FINAL TRANSCRIPT: SEIU Blogger Call
December 14, 2007/11:30 a.m. EST
SPEAKER: Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
TRANSCRIPT:
Moderator Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the SEIU blogger call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer period. Instructions will be given at that time. As a reminder, today’s conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Michelle Ringuette.
M. Ringuette Hello, Everyone. This is Michelle Ringuette with SEIU. I want to welcome you today to this call with Andy Stern. I’m so glad you could all make it, especially this time of year and at this hour (which is quite early, for those of you on the West Coast).
Briefly, I’d like to give you all a sense of how this call will work. First, Andy will come on. He’ll give you some opening thoughts and talk a little bit about income inequality and his viewpoint on where things stand with the economy right now. Then we’ll take a few moments to address some of the questions that some of you have sent in to us already. At the end, I’m going to turn it over to you all, so you can ask Andy anything that comes up during the discussion or that’s been on your mind.
One thing I do want to let you know is that Andy is actually on a train right now. So although we don’t expect any disruption, if Andy does get cut off, he will call right back in, and I will wing it in the meantime.
With that being said, I’d like to introduce you to Andy Stern.
A. Stern Thanks, Michelle. And thank you all for getting on the phone today.
Let me just sort of put this whole question of income inequality into a context here. Our country and the rest of the world is going through the most profound, the most transformative leap of significant, economic revolution in the history of the world. That’s more than a mouthful, but I think it’s where we are right now. There’s only been three economic revolutions in history: agricultural took 3,000 years; industrial took 300 years; this revolution, as we move from a national to an international economy, and in our country from manufacturing or muscle-work to mind-work, is only going to take thirty years. No single generation of people have ever witnessed such change in a single lifetime. I think you all know that this revolution is actually televised; it’s Google-ized; it’s digitized; it’s on your screen, in your face, and you are the chroniclers of it, 24-7.
So what we now know is this is not our father’s or grandfather’s economy. We know that we are as far today from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War. We know that the one-job-in-a-lifetime economy of me and my parents and grandparents is ending, that workers and employers are separating and on their way to getting a divorce. We’re going from employer-managed work lives to self-managed work lives.
We know that, according to Goldman Sachs, profits are at the highest percentage of the GDP in American history. Wages are at the lowest percentage in history. And that the market and the trickle-down theory of the Chicago school of economics has now proven to be totally bankrupt, that the market is no longer a way we distribute wealth. In fact, the market is distributing inequality.
We live in a country right now where more than 80% of all Americans think that the American Dream, the dream that their kids will do better than their parents, is not going to be true. Eighty percent of Americans think their kids are not going to do better! That is not the America we want. That is not the America we need. That’s why what we do in government, in unions and as a country has huge implications at this moment of history. Right now, I think it’s fair to say America has no plan.
That’s my opening context for the rest of the questions and everything else we talk about. So I’ll turn it back to you, Michelle.
M. Ringuette Great. The first question we have is from Aaron at Talking Points Memo Café. The first question is, “What were the biggest victories and defeats of the year for both the country and for SEIU?”
A. Stern I think some of the biggest victories this year, conceptually as well as practically, were in our response to global warming. We saw California take a major initiative. Yesterday, we hopefully—besides the stripping out of money for the renewables—saw Congress raise the mileage efficiency standards. We saw Al Gore and the inter-governmental group at the U.N. win a Nobel Prize. We’ve seen Center for American Progress and others come out with a ‘green jobs agenda’ for America. I think one of our greatest victories is finally—with the exception of our government—we have an America that is waking up about global warming. That will set a huge stage for a new president to jump into action.
We’ve seen a business community finally emerge, calling for universal healthcare systems and plans, in a number of different coalitions SEIU is a part of. Today, we hope to see Governor Schwarzenegger and Assemblyman Nunez say that they’ve made a lot of progress towards reaching some kind of way forward. In healthcare, we’ve at least, again, set the stage and maybe we’ll get some state-based action.
