unions

I'm still working to cut and post videos from the Better Deal conference this weekend but I had tickets to U2 on Sunday so that might explain the delay... The following is a video of Liz Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer newly elected Secretary Treasurer of the AFL-CIO who is one of the youngest and also the first woman ever elected at such a high level.

One of the conversations I had with Kevin this past weekend was about unique ways in which Labor Unions are working to incorporate their members into existing youth movements and how they too can do specific outreach to their young members. Young Democrats of America has a vibrant labor representation in their executive committee and they are doing outreach to many national unions to help facilitate alliances.

Laborers 1290 out of Kansas City is doing the same thing. A good friend developed and manages their online strategy used to communicate to young people what unions do, how they can help, and what they mean to our history. With so many young people working in skills and trade jobs today, there is a natural outreach mechanism that should be built to our friends in the unions.

Enjoy her speech.

We all know that young workers are in bad shape, but in case you need a refresher:

According to a 2008 report, "The Economic State of Young America," published by Demos, a non-profit research organization:

• Median annual earnings for young men (25–34) with a high school education declined by 29 percent between 1975 and 2005, and decreased by 10 percent for young women who are high school graduates. The drop of earnings was even steeper for young African American and Latino workers with only a high school education.
• Median earnings for young men with a bachelor's degree decreased 2 percent between 1975 and 2005, while the earnings for college-educated women increased slightly by 10 percent.
• One in three young workers between the ages of 18 and 34 do not have health insurance—the highest rate by far for all age groups.

Moreover, economic mobility for young workers is constrained by the rising costs of higher education. Tuition at public universities has doubled since 1980 after adjusting for inflation. In 2006, more than half of all students graduating from four-year colleges owed an average of $20,000 in student loan debt.

Over at the AFL-CIO blog, Martin Bennet makes the case for EFCA (union card-check) as the first step to solving those problems. The whole thing is worth a read, but the main thrust of the piece is that -

Wage stagnation and diminishing benefits for young workers over the past three decades is due to erosion of the inflation-adjusted minimum wage; globalization and the export of good manufacturing jobs abroad; the "dot-com" tech bust of the late 1990s and the proliferation of low-wage service sector jobs; the increase of part-time and contingent employment; and, most importantly, the decline of union membership.

- and EFCA, which could drastically increase the size and power of unions, particularly in a service industry in which many workers are young, is the cure.

Also of interest is that the piece notes that the AFL-CIO is going to release data from a survey of young workers before Labor Day. That's an area with very little research and it will likely be a very interesting and important read.

Kelly Jacobsen is a young college student at Washburn University who has worked as staff on several campaigns and spoken at a Congressional press conference about the College Cost Reduction Act in 2007. We are grateful to promote her work here on FM. --Sarah

As a college freshman, I am often thankful I have several years before I will begin the difficult process of finding a job. But with massive company layoffs dominating the daily news, it is hard for me not to worry about whether or not my peers and I will be able to find jobs stable enough to support our families.

Proponents of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) recognize the current, daunting state of the economy and are striving to lend a helping hand to the American worker.

This piece of legislation, which was recently introduced in Congress, would give workers the freedom to decide for themselves to join a union, rather than facing company roadblocks. By forming a union, workers would then be allowed to bargain for better benefits, wages, and working conditions.

One goal of the EFCA is to level the playing field for all workers and prevent salary increases from strictly benefiting company CEOs.

“Despite our national economy, the production of American workers is up,” said Andy Sanchez, Secretary-Treasurer for the Kansas State AFL-CIO. “Each year American workers improve upon their production, yet they are left behind as the companies profits have grown by leaps and bounds. One needs to only look at what CEO salaries have increased by to realize something is out of whack.”

For young people, the benefits of joining a union are very promising. A 2008 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) entitled “Unions and Upward Mobility for Young People” found that young union workers (ages 18-29) earned 12.4% more, on average, than their non-unionized counterparts.

The report also found that young union members are 17% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and 24% more likely to have an employer-provided pension plan.

"Unions make a big difference for younger workers," said John Schmitt, a Senior Economist at CEPR and the author of the study. "There is no economic theory that says young people have to be poorly paid or go without benefits."

It is no secret that our country is experiencing a very trying time. While I am confident in our new President’s ability to navigate us back to a strong economy, I am fully expecting the process to be very exhausting. By allowing workers to choose to unionize, we can strengthen America’s middle class and create strong jobs for our communities.

“The middle class is what built this country and it is what continues to maintain America's prosperity,” Sanchez said. “It is also what will get us through this rough time.”

According the AFL-CIO, 60 million American workers who are not union members would opt to form a union tomorrow if given the chance. Please contact your representatives in Congress to encourage them to support the Employee Free Choice Act and give these workers the choice on whether or not to form a union. By doing so, you will be taking action to assure that all Americans get a fair share in the work place.

