Saturday, March 11, 2023

[NJFAC] Jobs for All Newsletter, February 2023

Jobs for All Newsletter, February 2023 New Version of HR 1000;  Connecticut Considers Full Employment Trust Fund Bill;  National Infrastructure Bank;  Looking Back at the National Youth Administration

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Friday, March 3, 2023

[NJFAC] low unemployment means more employment for those with a disability



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June Zaccone
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[NJFAC] unionization rate down, though members numbers up [note image slogans]

....
Headline writers began declaring things like, "Employees everywhere are organizing" and that the United States was seeing a "union boom." In September, the White House asserted "Organized labor appears to be having a moment."

However, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released its union data for 2022. And their data shows that — far from a resurgence — the share of American workers in a union has continued to decline. Last year, the union membership rate fell by 0.2 percentage points to 10.1% — the lowest on record. This was the second year in a row that the union rate fell. Only one in ten American workers is now in a union, down from nearly one in three workers during the heyday of unions back in the 1950s.
To be sure, various data makes clear that the hubbub over a union resurgence last year wasn't all hype. For one, the absolute number of American workers in unions did, in fact, grow in 2022 — by approximately 200,000. It's just that the number of non-union jobs grew faster. The National Labor Relations Board saw 2,510 union representation petitions filed in fiscal year 2022 — a 53% increase over the previous year. That's hardly a game-changer, but it's something.....

Following a rally in Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza Park, hundreds of union members march across the Brooklyn Bridge in support of IBEW Local 3 (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers), September 18, 2017, in New York City.


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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Wednesday, February 1, 2023

[NJFAC] Galbraith: The Debt Ceiling Explained--what the NYTimes doesn't know...

The Debt Ceiling Explained. Once More, With Feeling…

What The New York Times doesn't know might hit you in the wallet. By James K. Galbraith January 19, 2023

It is in the nature of articles about the debt ceiling that no matter how often one tries to set the record straight, nothing ever gets through. Noting this after reading my most recent effort, a physicist friend chided me for using "facts and logic" against "what everyone knows." This states the problem precisely. So here I go again, once more, with feeling. 

In The New York Times of January 17, 2023, Alan Rappeport offers an excellent account of what everyone knows. It is suitable for a technique I learned in high school in France, explication de texte. The method involves line-by-line quotation and analysis. Herewith:
The United States borrows huge sums of money by selling Treasury bonds to investors across the globe and uses those funds to pay existing financial obligations, including military salaries, safety net benefits and interest on the national debt.
No. The United States does not borrow in order to have funds to pay its obligations. It pays its obligations by check (or electronic transfer) as specified by law. It then issues bonds so that "investors across the globe" can save a safe US dollar-denominated asset, the Treasury bond, that pays interest, as cash and bank deposits do not. Cash and bank deposits are not "debt subject to limit" under the law. You can review a full list of what is subject to limit here. Cash and bank deposits are not on that list. It is possible to look these things up.
But eventually, the United States will need to either borrow more money to pay its bills or stop making good on its financial obligations, including possibly defaulting on its debt.
No. The financial obligations of the United States government are, in fact, obligations. This is a legal term. The debt ceiling statute does not authorize the breach of any obligation.....


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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Sunday, January 29, 2023

[NJFAC] Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Celebrated Unemployment as a “Worker-Discipline Device”

In Confidential Memo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Celebrated Unemployment as a "Worker-Discipline Device"

Yellen wanted this to be the best of all possible worlds, but the best world she could conceive of was terrible. Jon Schwarz January 24 2023,

The memo is titled "Job Insecurity, the Natural Rate of Unemployment, and the Phillips Curve." Barker learned of it from references in the books "Maestro" by Bob Woodward and "Empathy Economics" by Owen Ullmann. Greenspan distributed the memo to the entire Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC — the group that decides interest rates — and it worked. As Ullmann puts it, "Yellen rescued Greenspan from his tight spot."

Here's the context in which Yellen was writing.
By mid-1996, unemployment had fallen to 5.3 percent. To understand the significance of this, it's necessary to understand the standard economics model at the Fed (and the other centers of U.S. powers). There is, they believe, an inescapable trade-off between unemployment and inflation: If unemployment gets low, workers across the economy will have the bargaining power to bid up their wages, which will cause unstoppable inflation, which a few steps later will cause the rise of another Hitler. (Germany's hyperinflation during the 1920s is generally believed to be one reason the country was open to extreme leadership.) You might think it would be nice for everyone to have jobs and good pay, but that just shows you are naïve and/or a Nazi.

Therefore, as previous Fed Chair William McChesney Martin said in 1955, the job of the Federal Reserve is to be "the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up." They can't let unemployment get too low, or the party will get out of hand.
....
...members of the FOMC were "prodding Greenspan to raise interest rates right away." But Greenspan was resisting this; no one knew for sure where the NAIRU was..... Greenspan's rationale was not that higher inflation was OK. Rather, as he eventually explained, "greater worker insecurity" had made possible a "healthy economic performance" with both low inflation and lower unemployment. This increased worker insecurity, he believed, could be measured by surveys finding that in 1991, in the middle of a recession, 25 percent of workers agreed with the statement, "I am frequently concerned about being laid off" — yet five years later, with far lower unemployment, 46 percent did.