At the same time, we’ve been disappointed: in the Bush administration in Bali, with the failure to pass children’s health insurance in our country, with Democrats in the Senate being pretty much gutless when it comes to making corporations and other people pay their fair share of taxes. We’ve obviously failed to find any way to begin the draw-down and bring home the American troops and find a pathway to some kind of reconciliation of the civil war in Iraq. Then, I should say, we’ve also seen no change in the growing inequalities in this country. In fact, the rich are again richer than at anytime in history. Personal savings are down, so inequality keeps growing.
For SEIU, what we see is that we can be part of the solution. Our greatest victories have been with workers who are janitors in Boston, getting full-time jobs with health insurance coverage; security officers a couple weeks ago in San Francisco getting a contract that provided significant wage increases and health insurance; child care workers in Maryland and Pennsylvania forming a union and giving them their pathway to better jobs and health insurance; 22,000 personal care assistant in Massachusetts—in the largest election in New England history and in recent U.S. history—voting to have an organization. We’ve seen workers in Colorado gain the right to collective bargaining and workers in Gilbert, Arizona, who were Republicans in a Republican-controlled county, get the right to collective bargaining.
So, for SEIU, we’ve continued to see that we are part of the solution to inequality. That when workers join their voices, we actually can change their lives.
M. Ringuette Great. That leads us to a follow-up question from Lisa at Politico: “Did SEIU expect more from the Democratic majority in Congress? If so, why do you think they couldn’t deliver?”
A. Stern It’s clear that being out of office for a long period of time makes people’s skills a little rusty. I think we’ve seen the House now recover from a very good attack in the first 100 days. We’ve now seen Congressman Rangel come out with an extraordinary, comprehensive tax bill. We’ve seen them now pass something to deal with the water-boarding, to deal with some of the other labor relations, communications, EFCA, and other kids of plans. The House is off to an expected wobbly start. It’s starting to find its sea legs.
I think the Senate is a team that can’t shoot straight. It is disorganized. It is caving in under the guise of “we can’t get 60 votes” for any significant change in our country. Charlie Rangel is right. It’s time for the Senate to stand up and fight for something, not just roll over because we can’t get “60 votes.” I think we’ve also seen that the Senators have been very reluctant to challenge corporations or tax policies in conflict with many of their contributors and the lobbyists… So, I’d say we have a House that’s begun to find its sea legs and an incredibly disappointing, disorganized Senate.
M. Ringuette The next question comes from Dark Wraith, who runs The Dark Wraith Forums and a few other sites. A shortened version is, “Labor has been declining at a tremendous rate since the 1950’s. In your judgment, how can the erosion of union membership rates and political hostility toward unions in this country be turned around?”
A. Stern The good news is that the best way to turn it around is to let workers make their own choice. Right now, just like we see in Congress, we see the workplace as a really strong, corporate community that has a very clear agenda (whether it’s on net neutrality or workers’ rights): to make sure that it stays in power. We see in the public sector a much more level playing field, where workers can make their own choice about having an organization at work. We see the dramatically different results.
So the best way to restore the opportunity of unions is to restore what’s really important: for workers to make a free and fair choice about whether they want to have a union or not. Legally, if they get to make a freer, fairer choice, our experience is they make a choice that they want to have an organization. And that organization is able to do its job, to better share the success within a company and deal with the growing inequality without necessarily having to pass government regulations and government policies because unions are just a non-governmental way to help redistribute wealth in our country. So we just need to change the laws to both give workers rights and choices, as well as to rebalance power between companies and individuals and at the same time, lead America to a growing middle class.
The good news is that, although there is clearly hostility—we certainly see it by Writer’s Guild strike and other places—by Corporate America and corporate conservatives towards unions, the desire of American workers to have an organization at work has never been higher… it’s the highest it’s been in nearly 50 years because people understand that there’s an imbalance of power, that there’s an imbalance of wealth, and that workers need some kind of strength if they’re going to be able to change their lives.
M. Ringuette Anna, I think we should open it up now to see if there are any questions on the line.
Moderator Our first question comes from Christopher Hayes with The Nation. Please go ahead.
