Time To Fight...Again

By William Lucy

There seems to be no limit to corporate greed these days. A Disney bigshot gets $100 million for quitting. CEOs who make millions every year find ways to pay less than you do in income taxes.

A hundred years ago corporate giants like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Frick brazenly looted America until the people rose up and demanded fairness. Now history seems to be repeating itself.

Look at what's happening. Corporate profits are at near-record highs. The stock market has passed 6,600 and is still climbing. Productivity has reached new peaks. In 1960 the average CEO lived well on an income 12 times that of the average worker; now they pay themselves 135 times more. Today a top executive averages $207,500 just for saying, "I'll take the job," while between 1980 and 1992 the average worker's paycheck lost 12 percent of its buying power.

Look at what's happening. Today America's economic elite-the top 10 percent of the population-own 67.2 percent of all the wealth. The other 90 percent-that's us-are left with less than a third, and our share is shrinking. Since 1979, 98 percent of all the growth in income has gone to the top fifth of the population; the rest of us, the bottom 80 percent, get to split the leftover 2 percent. The middle class is drying up.

Look at what's happening. For more than a generation after World War II labor and management prospered or suffered together. Then Corporate America scrapped the social contract. Today job security is gone, and pensions and benefits are fading. Rising productivity no longer means higher wages; now the reward (if any) is not getting fired.

Look at what's happening. Jobs have become one of Corporate America's leading exports. Millions of jobs that used to support families in Boston and Biloxi are now in Thailand and Taiwan. Since 1990 alone Corporate America has "downsized" 3 million workers. Since 1990 alone business has imported-has brought in-nearly 2 million workers from low-wage countries to fill U.S. jobs. They tell us that no qualified U.S. workers are available! Some 18 million Americans are now "contingent workers," with few benefits or none at all. Today the nation's biggest private employer is a temp agency.

Corporate America has sold us out. It controls one political party, and in 1994 it took control of the U.S. Congress. Since then business has openly tried to crush organized labor, to subvert health care reform, to revive company unions, to abandon the 40-hour, five-day work-week, to weaken occupational safety and health laws, to kill prevailing wage laws, to reduce employees' right to sue employers, to enact a national right-to-work law.

Politicians leased by business push to balance the federal budget and call for sacrifice-always by somebody else. They propose slashing Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, tuition aid, and other basic social programs, but they ferociously protect corporate tax breaks-$455 billion in 1996 alone. Your tax dollars may not help keep grandma in a decent nursing home or help your kids get to college but they are helping pay for some millionaire CEO's boozy luncheons, sky boxes, tickets to the playoffs, and the merger that costs 40,000 jobs.

Now they are trying to loot Social Security. They call it "privatizing," but what's in it for Wall Street is the chance to drain more than $100 billion a year out of workers' retirement money.

Corporate greed has gotten out of hand. It has produced a dangerous social and economic imbalance in the United States, and organized labor is just about the only significant force in the country still able to fight to put business back in its place. That's why they hate us so much. You hear CEOs vilifying "labor bosses" and greedy union workers, but business laid out at least $250 million during the 1996 election season-outspending labor by 7 to 1-to protect its gravy train. Who's the threat?

Sisters and Brothers, before the recent election the powers-that-be saw organized labor as not much more than a quaint and irritating relic. Now they know we're a threat, and in the next two years you can expect a torrent of anti-worker, anti-union actions by those who control the Congress. And as always, we will have to fight like hell for basic justice.