San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How Congress can work for workers
When my dad lost his job, I was a freshman in college, and it was the Teamsters Local 170 that got me through school working for trucking companies on the graveyard shift. When I drove across the country to start a new life, it was the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Local 2 that made sure I could live a good life in San Francisco. Now, my children and workers of all ages and professions have challenges older Americans never faced.
The social contract that hard work will be rewarded is broken. We are headed for social implosion if we do not correct today’s inequality.
Productivity is accelerating while wages have plateaued; people are working more for less. Last year, more than a third of families with at least one working adult faced difficulty meeting at least one basic need. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has not been raised in more than a decade.
At its high point in 1968, the minimum wage was enough for one fulltime worker to put a family of three to be above the poverty line. Today, it can’t even keep a family of two from falling below the poverty line.
Labor unions, the protector of the working people, are under attack at every turn. Uncertainty is growing about the impact of automation, and the new trend of giving fewer benefits such as pensions and health care is becoming an epidemic.
The focus of Republicans in charge has steadily shifted away from workers and toward corporations and shareholders. New tax policies, the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Citizens United vs. FEC that allowed corporations to make unlimited federal election campaign contributions, misclassification of workers as independent contractors rather than employees, corporate consolidation that allows two or three companies to dominate an industry, and skyrocketing CEO pay, to name a few, send a very clear message to American workers — the GOP priorities lie with the 1 percent.
In 2016, as a new member of Congress (in the simpler times before Donald Trump was president), I launched an initiative called the Future of Work, Wages, and Labor with three of my colleagues to address these problems and more, with the urgency they deserve. Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., Donald Norcross, D-N.J., Debbie Dingell, DMich., and I visited all our home states, where one thing rang true, no matter where we stopped from California to Michigan, from New Jersey to Wisconsin: Workers need help.
This effort took us more than 4,700 miles around the country, where we hosted town hall meetings with local workers — including in the East Bay — and consulted more than 100 experts and academics before developing our findings.
Our plan puts together more than 30 policy recommendations aimed at unleashing the power of the American worker, but at the core it’s about taking power away from corporations and giving it directly to workers. What does this mean?
For corporations, those sweeping changes include things like breaking up monopolies, banning stock buybacks, overturning Citizens United and disincentivizing outrageous CEO pay.
For workers, it would increase wages and adjust them regularly, require their work schedules to be predictable, and provide them the freedom to create and join unions that have a strong voice.
When Democrats take back the majority in the U.S. House of Representa-
tives, we are going to put these initiatives into action. We seek allies in state and local governments and with responsible
companies. Corporations can either be our partners in or a hurdle to progress.
The time of phony half-measures and political gestures in Washington must come to an end. The American worker deserves to be put back on the path to prosperity and know who is on their side, and it is up to us to earn their trust.