C. Hayes Andy, I was wondering since you guys are pretty active in monitoring some tax fairness issues, if you had any insight into basically who killed the carried interest provision as it worked its way through. I know there are a lot of venture capitalists who rebelled against it. I just wondered if you’ve been in conversations and could shed any light on who put the axe to that.
A. Stern I don’t think there’s any question that both private equity and the venture capitalists have all wanted to make sure they maintained as much of their income as possible. I think that the co-conspirators have been, obviously, lots of Republicans in Congress and some Democrats who did not want to go after the CEO’s of hedge funds, investment funds, and the oil industry. In the end, it was killed by procedure and by legislators who were being cute.
What Charlie Rangel tried to do was say, “This is basically a fundamental question about who is going to pay for what America needs, people with wealth or people that work.” I say this kind of conspiracy between Republicans who are anti-tax and Democrats who are hiding like Chuck Schumer behind the appearance of trying to be more equitable. But in the end, you can’t find that many Democrats coming out for what Charlie Rangel is standing for, which is a fundamental rebalancing of the tax system.
M. Ringuette Anna, do we have any more questions?
Moderator Our next question is from Aaron Halegua from TPM Café. Please go ahead.
A. Halegua Hello, Mr. Stern. Thank you for organizing this call.
A. Stern It’s Andy, by the way. You’re welcome.
A. Halegua My question is, watching all these presidential debates and everything going on, immigration seems to be a huge issue. I am particularly interested in your thoughts about the relationship between undocumented workers and the labor movement in this country. I think your union is probably in a somewhat perhaps different position than some other unions. Your thoughts on immigration policy generally: what you like, what you’re hearing, what you don’t like, and undocumented workers in the labor movement. Thank you.
A. Stern Sure. First of all, when people feel economic anxiety, the history of the world has shown they look for someone to blame. You can go to France right now, or you can go to the United States, or you can go to Germany when their economy was doing poorly. I think we need to appreciate that hate is bred when people are insecure. Americans are incredibly economically insecure. When the economy was booming, we should remember, so to speak, booming in the ‘90’s with Clinton, there were a significant number of immigrants in the country. But the growing issue of immigration, I believe, is largely a growing issue of economic insecurity and inequality in our country. That’s one.
Two is nations get to make immigration policy, so, I am a strong believer that we need a national immigration policy. If you want to be able to set a policy, you have to have control of the situation. Control of the situation means we need to have a way in terms of protecting our borders to control immigration in a way that we can decide how we want to let people come into this country in an orderly fashion that doesn’t happen in the shadows. So we need to think about border security and getting control of the situation, so we actually can have a conscious, positive American position on this.
At the same time, we have 12 million people in this country; it is unrealistic to not find a pathway to citizenship for people that are working hard and paying taxes. We need to get control. Part of getting control of the situation is getting people out of the shadows and on a path to citizenship and being aware of who’s in our country.
Finally, we need to decide in the future how to match job needs in America because we will need certain jobs to be filled. Some of them may be higher skills; some of them may be agricultural, but we need to match job needs with our immigration decision-making process. That’s how we need to get there, how we get control of our borders.
We could all debate what’s the right methodology to get 12 million people out of the shadows and into some kind of status on their way to citizenship, and then, how do we match jobs—[these] are all fair questions. But if we don’t do all three, we’ll be in a place where we’re going to have vigilante justice and incredible unfairness and hatred being bred in this country.
It’s always been a country of immigrants. It’s always a little more difficult when the immigrants are people of color rather than Irish and Italian, as they were at one time. Even those immigrants faced huge discrimination and a huge backlash. I just think we need to do something that’s possible and realistic and appreciate that at times of economic insecurity, this comes to the surface.
M. Ringuette This is Michelle jumping in quickly--for those of you who may have just joined the call, I wanted to ask Anna to again go over instructions. If you’ve heard any odd background noise during this call, I want to just let you know that Andy is on a train right now, so that would explain the directions and station announcements.
Moderator We have a question from Mickey Kaus from Slate. Please go ahead.