Yellen's memo was an attempt to provide intellectual support for Greenspan's belief that increased worker insecurity could coexist with low unemployment. She writes in the memo that "unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device."
....
In her view of how economics works, the insecurity that working people hate is positive for everyone, including them, because this is the best we can do without provoking catastrophe. But is she right?....


Note that employed workers can feel less secure even at lower rates of unemployment. jz

June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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Monday, January 16, 2023

[NJFAC] Dr. King’s goal was full employment and universal health care. J. Phillip Thompson

Dr. King's goal was full employment and universal health care.
J. Phillip Thompson January 21, 2013

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is a leader for our times. A thoroughgoing revolutionary, he advocated peaceful yet determined resistance to not only racial but also economic subjugation.

Though his approach was nonviolent, he never to advised passivity in the face of injustice or acceptance of the "politics of the possible." His was a call to prolonged protest and self-sacrifice among people of conscience, a resolve strong enough to force a humanistic reordering of national priorities and transformation of the political economy. In opposing militarism and denouncing the Vietnam War during the height of its popularity, King proposed spending money instead on full employment, universal healthcare, affordable housing, and massive investments in education. He repeatedly cautioned that technology and corporate wealth were being used for selfish ends:
The contemporary tendency in our society is to base distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breath of meaning it is necessary to adjust this inequity.
On this national holiday, as we debate austerity measures, the jobs crisis, and gross inequality, we would do well to recall the entirety of King's mission.
• • •
King believed that racial justice was not the final aim of black Americans' struggle, but rather part of a broader and more fundamental struggle for economic justice. Economic justice also was not the ultimate goal, but it was a condition of that goal: upholding the dignity and promise of human beings everywhere. While he supported blacks' efforts to win political offices and championed black pride as a counter to negative anti-black stereotypes and black self-hatred, King continuously reminded black audiences that winning meaningful improvements required strong alliances with poor whites, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans.....

Some progressives, desperate for signs of hope, look to the labor movement. King believed it was imperative to redesign the economy to protect workers and sought an alliance with labor leaders. He told the national AFL-CIO convention in 1961:
In the next ten to twenty years, automation will grind jobs to dust as it grinds out unbelievable volumes of production. This period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency. . . . To find a great design to solve a grave problem, labor will have to intervene in the political life of the nation to chart a course which distributes the abundance to all instead of concentrating it among a few. The strength to carry through such a program requires that labor know its friends and collaborate as a friend.
....
Tragically, following King's assassination, most black political leaders were too fearful to follow his example. They retreated from building a multiracial movement for full employment. By the early 1970s, most accepted affirmative action—a far less costly strategy than full employment, created by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to quell urban rioting and appease elites—rather than befriending and collaborating with other minority groups and poor whites in the service of transforming society....


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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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Thursday, January 12, 2023

[NJFAC] Beat the Press - Big Victory on Retirement Income in Omnibus Spending Bill

Good discussion of new bill, including pointing out the benefits of a state strategy:

"The passage of the Secure Act 2.0 provisions is also a vindication of the state-by-state strategy that progressives have been pursuing for the last quarter century when action at the national level seems blocked. This has been done with increases to the minimum wage, paid sick days and family leave, support for child care, and a number of other areas."

Since coming to Washington more than three decades ago, I have spent much of my time working on retirement income. The biggest part of that story was defending Social Security, which leaders in both parties were anxious to cut. This defense was largely successful, as the efforts to privatize it in the 1990s and under President Bush were beaten back, and the efforts at cuts often focused on the annual cost of living adjustment, were similarly derailed.
...

Big Victory on Retirement Income in Omnibus Spending Bill

Dean Baker, December 24, 2022
Since coming to Washington more than three decades ago, I have spent much of my time working on retirement income. The biggest part of that story was defending Social Security, which leaders in both parties were anxious to cut. This defense was largely successful, as the efforts to privatize it in the 1990s and under President Bush were beaten back, and the efforts at cuts often focused on the annual cost of living adjustment, were similarly derailed.
Defending Social Security was crucial, both because tens of millions of people depend on it for most or all of their income, but also because it was a model social program. The administrative costs are minimal, with the total program's costs coming to less than 0.6 percent of annual benefits, with the costs of the retirement program alone coming to less than 0.4 percent of benefits. By comparison, the fees from private 401(k)s run in the neighborhood of 15 to 20 percent of annual retirement benefits.
 
     Read More    

Contrary to What the NYT Tells You, the Problem in An Aging Society is Distribution

More Mind Reading at the NYT: Tells Readers U.K. Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak's Real Concern Is the Working Class

The NYT Doesn't Have Access to Census Data: We Do Not Have a Record Number of Renters

Quick Note on Minimum Age for Mandatory Retirement Fund Distributions

Industrial Policy Is Not a Remedy for Income Inequality

Real Consumption Rises as Inflation Decimates People in Joe Biden's America

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Dean Baker, Senior Economist

Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.
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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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