First, defining terms. The "labor movement": to many, this phrase evokes established labor unions, and refers solely to the fate of these organizations. Teamster truck drivers, building construction workers in hard hats, Laborers picketing next to an inflated rat. Maybe the image includes teachers and municipal employees, maybe nurses and janitors. But what about the Occupy activists demonstrating against elite, corporate power, on behalf of "the 99%"? This movement was concerned with the issues of working people, but is it considered part of the so-called "labor movement"? Does it matter whether this movement concerned itself with actual workplace issues? But there is also a tremendous amount of organizing and activism that directly concerns workplace issues but may not always be considered part of the labor movement, per se. This is the work I want to write about here. In New York, this includes new organizations of domestic workers, taxi drivers, fast food workers, carwash workers, retail sales clerks, freelancers, and day laborers.
It seems to me that many activists shy away from calling themselves part of the "labor movement." This isn't surprising. The terminology of the "labor movement" evokes bad associations for many: corruption, racism, anti-immigrant nativism, and a mission concerned more with contract gains for the few than with broad social improvements for the many. When I spent time in law school working with and studying organizations of Latino immigrants working together for improvements in their workplaces, the group's members were frustrated with their experiences with traditional unions. When I described my interest in this area, I talked about "immigrant workers' rights", or perhaps "workers' rights" when I was feeling more expansive. I don't recall using the term "labor movement" myself at e time, and I don't recall hearing, at least at that time, nearly a decade ago, the folks i encountered in my work talk about being part of the labor movement. (In a future post perhaps I can make a more academic study of this entirely anecdotal hypothesis.) If anything, they appeared to view their work with immigrants and traditionally unorganized workers (domestic workers, day laborers, for example) as challenging the labor movement.
I'm not sure if this language is changing, but I suspect it is and believe it should. As someone doing work connected to the traditional labor movement, what this term evokes for me is the ubiquitous trope, "the labor movement is in serious decline" or "the labor movement is nearly moribund."
But I see hundreds of green shoots in the "labor movement" - so long as we define terms properly. So here's my definition: in my mind, the labor movement refers to the struggle of people who work for a living, people whose livelihood depends on receiving renumeration from others, wage-earners, to improve their conditions both in and out of workplace, to the extent that those outside-the-workplace issues are directly related to the ones within the workplace, like healthcare or childcare.
With that expansive definition of the labor movement in mind, my next posts will discuss some of my observations on the future of that movement.
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
What happens to the low-skilled workers?
I was fascinated by this project by This American Life and their friends at Planet Money: "Unfit for Work: the Startling Rise of Disability in America." Chana Joffe-Walt makes an incredible, thorough study of the increase in people on disability (a part of the Social Security Adminstration) in the country over the past couple of decades. She makes a compelling point in the final segment that a large driver of this increase was the federal government's Clinton-era shift to move people off of welfare rolls. Because states had to cover an increasing percentage of the welfare costs, but disability was funded by the feds, these incentives have motivated states to take an active role in helping people submit successful applications for disability benefits.
But as a labor lawyer, there was another point in the piece that I found particulary fascinating. First, look at these charts, that show how applications for disability rise and fall with the unemployment rate:
Joffe-Walt argues, "disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills," and quotes an MIT economist who observes that unemployment statistics do not count people on disability: "'That's a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market,' David Autor, an economist at MIT, told me. 'Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program.'" On a more anecdotal level, Joffe-Walt talks about a woman with back pain who, it seems, "could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain." In the radio version (short version and long version) she observes that this reflects a gap between her own world and the world of low-skilled workers: for Joffe-Walt, and myself, and our coworkers, we are able to work successfully with back problems and knee problems and other physical ailments. For low-skilled workers, it seems, there may be a mismatch between their job skills and physical abilities (and limitations), on the one hand, and the jobs that are available to them on the other.
With this fresh in mind, a remark in this Daily Beast article grabbed my attention. In the provocatively-headlined, "Why a BA is Now a Ticket to a Job in a Coffee Shop", Megan McArdle reviews some recent social science studies suggesting that more and more college graduates are winding up with low-skilled service-sector jobs. She considers the policy implications of this trend, asking if too many young people are spending too much money on college. And in the course of this analysis, she observes that as college grads increasingly fill low-wage service jobs, "The workers who can't get those jobs are taking less skilled ones. The lowest-skilled workers are dropping out entirely, many of them probably ending up on disability." This remark certainly seems bourne out by the data in Joffe-Walt's study.
How can we find a better solution than the sort of jerry-rigged social response of putting people on disability?
