Protecting Bargaining Rights Key To Economic Growth

An Op-ed By CWA President Larry Cohen:

This Labor Day, America’s working families are in an economic free fall, stuck in a "dollar store" economy.

Economists and analysts tell us that increased demand and consumerism will turn things around. Pretty hollow words for workers who haven’t seen a real wage increase in decades, whose employers cut jobs and benefits just because they can and who can’t find enough work to sustain a middle-class standard of living.

Martin Luther King Jr., whom we remembered this week for many things, also should be remembered for his understanding that workers’ rights are the key to economic gain for millions of Americans. He was right.

King understood that workers’ rights, meaning real collective bargaining rights, are the path for workers to the middle class. Bargaining rights are the engine to increase demand and improve workers’ standard of living, thus improving the economy.

King was killed in Memphis 43 years ago as he prepared to stand yet again with striking sanitation workers who wanted economic justice and respect. He was often on the picket line and would have walked that line with the 45,000 Verizon workers pursuing exactly those goals were he alive today.

The CWA and IBEW members who returned to work at Verizon after a two-week strike are hopeful that there will be meaningful bargaining and a good result. For Verizon workers, the strike was about real collective bargaining rights as much as about preserving the standard of living for families.

The unity of our members and the widespread public support for their cause, to a large extent, reflects just how unusual resistance on this scale is in the United States of the 21st century.

Because today, in the United States, far fewer workers have bargaining rights than when King risked his life for Memphis sanitation workers 43 years ago. In state after state, we have seen an assault on public workers and a demand by extremist politicians to strip them of their rights. We see private sector workers routinely harassed and fired when they organize. We see hugely profitable companies look to cut wages and benefits, and send more jobs overseas, while sitting on more than $2 trillion in assets. We see elected officials eager to do the bidding of wealthy campaign contributors and weaken the voice of millions of working and middle-class families.

And the result: a flat economy, no growth in quality jobs and little promise for a better future for millions of working families. Real wages have stagnated, employer-based health care is collapsing, retirement security is fading and increasingly jobs are contracted out.

The root cause of much of this decline is the collapse of workers’ rights and bargaining rights, in both the public and private sectors. Look at nearly every other industrial democracy, where high-level and cost-effective health care is the norm, retirement security means much higher income replacement and public policy supports retaining jobs in key industries. In these democracies, there is widespread public and political support for collective bargaining.

Economist John Maynard Keyes, who advised President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, also understood that collective bargaining was key to boosting economic growth. In 1938, when the United States still was gripped by recession and economic downturn, Keynes wrote to Roosevelt that the jobs program and financial regulation were important, but "I regard the expansion of collective bargaining as essential."

Keynes was not particularly a union supporter, but he understood, as did economists for decades to come, that collective bargaining is a critical engine to fire up the demand curve and enable workers to improve their conditions in discussion with management, thus improving the economy. We will never have an economic recovery in this country if, instead, very profitable employers automatically cut wages, cut benefits and ship more good jobs overseas because their colleagues at other firms are all doing it. That remains a race to the bottom.