News & Articles

Boss,” spelled backwards, is double-S-O-B, and that’s how most of the employees of the US Postal Service feel about their top boss.
America’s postal employees – from mail clerks to letter carriers – take great pride in moving millions of pieces of mail to us every day, whether we live in inner cities or way down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where mail is delivered by mule-riding letter carriers to a Native American tribe living there. But USPS bossman, Postmaster General Pat Donahoe, definitely does not make postal workers proud, for he’s been deliberately monkeywrenching our mail system by slowing delivery, reducing staff and hours of service, closing neighborhood and historic post offices, shutting processing centers, trying to end Saturday delivery, badmouthing his own agency’s performance, steadily corporatizing public functions, and transforming decent, union-scale jobs into the low-wage retail economy.
One portentous example of Donahoe’s determination to bust the wages and undermine the performance of USPS is the sweetheart privatization scam he’s set up with Staples. He’s letting this big box retailer place official postal kiosks in its 1,500 stores – only they’re not being staffed by highly trained, publically-accountable postal workers, but by Staple’s own poverty-wage, high-turnover floor staff. In at least one case, Donahoe even cut the hours of service at post offices around a Staples store, then put up a sign directing postal customers to the Staples outlet.
Mark Dimondstein – the feisty president of the American Postal Workers Union – calls Donahoe “Wall Street’s Trojan Horse, the privatizer from within.” But, says Dimondstein, “We intend to stop him.” His union has launched a Dump Donahoe campaign as well as a national boycott of Staples stores.
 
For information and support, go to www.apwu.org.

What job creation numbers don’t tell us

Have you noticed that The Powers That Be employ an entirely different standard for measuring the health of America’s job market than they use for the stock market?
They’re currently telling us that, “The job market is improving.” What do they mean? Simply that the economy is generating an increase in the number of jobs available for workers. But when they say, “The stock market is improving,” they don’t mean that the number of stocks available to investors is on the rise. Instead, they’re measuring the price, the value of the stocks. And isn’t value what really counts in both cases?
As a worker, you don’t merely want to know that 200,000 new jobs are on the market, but what they’re worth – do they pay living wages, do they come with benefits, are they just part-time and temporary, do they include union rights, what are the working conditions, etc.? In other words, are these jobs… or scams?
So, it’s interesting that the recent news of job market “improvement” doesn’t mention that of the 10 occupation categories projecting the greatest growth in the next eight years, only one pays a middle-class wage. Four pay barely above poverty level, and five pay beneath it, including fast food workers, retail sales staff, health aids, and janitors. The job expected to have the highest number of openings is “Personal Care Aide” – taking care of aging baby boomers in their houses or in nursing homes. The median salary of an aid is under $20,000. They enjoy no benefits, and about 40 percent of them must rely on food stamps and Medicaid to make ends meet, plus many are in the “shadow economy,” vulnerable to being cheated on the already miserly wages.
To measure the job market by quantity – with no regard for quality – is to devalue workers themselves. Creating 200,000 new jobs is not a sign of economic health if each worker needs two or three of those jobs to patch together a barebones living.
“10 jobs poised for explosive growth (Hint: they don’t pay much),” www.cnn.com, December 19, 2013.

A Billionaire’s sound advice to the Billionaire’s Club

Here’s an unusal über-rich guy with an unusual message for his fellow one-percent-of-the-one-percenters.
Nick Hanauer, who made billions as an internet entrepreneur, recently wrote in an open letter to other über-richies that, “The true job creators are middle-class consumers, not rich businesspeople like us.” America is dependent on a strong middle class he says, for it’s their purchases that power the economy, he says, noting that “I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff.” He points out that his family has three cars – not 3,000. So, Hanauer says, it’s in the self-interest of America’s corporate and financial elites to do all they can to lift wages – starting with a $15-an-hour minimum wage.
The old claim that paying workers more will destroy small businesses and job growth is simply not true, he says, adding that it’s insidious to claim that helping the rich get richer is good for the economy, but helping the poor get richer is bad for it. Hanauer points out that “The two cities in the nation with the highest rate of job growth by small businesses are San Francisco and Seattle” – which also have the two highest minimum-wage levels in the country. For the Koch-headed ideologues who say any minimum wage is Big Government in Action, this member of the Billionaire’s Club says that the soundest way to shrink government is to decrease the need for it – pay decent wages so people don’t need food stamps, rent assistance, and other subsidies for life’s basics.
Hanauer concludes with this sobering warning to obtuse billionaires: No society can survive the glaring inequities we are building into the American economy – stop these feudal low-wage policies and bridge the widening divide, or “the pitch forks are going to come for us.”

“Ultra-rich man’s letter: “To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans: The Pitchforks Are Coming,” www.topinfopost.com, June 30, 2014.
“The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage,” www.bloombergview.com, June 19, 2013.