Richard Trumka, American
The American worker has been getting thrashed for thirty years. Jobs leaving the country, wages flat, his boss getting rich. One coal miner from Pennsylvania knows exactly what to do about it.
By John H. Richardson
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2011/richard-trumka-1211#ixzz1eTr5AmUs
Richard Trumka stands at the podium like a man with his foot in the doorway of history, relaxed and confident and grinning at the audience. Wisconsin? The attempted murder of public unions? That was actually a win, he says.
A big beefy guy with a bristling mustache and Blagojevich hair, Trumka started life as a coal miner. His grandfather was a union man. His father was a union man. He became a union man and put himself through college on the midnight shift, leading many bitter strikes in the coal patch where rock-throwing miners confronted guards with machine guns, scenes from an epic American history few people remember. Two years ago he rose to the top of the American labor movement, president of the AFL-CIO, where he represents twelve million firefighters, teachers, nurses, miners, electricians, and entertainers. He came in with a lifetime's worth of dreams for reviving labor and saving America. So when Governor Scott Walker this year took away the right of collective bargaining for government workers in Wisconsin, the law of the land for seventy-five years, Walker didn't just aim a dagger straight at the heart of American labor, he aimed it at Rich Trumka's heart.
But Trumka is grinning. "We've been trying for three decades to get a national debate on collective bargaining. Scott Walker gave us the national debate we were looking for."
By national debate he means thousands of angry citizens marching in the street. Occupying the state capitol. Mounting recall elections. That's the kind of national debate Trumka thinks America needs.
"Now 70-some percent of Americans think every worker, public or private, ought to have the right to collective bargaining."
So would you support going after Walker?
Trumka doesn't hesitate. "Would I support going after Lucifer? Of course — the guy's been a bad governor, he tried to use a contrived deficit to take people out."
Within hours, this will be denounced as hate speech on right-wing blogs.
And the Occupy Wall Street protests, some recent union locals becoming involved — do you have an opinion on that?
Hell yes, he has an opinion. Unions have been trying to tell people that Wall Street is out of control since about forever. They've warned about lost jobs and stagnant wages and the insane wealth of the top 1 percent for almost as long. They've been major players in the push to reregulate Wall Street. They've been leading the fight against lavish executive pay. From the beginning of the protests, union bus drivers refused to take people to jail. The first major endorsement of the protesters came in the form of seven hundred union steelworkers.
"I think being in the streets and calling attention to issues is sometimes the only recourse you have," Trumka says. "Wall Street is out of control. Calling attention to it and peacefully protesting is a very legitimate way of doing it. I've done it thousands of times myself and I'll do it again."
On the right-wing blogs, Trumka is called "the spiritual father whose attention is craved by the anarcho-communists in Zuccotti Park."
A few days later, Trumka takes the protesters water and bagels.
In the endless war over America, which is always a war over different versions of American history, a new battle has begun.
There's the White House just outside Trumka's window, so close he has to call the Secret Service every time he wants to go out on his balcony. Trumka pays no attention. "We have fourteen million Americans out of work," he says. "We have twenty-five million Americans that want to work full time and can't find a full-time job. We have record numbers of people who have been out of work for longer than six months — companies now beginning to say, 'If you've been out for six months, don't apply. Don't apply. In order to get this job, you must already have a job.'"
There's a hammering urgency in his voice you don't hear from most other people in public life these days, partly because everybody else realizes they don't have real solutions to offer. Republicans think that all we can do is cut taxes and cut regulations and wait for capitalism to heal itself. Democrats want to raise taxes a little on the rich and try another little stimulus and wait for capitalism to heal itself.
Trumka thinks they are both wrong — dangerously, destructively wrong.
"This is what we need — to be able to share the wealth more equitably. That's how the middle class was built, from '46 to '73, and that's how it should be built again. 'Cause the country isn't poor, the country's as rich as it ever was. Our wealth is just concentrated in the hands of very few. More people need to get a bigger share of what's being produced."
Free markets? He has no patience for such talk. "It's an insane system right now. We just came through a period where all the major premises that they relied on have been disproven. And yet they still cling to them — 'Get everything out of the way of the market and everything will be fine.' We know that's not true."
Or the idea that austerity will improve the economy.
"Look at Greece — the more austerity they push on Greece, the deeper the recession and the more debt they have. It's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting to get a different result."
Even the idea that aid to the elderly, the sick, and the helpless — the social services that conservatives have taught us to call "entitlements" — is a drain on the economy.
"Lemme give you facts. That tax cut that they gave to the middle class there, each dollar generated a dollar four in economic activity. Dollar four cents. You know what a dollar in food stamps generates? Dollar seventy-four cents. Which one's the most effective? Which one?"
The root cause of our crisis, Trumka argues, is the small government "neoliberal" economics pioneered by Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago. He asks for a copy of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.