M. Kaus Hello, Mr. Stern. Thanks very much.
A. Stern If everybody keeps calling me Mr. Stern, I’m going to get really embarrassed. Please Go ahead.
M. Kaus Okay. You described the tremendous transformation in the economy. The standard reasons why inequality is growing given by economists are greater returns to skills in this new economy and trade, which tends to farm out unskilled work to foreign countries. Given this huge transformation, I don’t see how any little old tax bill in Congress promoted by Democrats—even one that would meet your wildest dreams—is going to counter that huge wave of fundamental economic change, which is changing distribution of income before taxes.
A. Stern Right. So let me just say two things. One is the “education is the answer” mantra is not going to work in and of itself either. I’m a great believer that everybody deserves every single opportunity in life because for each individual, education is a unique opportunity, but here’s a problem. Only eight of the 30 fastest growing jobs in America require a college education. College-educated workers lost 5.4% in real wages in the last five years, so even a college education is not going to create the jobs.
I think the real question we’re facing is there’s a difference between low-wage jobs and low-paid jobs. There was a time in our economy when GM was the largest employer. If you turned a single bolt on an assembly line, you made enough money to own a home, raise a family, and retire with dignity because inside the firm, we distributed the success differently. When productivity went up, workers shared in the success. A lot of the problem we have is a distribution problem, not a growth, education, or skills problem.
I don’t think the government is the best way to distribute success within a company because I don’t think you can have that kind of macro-decision-making, sector by sector and industry by industry, which is where more modern unions, where ESOP’s, where profit sharing at a lower level all make a difference. If we have an economy where the fastest growing jobs don’t require education or high skills, then we’re going to face the same problem. Bill Clinton said, “We’re going to build a bridge to the 21st century.” The bridge was built on high tech jobs with the fastest-being-exported jobs in America being computer operators.
So we need to come to grips with the economy of the 21st century. We need to come to grips with distribution. You would probably agree not to see trade as anything other than the natural evolution of what a global economy brings to it, and we’re not going to stop it.
M. Kaus Thanks.
Moderator We have a question from Al Cring with The Dark Wraith Forums. Please go ahead.
A. Cring Good morning, Andy.
A. Stern Good morning.
A. Cring Listen, the problem that I see – I’m speaking here as an economist – is that there is a long-term, deep problem with the wages in this country. As I wrote in the second part of my series, The Economics of Wreckage, wages in this country in real terms have not made any progress whatsoever for decades.
A. Stern Right.
A. Cring That is a long-term problem that transcends the political environment. Now most of the people here, I’m sure, are very much believers that the Bush administration has been very much anti-labor. I would agree with that. However, there is fundamental policy that goes on. Part of it, I would argue, is Neo-Keynesian policy that requires that workers suffer a lag in wages, which is the propulsion engine for greater productivity. As other prices go up, workers have to work harder in order to make up for their loss of purchasing power.
Over a long period of time, we see that workers just are not making any progress whatsoever in real wage terms. As a matter of fact, I have a graph that shows that wages have been, pretty much in real terms, flat since the 1960’s. There was a minor turn-up in the middle of the 1990’s. How do we deal with that? This is not something that is particularly apparent to the Republicans or the Democrats. Where is the solution?
A. Stern First of all, you know much more than I do on the subject, so I’ll do my best here. One is we have to decide what is the problem and what aren’t the answers. You nailed one problem, which is this is not simply some kind of temporary problem that electing a Democrat in and of itself will end. Although there are a series of forces between market, government, and unions that do help rebalance an imbalanced economy.
This is (a) a long-term problem; and (b) we need to appreciate we still are the richest country on earth. So this is not a question of growth, productivity, or wealth, which you could argue would be true in Rwanda or Zimbabwe or certain part of Eastern Europe still. It’s not true in the U.S. There’s plenty of wealth. It’s a question of distribution. It’s an economic question of how is all the wealth distributed better in our country.
Third is we should not find answers, like you’re saying, that defy the length of time this has been going on. Again, I don’t mean to be disparaging of education, but there are not enough jobs for everyone to go to college. That’s not going to, in of itself, solve our problem.
