unions

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.