[A couple caveats before I move on: of course there are many folks who so disabled that they can't perform any job. I'm not talking about them. Also, there may be some folks who scam the system because they are lazy. I'm not talking about them either.]
"Unfit for Work" makes clear that while "disability has become a de facto welfare program . . . it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet . . . federal disability programs became our extremely expensive default plan." The program also fails to serve a welfare-like social purpose because "in most cases, going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work. Going on disability means, assuming you rely only on those disability payments, you will be poor for the rest of your life." Not only does disability fail to serve the social purpose of a welfare safety net, but it is an entirely unsustainable safety net, such as it is: "disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, cost some $260 billion a year. . . . The reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016."
It is clear that we need a new solution. There are a lot of depressing facts to take away from this. But I also learned a couple of things from this reporting that I find really valuable and not simply cause for despair: first, disability is a big part of the answer to the question of what happens to low-skilled (or wrongly-skilled) workers in this dismal economy, and should be borne in mind when considering unemployment statistics; and second, the study makes clear that disability programs serve as a poor stand-in for the welfare, job-retraining, and social safety-net programs we really need. Now that we see these glaring errors and omissions in our social system, let's get to work at designing better programs that present better solutions to our social and economic problems. Namely, finding jobs and health care for everyone who is able to contribute to our economy and society.
But as a labor lawyer, there was another point in the piece that I found particulary fascinating. First, look at these charts, that show how applications for disability rise and fall with the unemployment rate:
Joffe-Walt argues, "disability has also become a de facto welfare program for people without a lot of education or job skills," and quotes an MIT economist who observes that unemployment statistics do not count people on disability: "'That's a kind of ugly secret of the American labor market,' David Autor, an economist at MIT, told me. 'Part of the reason our unemployment rates have been low, until recently, is that a lot of people who would have trouble finding jobs are on a different program.'" On a more anecdotal level, Joffe-Walt talks about a woman with back pain who, it seems, "could not conceive of a job that would accommodate her pain." In the radio version (short version and long version) she observes that this reflects a gap between her own world and the world of low-skilled workers: for Joffe-Walt, and myself, and our coworkers, we are able to work successfully with back problems and knee problems and other physical ailments. For low-skilled workers, it seems, there may be a mismatch between their job skills and physical abilities (and limitations), on the one hand, and the jobs that are available to them on the other.
With this fresh in mind, a remark in this Daily Beast article grabbed my attention. In the provocatively-headlined, "Why a BA is Now a Ticket to a Job in a Coffee Shop", Megan McArdle reviews some recent social science studies suggesting that more and more college graduates are winding up with low-skilled service-sector jobs. She considers the policy implications of this trend, asking if too many young people are spending too much money on college. And in the course of this analysis, she observes that as college grads increasingly fill low-wage service jobs, "The workers who can't get those jobs are taking less skilled ones. The lowest-skilled workers are dropping out entirely, many of them probably ending up on disability." This remark certainly seems bourne out by the data in Joffe-Walt's study.
How can we find a better solution than the sort of jerry-rigged social response of putting people on disability?
[A couple caveats before I move on: of course there are many folks who so disabled that they can't perform any job. I'm not talking about them. Also, there may be some folks who scam the system because they are lazy. I'm not talking about them either.]
"Unfit for Work" makes clear that while "disability has become a de facto welfare program . . . it wasn't supposed to serve this purpose; it's not a retraining program designed to get people back onto their feet . . . federal disability programs became our extremely expensive default plan." The program also fails to serve a welfare-like social purpose because "in most cases, going on disability means you will not work, you will not get a raise, you will not get whatever meaning people get from work. Going on disability means, assuming you rely only on those disability payments, you will be poor for the rest of your life." Not only does disability fail to serve the social purpose of a welfare safety net, but it is an entirely unsustainable safety net, such as it is: "disability programs, including health care for disabled workers, cost some $260 billion a year. . . . The reserves in the disability insurance program are on track to run out in 2016."
It is clear that we need a new solution. There are a lot of depressing facts to take away from this. But I also learned a couple of things from this reporting that I find really valuable and not simply cause for despair: first, disability is a big part of the answer to the question of what happens to low-skilled (or wrongly-skilled) workers in this dismal economy, and should be borne in mind when considering unemployment statistics; and second, the study makes clear that disability programs serve as a poor stand-in for the welfare, job-retraining, and social safety-net programs we really need. Now that we see these glaring errors and omissions in our social system, let's get to work at designing better programs that present better solutions to our social and economic problems. Namely, finding jobs and health care for everyone who is able to contribute to our economy and society.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)