Two-Day UC Strike Unlikely to Sway Bosses

A strike by nurses and other patient care workers at University of California (UC) hospitals and medical centers entered its second and final day Wednesday, despite efforts by the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to block some employees from participating. UC officials said it would “threaten public health and safety,” the SF Appeal reported this week. The dispute involves over 12,500 employees, who are represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union (AFSCME). Hundreds of members of the University Professional and Technical Employees Union threatened to join in a one-day sympathy strike on Wednesday.

According to AFSCME officials, the PERB injunction only barred around 120 employees from participating. Almost twenty-four of them had already been exempted from striking under the union’s “Patient Protection Task Force,” which allowed them to cross the picket line to help maintain emergency patient care.

UC officials predictably condemned the strike, saying it would cost them $20 million “to ensure patient safety” for two days, while completely ignoring how their own policies endanger patient safety every day of the year. Some of these policies include downsizing patient care staff, which reduces the ratio of nurses to patients. It has also resulted in a reduction in the Lift Teams used to shift immobilized patients in order to reduce bed sores and increase circulation. This is one of the more dangerous responsibilities of patient care workers because of the risk of lower back and other injuries and it becomes even more risky when there aren’t enough staff members to do it safely.

In an attempt to vilify the union and turn public sentiment against them, senior vice president for health sciences and services, Dr. John Stobo, said “It is completely inappropriate to threaten services to patients as a negotiating tactic—the health of our patients must not be held hostage.” Another official said that the staffing reductions were an inevitable consequence of revenue losses stemming from Obamacare (or the Affordable Health Care Act), which is reducing Medicare and Medical payments. Yet, according to one union member, the university’s hospitals have been making over $100 million in profits every year for the past 15 years (KPFA Morning News, 5/22/13), while administrative salaries have soared. In reality, the cuts have far more to do with maintaining high profits and administrative salaries and have been a far bigger threat to patient health and safety than a short, two-day strike.

While health care workers, like teachers and many other public sector workers, do provide essential health and safety services, this cannot be used to compel them to work under dangerous conditions that threaten their own health and safety. Wage workers have little freedom in the long term (one must work for wages in this society in order to feed one’s family)—hence the term Wage Slave. However, they do (at least in theory) have the right to withhold their labor in order to fight for better, safer working conditions, unlike chattel slaves, who could be beaten or killed for such impudence. According to Dr. Stobo, however, hospital workers do not even have this right because of their role in maintaining patient health and safety. (Similar arguments have been made to ban teachers’ strikes). Yet, if we take this argument to its logical conclusion (i.e., that patient health and safety trump all us), health care should be provided free of charge to everyone, since profit- and insurance-based healthcare result in thousands of preventable and premature deaths each year. Likewise, hospitals should be required to provide all necessary services to maintain both patients’ and workers’ health and safety, and not be permitted to reduce these services either to maintain profits or administrators’ bloated salaries.

UC and AFSCME have failed to come to an agreement on several contractual issues, including staffing ratios and the demand that workers pay more toward their pension plans. Unfortunately, a limited two-day strike is unlikely to cause enough pain to compel the bosses to concede to the workers. To make matters worse, many employees crossed the picket lines, including AFSCME members. The Los Angeles Times reported that 601 AFSCME members crossed the picket line at UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, out of 1,095 scheduled to work, a solidarity rate of less than 50%.

Parasites Unite! America’s Entitlement Problem

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Mitt Romney was recently embarrassed by a leaked video in which he wrote off the “47% of Americans who don’t pay taxes,” accusing them of feeling victimized and expecting the government to take care of them. NPR’s Planet Money says that it is actually just over 46% of Americans and it is primarily just the federal income tax that they do not pay and they don’t pay it because they receive tax credits or untaxed income like Social Security, Earned Income Tax Credits, child care tax credits and disability payments. The overwhelming majority of these people are poor or low income working people and retirees.

The biggest reason why so many people pay no federal income tax is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which was established in 1975 for low and moderate income working Americans, particularly those with children, as a way to offset social security taxes and to provide an incentive to work. The idea was that if you were working full time, you shouldn’t be starving, too. So the feds established this tax credit to put more money in the pockets of the working poor by taxing them less. The result was that many working poor no longer had any income tax liability. Thus, they paid no taxes.

Romney’s disparaging of these Americans, most of whom have worked hard all of their lives, belies his disdain for the rabble who he and his ilk have exploited to enrich themselves. Yet, in reality, the EITC has contributed to this exploitation, as it subsidizes low wages. The credit is only available to full time workers. So if you are willing to work for low wages, you will be rewarded with a tax credit. This helps ensure that there will always be a pool of workers willing to take on the lowest paying and most degrading, stressful and dangerous jobs out there and that bosses can continue to make millions of dollars per year by paying them so poorly for their toil.

