eye:


Organizing Upgrade: Left Organizers Respond to the Changing Times
http://www.organizingupgrade.com/

From their "about us" page:

Organizing Upgrade is an attempt to engage left leaders and innovators in the field of community organizing in a strategic dialogue. We hope that this project can bring the kind of inspiration, vision and strategic clarity we need to strengthen our political impact, both in our immediate fight and in our longer-term efforts to build the social justice movement and to revitalize a movement-rooted left in the United States.

Also, this has become a regular source for me for international labor news:

LaborStart: Where trade unionists start their day on the net.
http://www.labourstart.org/
from their about page:

LabourStart is an online news service maintained by a global network of volunteers which aims to serve the international trade union movement by collecting and disseminating information -- and by assisting unions in campaigning and other ways.

Its features include daily labour news links in more than 20 languages and a news syndication service used by more than over 700 trade union websites. News is collected from mainstream, trade union, and alternative news sources by a network of over 500 volunteer correspondents based on every continent.

'Nuff said.

Conversation on Taxes

Full text of a conversation with some libertarians. Did I win? Did I score points? Or did I flatter them too much by using the term "pathological individualism"? You be the judge.
-----

Paul Nickels
This is class warfare, people! The rich are effing the poor at every turn. Money for tax breaks for the rich, no money for 99ers. Money for corporate bailouts, no money for the people. The poor pay taxes, the rich pay little or nothing. Is this the America our parents and grandparents fought for? Is this the America our founding fathers envisioned?

No. It is not.

Only Little People Pay Taxes | Mother Jones
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/taxes-richest-americans-charts-graph
How a janitor ends up with a higher tax rate than a millionaire, and seven more charts that show how the richest Americans beat the IRS.

April 18 at 11:12pm • UnlikeLike • • Share

You, Deborah L Purdom and Jacquard Guenon like this.
o
Denise Gerdes NO! This is not what it should be!
April 19 at 7:53am • LikeUnlike


o
Bruce Olson it's not; that's a bit of a misrepresentation... those "in the Helmsley building" are not necessarily representative of "average". It also makes a lot of hidden assumptions about the sources of income for the wealthy person... if that income were mainly salary/bonus, his actual taxes would be MUCH higher; His net taxes in this case imply revenue from mainly off-shore or other tax exempt sources.
April 19 at 11:41am • LikeUnlike
o
Sam Calvin ‎@Bruce I'm not seeing your point - the main thing here is that people who work for a living pay a high rate, while those lucky enough to live mostly off capital gains pay much less. The source of the wealth of all the truly wealthy is not work - that's why the tax rate falls as you get into the "upper stratosphere" of the top 1% despite a progressive income tax.
April 19 at 8:06pm • LikeUnlike • 1 personLoading...

New tools for communication: Whiteboard

Nice project going on over at RSAnimate ( http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/videos/ ), using whiteboard with entertaining cartooning to make a lecture listenable which might otherwise be boring.

Here's David Harvey getting animated:

Ucubed election fail

Too bad. Unemployed badly need a stronger national network...

Fwd: One Truly Is The Loneliest Number

Dear UCubed Leaders and Activists:

One truly is the loneliest number. Only one UCubed member stepped up to run for UCubed State Director in exactly one state. Consequently, the scheduled 2011 elections must be cancelled.

Perhaps, by this time next year, UCubed will have sufficient mass -- and sufficient intensity and drive -- to elect its own leadership. Until then, we will build our organizational infrastructure by appointing activists who will aggressively represent the Union of Unemployed and its members at the state and regional levels.

Here at the Union of Unemployed, just like in your personal lives, each obstacle is simply another challenge to be met… as we continue our fight for the jobless.

In Unity – Strength,

Rick Sloan
Executive Director
Ur Union of Unemployed

Cutting the Wrong Deficit

Why doesn't the "soak the rich" line work? Even when Reich giving it his all, it lacks the ring of conviction.

Because there *is* an economic problem.

But it is the trade deficit, not the budget deficit.

In a sense, the "common sense" right-wingers are not entirely wrong: we cannot indefinitely continue to be a nation which produces less than it consumes. Of course, they've got their facts mixed up about the cause of the deficit (hint: it wasn't caused by lazy people), and, therefore, are way off on workable solutions.

