May 26, 2018: The Great Scam Perpetrated on Workers by the GOP

 

5/26/18: We start the Memorial Day weekend the way Republicans like it. First, there’s excitement because…well…giant tax cuts for fat cats! 

The blogger bicycled across the USA twice

to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund.

Meanwhile, Big Pharma bought up GOP lawmakers

and jacked the price of insulin by 700%.

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How the Great Scam worked.

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In related news, did you realize top prices for Rolex watches can surpass $400,000? This is exactly the way to insure a healthy economy. Cut taxes and the superrich will create more jobs for Rolex factory workers.

 

(I should point out the website offering the watch above includes “free shipping and handling” if that might be a factor in your decision.)

 

Speaking of the typical American worker, this has been a great month for them. No, I’m joking! First, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, 5-4, that companies which require individual workers to sign arbitration agreements can ban collective action by workers to recover overtime pay they were denied. Now, if Mega Corporation-R-Us bends the rules and 980 workers are cheated out of $1,900 overtime pay each, those workers can go to arbitration individually and complain. 

I think we can say with total confidence that Mega Corporation-R-Us will not fire Worker #1, who steps forward first and complains. 

Or Worker #2, who doesn’t get the message when #1 gets the boot. 

In similar fashion, if Worker #3, a female, has been sexually harassed by her superior, she must go to arbitration to complain. She may not join forces with other female Workers, #4, #5, #6 and #7, similarly harassed. 

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the Supreme Court majority in Epic Systems Corp v. Lewis, rules that the Federal Arbitration Law of 1925 has precedence over the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The latter act was passed to improve the rights of workers eight decades ago.

 

Now that conservatives have a grip on the highest court in the land, the corporations can do as they please. This kind of decision is a “payoff” for donations corporations have heaped in the laps of the GOP. Abercrombie and Fitch won’t need to change a policy that requires thousands of workers not scheduled for shifts to come in immediately, at 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday or a Friday, if given two hours notification. Company leaders at Mega Corporation-R-Us can sexually harass a nightshift cleaning woman, two receptionists, three interns and five secretaries over the course of several years. 

The nightshift cleaning woman will have every right to pay for a lawyer and go to arbitration herself.

 

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Noble efforts to save taxpayer dollars. 

AS SUMMER APPROACHES, teachers can relax after bruising strikes in deep red states. These strikes in West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky were sparked by a variety of issues. In Oklahoma teachers had gone a decade without raises. Now, you may be asking why states can’t raise pay for teachers. The answer is simple. GOP lawmakers are proud of having signed the Grover Norquist “taxpayer protection pledge.” If you go to the webpage for Americans for Tax Reform you can see that 46 members of the U.S. Senate and 208 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all members of the GOP (I think), have agreed never to raise taxes again, not in a million years, assuming they live so long. 

Meanwhile, President Trump has issued a series of executive orders stripping protections from federal civil service employees. Now it will be easier to fire them if they ask for more money or improved benefits and – hopefully, as Republicans would put it – to bust their unions. 

Republicans will cast all these moves as noble efforts to save taxpayer dollars. Actually, these are bricks in a wall (no, not that wall) to break the power of ordinary American workers. 

There was a time when many workers in private industry had excellent pensions. Then Mega Corporation-R-Us began to complain about greedy workers. Leaders of the GOP agreed. Unionized workers with pensions were the worst! Executives at Mega Corporation-R-Us, however, earning seven-figure salaries were not greedy. Mega executives wanted to create jobs!!

 

Mega Corporation-R-Us, Behemoth Retailing, and Leviathan Cable TV, as well as various multinational corporations, managed to pull off several slick moves. First, corporations insisted they had no choice but to move factories from “high-wage” states to states where “business-friendly” rules prevailed. These states, almost exclusively Republican-controlled, had laws that made it difficult for unions to organize. They promised lower taxes on businesses, and reduced services like healthcare for ordinary citizens. But hey! Job creation! Texas “created” 10,000 jobs by syphoning off 10,000 jobs from Michigan and Ohio. Those jobs just happened to pay $25.75 per hour in Ohio. In Texas non-union workers would accept $13 instead. 

Democrats were not the enemies of workers. Government was not the enemy of workers. Unions, imperfect as they are, were not the enemy. The corporations and their political allies were perpetrating a Great Scam. 

Soon the corporations realized that immigrant labor was even cheaper than non-union labor. You could pay an undocumented Mexican $6 per hour to install drywall in new homes. An American, if unionized, might demand $23. A non-union, native-born worker might expect $16. Americans would expect overtime if workdays stretched to nine or twelve hours. The undocumented wouldn’t complain if overtime went unpaid. They wouldn’t dare. In Texas, one of the reddest states in the land, hundreds of thousands of construction jobs were lost by native-born workers and filled by the undocumented.

 

Let me stop a moment and make clear. This is not a diatribe against immigrants. My Irish ancestors came to America in the 1800s for much the same reason millions of Mexicans have come more recently. I do not fear Haitian immigrants for their race. I do not fear Syrian immigrants for their religion. I do not fear Nigerian immigrants for their cultural beliefs. I do not fear immigrants. As a liberal, I would argue that immigrants enrich this country in a multitude of ways. 

I am simply listing the steps required to pull off the Great Scam. The Mega Corporation-R-Us crowd, overwhelmingly Republican in sentiment, took a series of steps that inevitably depressed workers’ wages. 