Consequently, the EITC has received widespread support from both parties throughout most of its existence. The program was expanded under Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and again under Obama, with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Clinton’s expansion of the program resulted in nearly 25% of Americans paying no federal income tax. Under George W. Bush, the percentage of Americans paying no federal income tax rose to 36% as a result of a child tax credit he added to the program. And as a result of high unemployment and temporary tax breaks, the number of Americans paying no federal income taxes under the Obama administration has risen to nearly 50% of all American households, according to NPR’s Planet Money.

So what’s wrong with this?

From Romney’s perspective, the beneficiaries are just a bunch of crybabies and self-entitled brats who will never vote for him anyway or do anything to end their dependency on government aid. From the perspective of anti-Big Government activists, like Romney, the only role of government is to provide subsidies and tax benefits to the wealthy and their businesses and provide military and police services to protect their property and investments. Any government spending that provides assistance to the rest of us is wasteful and irresponsible.

While this is not true (the EITC actually benefits the wealthy by encouraging them to continue paying poverty wages), this rationale is consistent with their never ending quest to lower taxes for themselves, something that requires a concomitant reduction in government services (for the majority of Americans, but not themselves).

One problem with the EITC is that if 50% of Americans aren’t paying any federal income taxes, the middle class is forced to cover the difference, leaving the rich effectively off the hook. Most of the wealthy do pay some income tax. However, they pay a far smaller percentage of their income than do middle class wage earners, since the majority of their income comes from capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate than regular income. And some wealthy Americans in fact pay little or no income taxes. (For the years he actually provided data, Mitt Romney paid an effective federal income tax rate of around 15% on all income, far less than what middle class people pay. This is because the bulk of his income was capital gains and because of all the extra deductions available to wealthy investors and businessmen that are unavailable to the rest of us). Thus, this system allows the wealthy to retain a greater percentage of their income than middle and lower class wage earners, further enriching them and increasing the wealth gap.

As for the beneficiaries of the EITC, it has not ended (nor can it end) poverty. Rather, it encourages it by subsidizing low wages. This is not to say it should be abolished—it does provide some relief for low income wage earners. However, everyone should have the basics for survival, including sufficient food, housing, healthcare, leisure time, as well as access to the good things in life. The primary reason why we do not all have these things is that we are dependent on the wealthy to provide us with jobs and decent wages and they are dependent on our low wages for their profits and wealth. If we do not work, we cannot put food on the table. Thus, we have no choice but to continue selling our labor to them for whatever price we can get (a price that has been diminishing yearly since the 1970s when adjusted for inflation).

Until wage slavery itself is abolished, wages will continue to be the biggest influence on living conditions. Therefore, rather than simply giving a tax credit to the poor that lets the bosses off the hook and that encourages low wage work, the entire wage-based system must be ended and the quality of life needs to be unlinked from the type of work we do.

Career Testing for Kindergartners

Our Infallible Tests Have Identified You As A Textile Worker, So Get to Work!

For generations, Madison Avenue has marketed toys, sugary cereals and other products directly to children, through television, radio, billboards and product placement in stores at children’s eye level even though most of these products are bought by their parents. The reason why they do this is obvious to most of us: if you can get the kids excited about a product they will nag and cajole their parents, whine, argue that their friends’ parents do it, throw tantrums, and try just about everything they can come up with to get their parents to buy it.

Now the people at the ACT testing service are developing a tool that will test children as young as five to determine their career interests and academic performance, according to Good Education. The results of these tests can then be used to market career training curriculum, toys and games to young children. The results would also likely be used to direct students into certain career pathways at a much younger age than is currently done, well before they have had the experiences and education necessary to really know what all of their interests are.

Just because a child performs well in a particular subject does not mean the child necessarily wants to (or should) pursue a career in that field. Conversely, just because a child is currently performing poorly in a particular subject at the K-5 level does not mean that child cannot later develop proficiency in that subject and go on to have a successful career in it. Yet by pigeon holing children at an early age, educators run the risk of overemphasizing areas where the child already has competency at the expense of areas where the child really needs support and good teaching, thus depriving that child of a thorough, well-balanced education.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this scheme is its emphasis on careers, particularly at such a young age. Younger children tend to like school, and they like it best when it provokes their curiosity and creativity. As they get older, school and especially work often feel like tedious chores. Dumping a lot of testing, test preparation and now career training on younger children has the potential stifle their creativity and dampen their curiosity, making school seem a tedious chore much earlier.

So why is a testing service like ACT really interested in career testing at the K-5 level? It is certainly not because they care about children’s future career success. They must be aware that most people change jobs numerous times over the course of their lives and that few people can identify the career of their dreams even by the time they’ve declared their undergraduate major, let alone in elementary school. Likewise, they have certainly heard the current mantra that we’re preparing students today for jobs that have not yet been invented. So how is it possible to identify kindergartners’ career aptitudes and interests for these jobs?

Of course ACT is in the business of selling tests. The more tests they can sell, the more money they can earn. Thus by creating tests for K-5 students that were previously only given to high school students, ACT vastly increases it profitability.