But right-wing populists have caught wiff of a stinking fact of the system, they are right not to let it go.

So they've been set loose on the wrong deficit, and the "solutions" they're being offered funnel down the to level of personal allegory: the grotesque spectacle of flogging of public sector workers.

But politics is largely a matter of stagecraft, and if you want people to let go of one thing, you've got to give them something else to bite on.

But isn't that what "soak the rich" is? Red meat for the masses?

Only a nincompoop like Reich could think that it was. And there's nothing more insulting to a red-blooded plebian than trying to pass off this political tofu as red meat.

Ultimately, the "soak the rich" line derives comes from an underlying belief that there is no big problem, that this is all a manufactured crisis.

That may be easy for Reich to say, but I don't think I'll join him. It's an attitude comes from complacency, and only lead to complacency. Hardly the secret to Democratic "relevancy" (or is it)?

Bill Fletcher Jr - The Jobs Crisis in the African-American Community (VIDEO)

Talk given by Bill Fletcher Jr. to the Left Labor Project Forum on February 24, 2011.

Introductory remarks


PART 1 - Black History Month


PART 2 - Optimism in the Black and Latino Commuity


>>>>>>>PARTS 3-7 AFTER THE JUMP<<<<<<<

Resolution on Work Among the Unemployed(1931)-COMPLETE

[Reproduced in it's entirety, the following text is taken from The Communist, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party USA. It was published in September 1931, and represents the most coherent overview of the entire range of activities undertaken by the communists to organize among the unemployed in the years 1930-1933. -Ed.]

The following resolution was adopted by the 13th Plenum of the Communist Party, U.S.A. on the report of comrade Satchel.

1. Unemployment, already greater that at any time during the present economic crisis, continues to grow as a consequence of the still growing depth of the crisis and increasing rationalization, making work among the unemployed more than ever a "central and urgent task." The increase of part time employment and the growth of strikes against the sharpening wage cutting offensive of the capitalists, continually broadens the basis for, and makes more urgent the development of joint action of the employed and unemployed.

2010 Mass Strike in South Africa DIGEST

THE 2010 MASS STRIKE IN THE STATE SECTOR, SOUTH AFRICA (2010)
by Ian Bekker and Lucien van der Walt

DIGEST PRODUCED FOR TUSG.ORG

Recently, around 1.3 million state sector workers went on strike for four weeks against attempts to impose neoliberal austerity measures. The strike took place just weeks after South Africa’s government spent billions on hosting the FIFA World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world. It was the biggest state sector strike in recent history, dwarfing even the month-long mass strike of 2007, involving unions affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), as well as eleven non-COSATU unions linked together in the Independent Labour Caucus (ILC), a loose alliance.

The strike was all the more remarkable given that COSATU, the largest union centre, is part of a Tripartite Alliance with the African National Congress (ANC), the ruling party in South Africa. (The third leg of the Alliance is the South African Communist Party, SACP, many of whose leaders serve as key figures in the ANC government, but also as union leaders.) In striking against the state-as-employer, the federation inevitably had to confront the ANC-as-government, on the eve of the ANC’s September 2010 National General Council (NGC).

More on the Food Economy

To the editor:

I was excited to see Mark Bittman draw attention to the plight of workers in the food supply-chain, who "labor in difficult, even deplorable, conditions." Yet, in reading further, I discovered that he seems to think these bad conditions end when food leaves the farm or the packinghouse. The continuing growth of low-wage jobs handling food in restaurants, supermarkets, and "big box" stores refutes this.

Bittman's bias towards home food production - indeed, the fourth idea in his "manifesto" is to "encourage and subsidize home cooking" - both ignores the prevailing trend in production of meals and blinds him to badly-needed reforms. His bias is perhaps understandable (he is, after all, an author of recipes for the home cook), but to pose a return to home production of food is as a solution is both unrealistic - because increased time devoted to home cooking would almost certainly mean a reduction of job hours, family income, and national productivity - and utopian - because it simply "wishes away" the reality of low-wage jobs in foodservice and retail.

