Hawkins Issues Economic Justice Program in Honor of Labor Day

Green Party of New York State
www.gpnys.org

Howie Hawkins for US Senate
www.hawkinsforsenate.org 

September 05, 2006
Released September 03, 2006

For more information: Howie Hawkins, (315) 425-1019 
Meghan Keegan, (518) 225-0134
media@hawkinsforsenate.net

On Labor Day, Hawkins issues Economic Justice Program

• $10 Minimum Wage and Cap on CEO Salaries

• Full Employment through Public Works and 30-Hour Work Week

• Universal Health and Child Care

• Repeal Taft-Hartley

Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, called today for: an increase in the minimum wage to $10 an hour; a government guarantee of a living-wage job; strengthening of workers' rights, including the right to unionize, starting with a repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act; increase government support for employee ownership; enactment of single-payer national health insurance to provide universal health care; extending federal labor laws to protect farm workers; and mandatory six week vacations for all workers.

Hawkins also supports the establishment of a Universal Living Wage, where the minimum wage is based on local housing costs. The wage would be calculated based on local Fair Market Rents established by HUD so households spend no more than one-third of their income on housing. The Living Wage would be phased in over a ten-year period. In New York City, the Living Wage would be set today at $16.31 an hour.

"It is time to reverse the bipartisan tradition of the Democrats and Republicans of taxing the poor and middle class to pay for tax cuts and giveaways for the wealthy and large corporations. The US leads the world's industrial democracies in income inequality, and the gap is greatest here in New York. We need to end corporate welfare. The rich must pay their fair share of taxes. And we need public works and investment in sustainable infrastructure and public services to create jobs that will put New Yorkers back to work in our inner city neighborhoods and upstate communities," stated Hawkins.

"In recent decades, Corporate America has systematically destroyed millions of decent paying jobs for working people. Politicians from both major parties have given hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare to their campaign contributors while CEO's have awarded themselves with obscene compensation packages. They slashed jobs for Americans workers through mergers and runaway shops, subcontracting, and outsourcing in repressive cheap labor countries abroad. We are in the midst of the first so-called economic recovery that did not result in an increase of jobs - and many of the jobs that do exist pay poverty level wages or are part-time, without health care or pension benefits," added Hawkins.

Hawkins noted that Clinton has been a national leader in raising funds from corporate interests. In the current election cycle, Clinton was the most favored candidate nationally of 13 industries, including lawyers and law firms, real estate, health professionals, securities and investment, entertainment, accountants, publishing, and food and beverages, among others. She is the second largest recipient nationally of donations from the health care industry.

A recent report by the Fiscal Policy Institute found that in New York real wages for most workers are not yet back to where they were in 2002, even with reasonably strong growth in total output and worker productivity. Workers and jobs especially faired poorly in Western and Northern New York (the upstate area that extends from Utica west to Buffalo, including the Southern Tier and North Country).

Since 1990, the overall CEO-worker pay gap in the United States has grown from 107-to-1 to last year's 411-to-1. Minimum wage workers have lost 9 percent after inflation in the same 15 years. If the minimum wage had risen at the same pace as CEO pay, it would now stand at $22.61 per hour, over four times the current $5.15.
CEOs in the defense and oil industries have been able to translate war and rising oil prices into personal jackpots, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, "Executive Excess 2006." With Americans now paying over $3 per gallon, petroleum profiteers are raking in nearly three times the pay of CEOs in comparably sized businesses. In 2005, the top 15 U.S. oil CEOs got a 50 percent raise since 2004. They now average $32.7 million a year, compared with $11.6 million for all CEOs of large U.S. firms.
Since the "War on Terror" began, CEOs at the top 34 military contractors have enjoyed average paychecks that are double the compensation they received in the four years leading up to 9/11. These 34 CEOs combined have pocketed almost a billion dollars since 9/11 - enough to employ more than a million Iraqis for a year to rebuild their country. In 2005, defense industry CEOs walked off with 44 times more pay than military generals with 20 years experience, and 308 times more than Army privates.
"Individuals who work should make enough to support their families, starting with providing them with decent housing, food, and clothing. Instead, our politicians refuse to give the poorest workers a pay-raise while CEOs raid their companies to pad their own pockets. We need an immediate minimum wage hike to $10 an hour while enacting a reasonable maximum wage as FDR proposed back in the '40s," added Hawkins. In addition to enacting a Universal Living Wage, Hawkins supports federal legislation to cap excessive CEO salaries. He would also the true owners of American companies - mainly workers through their pension stock plans - to vote their shares, rather than the financial managers of such funds.
Hawkins called for a Jobs-for-All program that would guarantee every person willing and able to work a living-wage job in the public sector if that person could not find a job in the private sector. Hawkins said his full employment program be implemented through a combination of job creation in public works and human services and a more equitable sharing of available work through a reduction in standard work hours with no loss in pay. Hawkins said the public jobs program would be administered locally with federal funding so each community could identify their own public works and human services priorities. He said the work hours reduction with no loss in pay would be implemented through a "second paycheck" for workers enabling them to receive 40 hours pay for 30 hours work. Hawkins proposed that workers in the lower 80 percent of the pay scale would qualify for the supplemental paycheck, which would be paid for out of progressive federal income and wealth taxes. "The second paycheck would represent a Social Dividend for workers that gives them their fair share of social productivity gains that are attributable to public investment they made with their tax payments," Hawkins said.
"We can create millions of living-wage jobs through public investment in infrastructure restoration, public works, and human services. It's time to stop pretending that tax cuts for the corporate rich are a jobs program. This decades-old trickle-down approach to job creation is a proven failure. Private jobs are good, but public jobs are necessary to create decent jobs for everyone willing and able to work," stated Hawkins.