Happy Holidays. Here's what's caught my eye this week:

• The Washington Independent notes that Obama's energy policy is being driven by (young) green votes.
• AlterNet asks, Will the youth movement save the labor movement?
• Daily Kos has data that Join the Impact's anti-Prop 8 protests have changed enough minds in California that the ballot measure would not pass a second time. And they have data to prove it. That's an effective use of the protest model.
• The National Journal credits young voters with Obama's win, noting that his advantage among Millennials is bad news for the longterm health of the GOP. Generation We, YDA and others get good play in this excellent article.
• Oregon local news notes that young people were elected to the state legislature in droves this year, doubling their numbers within the Democratic caucus. Jefferson Smith, one of the founders of the Bus Project, is one of those new Young Elected Officials and he is quoted in the article.
• Netcentric Advocacy gives us the Obama campaign by the numbers. Interesting stats here.
• This is a must read. In the Huffington Post, Jake Brewer of the Energy Action Coalition, son of a GM worker, gives a heartbreaking and insightful account of the state of the auto industry. Word on the street is that this piece is getting read by GM execs.
• MySpace and Change.org are partnering with a number of other youthy and techie c3s to ask for your ideas on what President Obama should do once he takes office. They've got a cool Digg-style site set up to rate ideas, which must be no more than 250 words in length.
• The Obama Transition Team wants your ideas on healthcare.
• The Daily Kos empire expands with the launch of Congress Matters, a new blog that will track what's going on in Congress and offer activists and regular citizens information on how they can most impact the policy process.
• Danah Boyd and some other smarties have finished a three year ethnographic study of digital youth. This should be interesting.
• Engaged Youth has a post up about the "Activism Style of Millennials."
• At Tech President, Micah Sifry interviews Marshall Ganz about Obama's field operation and the upside and dangers of Obama as the first President backed by a full-fledged movement.

Bumped --Mike.

By Matt Sherman

With all the election news about increased turnout from people ages 18-29, television hosts seem giddily intrigued by the political habits of “young people,” as if we were some exotic and alien demographic of the American electorate.

The truth is, we Millenials (is that what they’re calling us?) are Americans like everyone else – just younger. We may not have lived through history, but we know the story. We may not have a family right now, but we will someday.

As citizens, we’ve taken advantage of all the new opportunities afforded us in the 21st century. We’ve graduated from high school and college at higher rates than in recent memory. We’ve contributed to the increased productivity from labor in the last decade. We were the first generation to grow up with computers, and we still give our parents a computer lesson every now and then. In short, we’ve been pretty good citizens.

And yet, we’ve been the hardest hit by the wage stagnation in our economy over the last three decades. After adjusting for inflation, the wage of the typical 18-29 year-old worker was about 10 percent lower in 2007 than it had been in 1979. Despite being more tech-savvy and better educated, we’re getting paid less.

A lot of this is outside of our control, influenced by political decisions in Washington and massive fluctuations in the economy. But there is one surefire way that young people can improve their living standard – unions.

A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) analyzes data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) and finds that unionized young workers (age 18-29) earned, on average, 12.4 percent more than their non-union peers. The trend was the same even in the lowest-wage occupations. The average non-union young worker made $8.74 per hour, while the average unionized young worker made $10.62 per hour. Unionized workers were also more likely to have good benefits, like employer-provided health care and pension plans.

You can find the full report here.

Matt Sherman is a 2008 graduate of the University of Virginia and an intern at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.

Fellow Philly blogger and local activist Susie Madrak, aka the Suburban Geurrilla and former Press Secretary for mayoral hopeful Tom Knox, had a post last week about the death of another Philly blogger: Rittenhouse Review’s Jim Capozzola. Susie is obviously extremely sad at the loss of her friend, but she's also really pissed:

There is not even a little doubt in my mind that, if Rittenhouse Review’s Jim Capozzola had remained a Republican, he’d be alive now. He would have been in a well-paid think tank job, living the high life. (He did, after all, have a masters degree in foreign policy.) Most importantly, he would have had health insurance for the past six years.

And what did his talent and dedication get him on the liberal side of the political noise machine? Some free books. A life that, as intellectually stimulating as it was, reduced him to living on the charity of strangers.

People saying really kind and thoughtful things about how important he was to the cause - after he’s dead. Isn’t that ironic?

The current state of progressive politics is all kinds of FUBAR. I myself just became insured again a few months back, due to my wife getting a job with benefits, but most activists and bloggers don't have a spouse they can get insurance through, so most go through life with, as Susie called it, the sword of Damocles hanging over their head every single day.

The few months that I went without insurance put so much stress on my relationship, that under other circumstances might have ended it. It also could have landed me in debtors prison if anything would have happened to either of us, but luckily, and with the help of a few family and friends with access to medicine (I have asthma, which requires pretty constant maintenance) we made it through. Which is to say that I am lucky. But a movement, if this is in fact a movement, can not rely upon the individual luck of all of its members if it is going to remain viable.

Whether we are talking about the "free" work that bloggers do for the party and movement, or the sweat and tears that activists pour into making political change a reality, the time for change is NOW. There are certainly a few donors who continue to fund what I feel is the movement, but most of the money being funneled into political communications still goes to the same G-d damned thing: 30 second ads. At the same time, most of the large Democratic organizations that have field operations continue to outsource them to the predatory PIRGs and PIRG clone Grassroots Campaigns, Inc.

If the party wont help to insure that its own toiling proletariat, than how can we honestly put any hope in the idea that they can or will help working people on the whole. I am now 100% convinced that the next major step in this movement must be for its workers to come together and form a union. I have become convinced that only after our own workers are organized and have successfully pushed for reforms of our institutions and party towards supporting their own heart, mouth, mind, feet, and hell, even soul, will we start to see the broader societal level changes that we all demand.