"Hey Norma? Do we have a copy of The Shock Doctrine back there?"
"Let me look."
Standing at the bookshelf, Trumka flips through the book, which is heavily marked on every page. It tells the history of the last forty years pretty much the way Trumka sees it, which is that our troubles all started when Friedman taught dictators in Chile and Argentina to privatize the economy by selling off state assets and cutting back on public health care and retirement, ideas that proved so unpopular they had to be imposed at gunpoint. In the United States, Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker put Friedman's ideas into practice when trying to stop inflation in the 1970s — the first "austerity" program. Then Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the rise of the modern conservative movement made these ideas so popular they have become the air we breathe, the water in which we swim. And the result has been the same everywhere: The rich get much richer and the poor get much poorer, and more plentiful.
These are some of the reasons why, long before it became the latest media obsession, Richard Trumka has been warning about the increasing gulf between the rich and poor.
"In the last twenty years, 100 percent of all the productivity gains have gone to the top 10 percent. Think about that — one hundred percent! And 30 percent of that has gone to the top one tenth of 1 percent. So that means that in the last twenty years, 100 percent of the gains have gone to the top 10 and the rest of us have gotten no income gain at all — flat wages. You have to put together a complete package that reverses that, that creates good jobs, and don't listen to anybody out there that says, 'We can't do it because of the global economy.'"
So what's the alternative? Consider Germany, he says — it has free health care, secure retirement, generous unemployment, and a higher standard of living than America, along with powerful unions that push for high-skill, high-wage jobs. And because of this splendid safety net, the German economy and workforce also experienced much less trauma during the crash. If people don't have money, the economy grinds to a halt and social pathologies develop that make things worse. "Efficient" Friedmanite capitalism turns out to be too efficient, relentlessly distributing the wealth upward. So small government by definition makes the rich richer, and larger government puts the money back in the hands of the people who will spend it. The only solution is to "spread the wealth," the very thing Republicans and even Democrats are so afraid to do.
"You have a $2.2 trillion infrastructure deficit, 351 stalled construction projects in America at this very moment. If we build bridges, roads, rails, the grid system, that would create jobs, make us more competitive as a nation, and propel us forward."
And the debt we pass on to our children?
"It's an investment. People say, 'You can't, you have to live within your means.' Well, lemme ask you this: I make $50,000 a year. I buy a house that's worth $250,000. Takes me twenty years to pay it off. When it's paid off, it's worth $400,000. Have I lived within my means? I was investing in my future and in my livelihood."
But doesn't all this require government force, as the Ron Paul folks say? The government has to take money away from some people and distribute it to others.
"So what? The rich are paying the lowest percentage they paid in decades. The corporations are paying the lowest percentage of GDP that they've paid for decades."
But if we level things out, won't we lose the dynamism and the capital accumulation that let us build factories and start new companies?
"They don't build the factories here, anyway! That's the point. They have closed 42,400 factories since 2001. They are coring this country out."
The American workingman is being slaughtered, Trumka says, and the American political class are all accessories. The solution is for unions to be set free. The problem is that to accomplish this, a lot of laws and court rulings have to be repealed. Unions may have only 12 percent of the workforce, but 58 percent say they'd join a union if they could.
Although Trumka has been saying these things for decades, more and more economists are starting to agree with him. This year, the United Nations' annual Trade and Development report said that austerity policies are a "major risk for the global economy" because cutting deficits slows growth, reducing tax receipts and making the deficits bigger. In September, the International Monetary Fund argued that "equality appears to be an important ingredient in promoting and sustaining growth." The Congressional Budget Office has agreed with him on many things: that last year's health-care-reform law will reduce the deficit, that the Republican austerity budget put forward by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan would increase it, that Obama's proposed jobs bill would in fact create jobs. A recent survey of thirty-four leading economists by Bloomberg News showed that most of them agreed, reporting that Obama's plan would raise the GDP and "add or keep 275,000 workers on payroll" next year. And the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the crash of 2008 hit "right to work" states hardest — five of the ten states with the highest unemployment are in the South, while the more heavily unionized states in the East and Midwest are starting to come back.
His ideas are gaining traction with the public at large as well. "When you tell people you want a millionaire's tax, 80 percent of the people agree. When you say, 'I want a financial-transaction tax, a half a cent on each share that's sold,' more than 80 percent of the people agree. Seventy-eight percent of the American people disagree with our free-trade policy. Go ask them. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, conservatives, rednecks, whoever, go ask them about the trade policy! They agree with us! That it hasn't worked and it hurts this country 'cause it's sucking jobs out of this country! So if 78 percent of the people agree, why do the other 22 percent dominate?
He sounds frustrated.
"Not frustrated," Trumka says. "Determined."
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/americans-2011/richard-trumka-1211#ixzz1eTrR0zdo