Hawkins called for a 10-year, $300 billion a year, public investment program in renewable energy, with the money coming from cuts in the US military budget. "Global warming, the impending peak of oil production, and an effective strategy for national security and world peace make it imperative that we redirect a major portion of US military spending into a global public works program to build a renewable energy infrastructure for the world. Based on solar, wind, geothermal heating and cooling, and biofuels, a renewable energy system would render nuclear and fossil fuels obsolete and remove the security and environmental dangers that nuclear and fossil energy create. We would make friends with clean energy instead of enemies in wars for oil. We would spread good energy and good will around the world instead of resentment at US military occupations. That would do more to enhance our national security and world peace than all the military force in the world," said Hawkins, a former Marine who organized opposition to the Vietnam War.

In calling for the Taft Hartley Act to be repealed, Hawkins noted that Taft-Hartley makes it extremely difficult for employees to organize unions. The rights to organize unions, bargain freely, and strike when necessary is being destroyed by employers and their representatives in government. Today, employers illegally fire nearly 1 out of 10 workers involved in union organizing drives. That is why union membership is declining. And as union membership falls so do the wages of all working people, union and non-union alike. The buying power of the average worker's wage has declined by 15 percent over the last 25 years.

Hawkins supports legislation to make the workplace supportive of workers and their families. This includes measures such as paid family leave, flexible work schedule, and universal child and elder care. Hawkins supports Fair Trade rather than the "free trade" corporate globalization policies of the Democrats and Republicans and calls for the repeal of NAFTA and the World Trade Organization.

Hawkins is an advocate of public ownership and planning where private ownership and markets fail. He calls for more public ownership and planning in two key industries and services, such as energy and health care. "I definitely support the social ownership in the energy sector, especially oil. When profit matters above all else, we end up with sky-high prices and damage to the environment and public health. Our health and environment must come before the super profits of the oil tycoons," said Hawkins.

Noting the 47 million Americans without health insurance, Hawkins called for Medicare for All, a national health insurance system with a single public payer. "Unlike the failed private insurance system, everyone will be fully covered, everyone will be free to choose their doctors, clinics, and hospitals, and we will still save hundreds of billions of dollars now wasted in the inefficient private insurance system." 

Hawkins also said the pharmaceutical companies should be publicly owned. "The research performed by the drug companies is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, but we have no say in what drugs are developed or how they are marketed. Drug company profits are driving up health care costs for everyone while they spend more on advertising their drugs than they do on research and development," said Hawkins.

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Rebuilding the Labor Movement in the United States

By Howie Hawkins, Green Party candidate for US Senate

Howie Hawkins is a member of Teamsters Local 317 and active in the national Teamster rank-and-file reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union. Howie presently works unloading trucks and rail cars at UPS. He is the former Director of CommonWorks, a federation of cooperatives working for an economy that is cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sustainable.

Unions need to offer a vision of how a just society should be organized. We need to organize for real solutions like fair trade, national health insurance, labor law reform, internal union democratic reforms to re-engage the rank and file, and a multi-year, multi-trillion dollar public works program to create millions of new jobs building an ecologically sustainable infrastructure for our future.

Between the lack of room to grow for the old-line, high-wage construction and manufacturing unions of the AFL-CIO and the lack of power of the new, low-wage service unions of Change To Win to help their members, union membership is falling. From the high point 35 percent of American workers organized at the time of the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1953, we are now down to 12.5 percent (and less than 8 percent in the private sector). The business unionism of today has the culture of an insurance company, where the workers are clients and the officers are managers taking in our payments and doling out our benefits.

The recent split nationally among the labor union movement avoids the real issues confronting us as workers: declining real wages, jobs lost to outsourcing, the erosion of pension security and health benefits, legal barriers to union organizing, top-down union bureaucracies, and the mounting environmental and energy crises.