Preparing elementary school students now for a future career that may or may not happen has the added bonus of conditioning them at an early age to accept a future of drudgery, rules and obsequiousness, thus making them more saleable as future employees and less likely to resist inequality and injustice. Then again, this has always been the primary function of public education. ACT has merely come up with a new way to profit from it before kids have graduated from high school.

Perhaps the unions should consider marketing labor history and pro-union curriculum to elementary schools, too.

We Want Jobs? Not If We Can’t Feed Ourselves!

Cooks Lining Up For Soup (from Flickr, gamillos)

Liberal politicians and union leaders seem to think that if they could just create more jobs, the economy would suddenly recover and everyone would be happy. Of course those who are unemployed, particularly the long-term unemployed, are desperate for some financial security and relief, and jobs seem like the simplest way to appease them.

While the absence of work is a terrible burden on families, the presence of work is not necessarily their salvation, and shouldn’t be their primary goal. Workers need material security, safer and better working conditions, better living standards, more leisure time and sufficient wealth to enjoy it.

Most jobs do not provide these things. In fact, many jobs do not even provide material security.

According to a recent report in Labor Notes, 28% of cooks live in food-insecure homes. In other words, more than a quarter of the people who prepare our food in restaurants, fast food chains and cafeterias do not earn enough to feed themselves and their families. Campus food workers, for example, had a median wage of only $17,176 in 2010, while many farmworkers are earning the exact same wages they made ten years ago.

There have been organizing drives among food workers at numerous college campuses over the past decade, most notably among employees of Sodexo (See here and here). These efforts still have a long way to go. At Pomona College, for example, 90% of kitchen staffers signed a petition for union recognition in 2010, but the college ignored it. Employees there were being fired for taking sick days and many are still earning less than $12 per hour, even after working there for 20 years.

What is most compelling about the statistic that 28% of all cooks go hungry on a regular basis is that it clearly reveals that food is not a human right, but a commodity that is produced by members of the 99% for the profit of the 1%.

In a sane society, a cook would not only be able to eat on the job and take food home from work for his or her family, but would be paid well enough to eat healthy, organic, locally produced food every day, go out to nice restaurants occasionally, and take time off to relax with family and friends. But they cannot do this because the food belongs to the bosses. The equipment to prepare the food belongs to the bosses. The buildings were the food is produced belong to the bosses. The right to hire and fire and set wages and working hours all belong to the bosses. And if they challenge any of this they will be unemployed quicker than they can say Sodexo.

This is not to say that workers should roll over and accept these conditions. A strong trade union can help to improve wages and decrease food insecurity for workers. However, trade unions cannot end workers’ dependency and subservience to their bosses, nor do they wish to. Their entire existence is predicated on the subservient relationship between workers and bosses. They act as the intermediary or advocate for the workers in an attempt to mitigate this relationship and make it as painless as possible for their members. They accept the premise that the boss is entitled to own and control every aspect of the workplace and become wealthy by paying their members less than the value of the goods and services they produce.

While the pain can be mitigated, workers will never truly be free, nor will they ever earn the true value of their labor, as long as the workplace remains in the control of bosses. Workers will continue to be forced to accept compromises, including declining wages and increasing work, just so they have any income at all. They will always face the dilemma of accepting abuses and degradations or risk being fired. Even when they earn enough to eat every day, they can rarely (if ever) eat as well as the 1%.

Thus, it is insufficient to demand jobs or even better jobs. We must also fight for a world without bosses and wage slavery, in which everyone has material security and access to the good things in life, leisure time, and the opportunity to contribute to society under their own volition and not under the boot of the 1%.

Human Need or Capitalist Greed

It is not only absurd, but dangerous, to believe that jobs are good just because losing a job is undesirable (See the Cry For Jobs, Ruthless Criticism). Of course it is terrible to lose ones income and material security. But simply demanding jobs generally results in compromises and sacrifices in order to get that paycheck rolling in again. Workers accept lower wages, longer working hours, more dangerous conditions, less autonomy, longer commutes just to get back to work.

Jobs do not even necessarily provide material security, particularly if the wages aren’t sufficient to cover living expenses. Even when times were “good” and unemployment was low, prior to the start of the economic crisis, wages and living standards had been spiraling downwards for more than 30 years. Working hours had been increasing, stress growing and leisure time shrinking.

Why do we need jobs? We don’t. We need the things that we can purchase with the income that jobs provide. If these goods and services can be produced in less than 40 hours per week we should all be happy—more leisure time, right?

But it never works that way because the goods and services don’t belong to us, they belong to the bosses, and we don’t get paid the value of the goods and services we produce, but only a fraction of that. Our pay is an expense to the bosses. The more work they can get out of us and the less they have to pay for it, the greater their profits. Therefore, the purpose of work is not to meet human need, but capitalists’ greed and increased worker productivity does not result in more leisure time or increased wages, it results in increased profits.