Krug Fug

comment on: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/the-kitchen-test/

This observation totally ignores *who* prepares food and *where* it is prepared. As recently as the '90s, the U.S. passed the tipping point where more meals were produced outside the home than within it. I'd call that a pretty big change, perhaps not quite on par with the movement from an agrarian to industrial society (when considered alone), but a significant index of our change to a "service" economy.

While technology (even in professional kitchens) has been quite stagnant - blame wage suppression on the retardation of labor-saving innovations - both quantitative changes (consider the huge amount of time went into producing food in the home, even with 1950s technologies) and qualitative changes (we have not yet "re-aligned" the nutritional content of commercially produced foodstuffs) continue to have a major impact on the way we live.

Considered in this context, everything from the obesity "epidemic" to the role of women in the labor force is implicated.

RT Reports from the Economic Front: China And The Jobs Issue

by Martin Hart-Landsberg

originally published at: http://media.lclark.edu/content/hart-landsberg/2011/01/21/china-and-the-jobs-issue/

CONDENSED FOR TUSG.ORG

The President of China, Hu Jintao, just completed a visit to the U.S. and, not surprisingly, many people used the occasion to raise the jobs issue.

The connection between jobs and China is usually made is as follows: China is an unfair trader. Its state policies, including subsidies and labor repression, are a major reason for the destruction of our manufacturing sector and jobs. The U.S. continues to run an enormous trade deficit with China, a deficit that dwarfs any other bilateral deficit, and for this reason, the U.S. economy continues to suffer from high unemployment, i.e. a "jobs deficit."

This nation-state framing encourages us to see U.S. workers in direct competition with Chinese workers, with their gains largely coming at our expense. Unfortunately, this framing misleads more than it helps to clarify current economic dynamics. It is also followed [by most economists] to a counterproductive response: force China to quicken its embrace of market forces so that its economy will become more like ours.

A more accurate framing would start from the fact that contemporary capitalist dynamics have led to the creation of a regional production network in East Asia, with China serving as the region’s final assembly base for exports to the U.S.

Bill Tabb - The Jobs Crisis (VIDEO)

Presented to the Left Labor Forum on January 18, 2011 in New York City.

PART 1


PART 2


PART 3


[video of discussion, and incomplete transcript after the break]

Montgomery- Fall of the House of Labor (1987) DIGEST

THE CRISIS OF COMPETITVE CAPITALISM, 1870-1900
by David Montgomery
Excerpted from The Fall of the House of Labor (Cambridge 1987) p. 44-57
DIGEST PRODUCED FOR TUSG.ORG
The long upswing of American industrial growth in the nineteenth century had different characteristics before and after the depression of the 1870s. Before that decade lay the formative years of the American working class. The ranks of wage laborers had grown hand in hand with rapid accumulation of capital for more than half a century to the point that they represented more than half of those counted by the census of 1870 as gainfully employed. Per capita output had also grown steadily, at least since the 1830s. The 1850s had represented something of a nodal point in this growth: along with the iron ship, the telegraph, and the consolidation of railroad trunk lines, that decade had brought aggressive working-class activity in both economic and political life and had closed with America's achievement of second place in manufacturing output among the nations of the world and a genuine industrial depression.

Harvey- Enigma of Capital DIGEST

THE ENIGMA OF CAPITAL by David Harvey (Oxford 2010)
DIGEST PRODUCED FOR TUSG.ORG

Capital is the lifeblood that flows through the body politic of all those societies we call capitalist. Understanding capital flow, its winding pathways and the strange logic of its behavior is therefore crucial to our understanding of the conditions under which we live.

My early seventeenth-century namesake William Harvey is generally credited with being the first person to show correctly and systematically how blood circulated through the human body. It was on this basis that medical research went on to establish how heart attacks and other ailments could seriously impair, if not terminate, the life force within the human body.

In trying to deal with serious tremors in the heart of the body politic, our economists, business leaders and political policy makers have, in the absence of any conception of the systematic nature of capital flow, either revived ancient practices or applied postmodern conceptions and sophisticated mathematical models.

In this book, I attempt to restore some understanding of what the flow of capital is all about. If we can achieve a better understanding of the disruptions and destruction to which we are all now exposed, we might begin to know what to do about it.