100 Slaves 100 Enemies

Mark Weisbrot of CEPR wrote a review of the new documentary from Michael Moore, Capitalism: A Love Story, which comes out on October 2, 2009. Weisbrot’s review will give you an idea of some of the movie’s content. The use of an Iggy Pop song as background music for robbing banks piqued my interest, as did this — probably because I was born in 1973:

He gets the economic story right. How is it that Michael Moore’s father could buy a house and raise a family on the income of one auto worker, and still have a pension for his retirement? And yet this is not possible in the vastly more productive economy of today? The answer is not complicated: in the first half of the post-War era, employees shared in the gains from productivity growth; since 1973, most of them have hardly done so at all … Moore also explains the structural changes, such as Ronald Reagan’s rollback of union and labour relations to the 19th century, that helped bring about the most massive upward redistribution of income in US history.

from the Introduction of
Confonting the Gloves-Off Economy: America’s Broken Labor Standards and How to Fix Them
written by the Center for Economic Policy and Research:

• According to “employer compliance surveys” conducted by US Dept of Labor in the 1990s (the best evidence for labor violations) in 1999:
  • only 35% of apparel plants in New York City were in compliance with minimum wage and overtime laws;
  • in Chicago, only 42% of restaurants were in compliance;
  • in Los Angeles, only 43% of grocery stores were in compliance;
  • nationally, only 43% of residential care establishments were in compliance
• slavery is not dead
  • estimated 20,000 workers are trafficked into the country per year
  • most extreme example: 1995, more than 70 Thai garment workers were discovered inside a small El Monte apartment building — under armed guard and surrounded by barbed wire — where they were forced to work 18-hour shifts without pay
• How did the gloves come off?
  • Reagan
  • weakening unions
  • regulators hostile to the idea of regulations
  • salting the National Labor Relations Board with people opposed to unions
  • subcontracting / temps
  • employers threaten to close all or part of their business in more than half of all union organizing campaigns
  • union/non-union gap; full-time union members:
    • earn 30% more
    • 70% union workers have defined-benefit pensions; 15% of non-union members do
  • between 1975 and 2004, the number of federal workplace investigations declined by 14% and compliance-actions completed dropped by 36%
  • The Occupationsl Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) budget has been cut by $14.5 million since 2001
  • At its current staffing and inspection levels it would take OSHA 133 years to inspect each workplace under its jurisdiction just once