Now, we have a president who promises to build a magic wall to keep the undocumented out – and keep the jobs in – and the GOP continues to sell the same worthless “male enhancement” fiscal pills. 

Yes. Unemployment is down. Plenty of $10 per hour jobs and even $13 and $15 per hour jobs are opening up. 

For most Americans, the $29 per hour-jobs at Ford Motors, General Electric and Stanley Tools are gone. 

 

They were loyal only to their bank accounts. 

The corporations still weren’t done. The rise of multi-nationals meant Ford looked to Mexico to build engines. General Electric turned to China to manufacture lightbulbs. Stanley Tools started producing wrenches in Taiwan. The people who ran our corporations showed less and less loyalty to workers and to this country. They were loyal only to their bank accounts. Why pay a worker in North Carolina $14 per hour to make underwear, if a worker in Sri Lanka could make the same garments and do it for $14 per day? Why build iPhones in the U.S. and deal with overtime rules when you could do business in China and workers would put in 90 hours per week and never complain? 

True. China was (and is) a communist nation. True. Communism is founded on the premise of destroying capitalism. Truer still: China is a growing threat to the United States on the international stage. 

The multinationals didn’t care if decisions they made helped China gain power. Great piles of money were to be made. 

The average American worker could see his or her economic position weakening but couldn’t exactly understand why. The multinationals sent Joe’s shipyard job to Vietnam. Calvin’s steel-making job ended up in Bangladesh. GOP politicians and shills at Fox News told Joe that Democrats wanted to take away his guns and convinced Calvin there was a “War on Christmas” to obsess about. 

The average worker felt the economic pain. The coal miners who voted for Trump in 2016 were desperate. They saw a vote for him as a worthwhile gamble. The men and women at the Carrier plant in Indiana, scheduled for closing shortly after the election, should, almost unanimously, have voted Republican, if Republicans could really save their plant from closing, as Trump promised. If a Republican candidate was promising to bring jobs back from China, voting Republican, not Democratic, made sense. 

The problem, again, was that the Democrats had never been the ones to ship jobs to China to begin. 

You could listen to the truth, buried at the end of Mitt Romney’s famous 47% speech if you paid attention in 2012. It wasn’t the obvious part (about how 47% of Americans were “takers,” and Romney and the superrich were “makers”) that should have alerted workers to the fact the Great Scam was on. 

 

A fundamental truth about the Republican Party. 

It was the second part that revealed a fundamental truth about the Republican Party. Romney was talking to a room full of the fattest possible cats about the joys of investing in China. 

In that role, Romney had reveled in opportunities to make money by shipping jobs to China, failing to take note of the near-slave wages and terrible working conditions Chinese workers had to accept. 

Here’s how he described the “possibilities” of making piles of dough in China: 

And I remember going to – sorry just to bore you with stories – but I was, when I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there, employed about 20,000 people, and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married, and they worked in these huge factories, they made various small appliances, and as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end with maybe ten rooms. And the rooms, they had 12 girls per room, three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen them.

 

American workers would never accept similar conditions. Romney continued in tone-deaf fashion: 

And around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire, and guard towers. And we said, “Gosh, I can’t believe that you, you know, you keep these girls in.” They said, “No, no, no – this is to keep other people from coming in. Because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they’ll just come in here and start working and try and get compensated. So, we – this is to keep people out.”

 

And they said, “Actually, Chinese New Year, is the girls go home, sometimes they decide they’ve saved enough money and they don’t come back to the factory.” And he said, “And so on the weekend after Chinese New Year, there’ll be a line of people hundreds long outside the factory, hoping that some girls haven’t come back and they can come to the factory. And so, as we were experiencing this for the first time, for me to see a factory like this in China some years ago, the Bain partner I was with turned to me and said, “You know, 95 percent of life is settled if you’re born in America [emphasis added].” This is an amazing land. And what we have is unique, and fortunately it is so special we’re sharing it with the world. I’m concerned about the future, but also optimistic as I said, and I look forward to getting America back on track… 

 

If wages and benefits declined, it didn’t bother the fattest cats. 

If wages and benefits declined at home, it didn’t bother Romney or the rest of the fattest cats. It didn’t bother the Koch brothers or the Walton clan. The Koch’s could afford to donate hundreds of millions to Republican candidates and causes. They would eventually be repaid for their “investment” with policies that granted them tax cuts worth billions. The Walton family continued to donate and continued to pay workers subpar wages. Walmart managed to curtail hours so fewer employees would qualify for healthcare under the Obama plan. Big Pharma donated millions to the GOP and kept jacking up drug prices. Republicans kept arguing that it would be a horrible idea if Medicare started negotiating to lower drug costs. The price of insulin shot up by 700% in twenty years. And champions of capitalism pronounced it good. 

The average worker got a few extra dollars in his or her paycheck when Trump and Congress cut taxes. 

Unfortunately, Calvin could no longer afford the insulin his daughter, who suffered from type-1 diabetes, needed to live. Still, if he watched enough right-wing TV, he found solace in thinking Republicans were fighting for him, fighting to keep transgender type-1 individuals from using the same bathrooms as his girl. 

The Great Scam was in.

 

POSTSCRIPT: For more on how the fat cats prospered, see: 6/29/18, and their efforts to move profits to offshore tax havens like the Isle of Man and The Cayman Islands.