We know from talking to our parents and grandparents and from reading history that labor once was a spirited social movement with high ideals. The emancipation of labor was to be founded on a tripod: the union, the cooperative, and the independent labor party. I believe these are still causes worth fighting for.

The purpose of the union was to advance workers' wages and working conditions in their jobs in the existing society by direct action. But unions have become very hard to organize over the last 25 years when employers have been able to break labor laws with impunity and fire tens of thousands of workers for trying to organize because the National Labor Relations Board acts too slowly and with too much bias in favor of the bosses. 

And nonviolent direct action by workers in many of its forms was outlawed by the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act. For example, Taft-Harley outlawed sympathy and solidarity strikes and "secondary boycotts" where workers refuse to cross picket lines when they were not directly party to a labor dispute or refuse to handle "hot cargo" coming from or going to a struck enterprise. The major result of the Taft-Hartley restrictions on labor action has been to divert unions from direct action to cautious administrators of contracts with no-strike clauses so the company cannot sue the union for violating the contract. Unions now devote most of their resources to handling grievances through "proper channels" and defending themselves from lawsuits by corporations with far more resources to go to court.

The purpose of the cooperative was to organize economic enterprises that did not exploit workers. Workers would jointly and democratically own and manage their businesses without parasitic absentee owners. Each member of the cooperative would have one vote and would receive a patronage dividend: a refund of net earnings in proportion to purchases in a consumer cooperative and a share of the net earnings in proportion to labor contributed in a worker cooperative.

The purpose of the independent labor party was to organize the working class majority to take political power and exercise it for the benefit of the working class majority. If we are ever going repeal the Taft-Hartley amendments and have public policies that favor cooperatives instead of corporate welfare for absentee owners, it is going to come from a new political party.

The Democrats had repeal of Taft-Hartley in their national platform between 1948 and 1992, but never moved to repeal it when they had congressional majorities under Truman, Johnson, Carter, and Clinton. Instead, the Democrats worked with the Republicans to limit labor's ability to organize. The turning point was the busting of PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, which was planned under the Carter administration and executed under the Reagan administration. The Clinton administration pushed through anti-labor polices such as NAFTA and WTO and the repeal of federal welfare guarantees after the Bush and Reagan administrations failed to do so. Robert Reich, Clinton's Labor Secretary and his cabinet's most liberal member, pushed job training instead of labor law reform to help unions organize.

The Change To Win coalition has criticized the AFL-CIO for "throwing money at Democrats" who then take them for granted. Change To Win has a point. Since 1980 when the anti-union offensive began in earnest, unions have spent $8-12 billion supporting Democrats through direct contributions to candidates, the Democratic Party, and pro-Democratic political action committees and internal mobilization of the union vote, according to Jonathon Tasini, president emeritus of the National Writers Union and the Democratic primary challenger to incumbent US Senator Hillary Clinton. 

But rather than building an independent labor party, Change To Win unions like the Teamsters and SEIU are throwing money at Republicans, too. The Teamsters gave 11 percent of their federal contributions to Republicans in the 2004 elections cycle. SEIU spent 15 percent in 2004 on Republicans, from a $500,000 contribution to the Republican Governors Association to a $7500 contribution to my local Republican congressman in Syracuse, James Walsh. Worse, SEIU spent considerable resources to stymie Ralph Nader's pro-labor independent candidacy in 2004, from sending SEIU staffers to counter-leaflet and heckle Nader speeches in New York to hiring lawyers in Oregon who threatened Nader petitioners in house visits with prosecution for fraud for any mistakes they made on petitions they witnessed.

Imagine if labor had responded to the anti-union offensive over the last 25 years by spending $8-12 billion building an independent labor party and movement, as the labor movement has done in every other industrial nation. We would have scores of labor party organizers in every state supporting a broadly based, grassroots democratic party of working people. We would have blocks of independent labor representatives in municipal, county, state, and the national legislatures. We would have a national labor daily newspaper and a labor news network on radio and cable presenting the public with an alternative to the corporate media's slant. The two corporate financed parties, the Democrats and Republicans, would no longer monopolize US politics. Public policy would undoubtedly be more pro-labor and the majority of working people would not have seen their real wages and living standards decline over the last 25 years.

The Green Party is best known for its environmental and peace advocacy. But in the absence of a labor party, the Green Party has also taken on the role of an independent labor party and taken up the labor demands the Democrats won't, from fair trade to labor law reform. We are trying to bring the old emancipatory program of labor as a social movement back into the public debate: the union, the cooperative, and the independent labor party.

Thus, I support project labor agreements on public projects and oppose contracts, tax breaks, and corporate welfare for companies with a record of union busting and labor law violations. I support targeting public economic incentives to cooperatives and other forms of democratic local ownership so public investments are anchored to our community by ownership structures for the long-term benefit of the community. And I believe it is time for working people to break away from the corporate-dominated Democrats and start electing their own representatives to public office.