I don’t know, therefore, what the answer is. To me, it’s a combination of tax policy, redistributing wealth at a company level…it’s an understanding that the market as we now know it isn’t going to work. It’s a question of providing a healthcare system that’s not employer-based, so that we have some basic standards as most European countries do. It’s that Americans live with a basic healthcare system, a significant retirement system, receive the support for childcare and education that people need. That means redistributing the good fortune we have in this country and not imagining that if workers just work harder, or their wives go to work, or they take more home equity loans or credit cards, that we can keep this economy going.
M. Ringuette Great. Anna, are there any more questions queued up?
Moderator (Directions given.)
M. Ringuette Andy, I have one question for you that’s just come in.
A. Stern Sure.
M. Ringuette It’s asking, “How doe SEIU plan to address the need to foster a pro-labor, pro-union attitude in America’s youth?”
A. Stern The best way to change your image is to change reality. One of the things we’re doing, for instance, is creating an organization called, “Qvisory,” which is really a way for people—kind of an AARP for people 18 to 30-35—to be able to manage their pensions, manage their healthcare from job-to-job, and advocate on issues such as credit cards and ATM fees and things that are important to people who are getting started off. I think it’s about the union movement existing, not just inside our own little world, but doing things like we’re doing today with bloggers.
We are about to have a revolution inside SEIU about our communications plans and structures to become multi-channel, to exist in lots of different places, to be an application on Facebook and other places, and obviously, to have lots of things that are much more geared to my son’s generation (he’s 21), and less geared to the boring, labor leaders of my generation.
Finally, it’s about being a voice that says something that’s important to people who are younger. Whether it’s on issues of climate change or issues of credit cards or issues of how you pay off your college loans, we need to be a voice that’s fighting for young workers, not just fighting for members.
M. Ringuette That’s great. Anna, do you have any more questions?
Moderator Yes. We have a follow-up. Our last question is from Al Cring from The Dark Wraith Forums. Please go ahead.
A. Cring Andy, I have got a question that goes back to something you had mentioned. You talked about changing the laws in the country and moving the laws, both tax policy and labor policy, more towards a pro-worker environment. One of the problems I see is not so much the laws in this country. We have laws that are fairly robust with respect to labor, although most of those were passed long, long ago. One problem is that the regulatory environment is so scattered with respect to the protection of workers’ rights, that we need a labor czar in this country. We need someone who is going to oversee, by presidential portfolio allocation, the protection of the workers and the defense of their rights in the workplace and in the American society. Would you agree with that?
A. Stern For the next president and for our country (as I wrote in my book, A Country That Works) what happens next, particularly to our kids and their future, is as essential to America’s future as its defense as a nation. It demands taking all the scattered and different ways we think about these issues from regulatory to public policy to how we deal with childcare and how do we deal with people who can’t afford to go to college or, if they do, can’t pay off their loans. We can’t segment this into so many different places.
So it would be incredibly healthy to have a vice-president of the United States or have a czar or have a labor department that really had the power to say, “We wrote a series of laws in the 20th century during the time of the New Deal that did a magnificent job of rounding off some difficult edges of the change from an agricultural to an industrial economy. We are hopeless and clueless and plan-less, as it relates to transforming from the industrial to more of a knowledge and service economy.” Someone who wakes up every day and tries to reorganize our thinking, and then reorganize public policy, and then reorganizes accountability to decision-making around an economy that’s very different than the one-job-in-a-lifetime economy. I think is critical if anyone really wants to succeed as a leader of this country.
M. Ringuette Great. If that’s it for the questions, then I would like to let you know that we will have a transcript of this call available. You’ll be able to find it on our Web site starting Monday at www.SEIU.org.
I want to thank you all for joining us today. We look forward to reading what you’re writing.
Moderator Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation and for using AT&T Executive Teleconferencing. You may now disconnect.
Issues
A Solution for Our Health Care Crisis
We all know our health care system is broken. See why working people, business, and elected officials must fix it together. More »
