[NJFAC] David Graeber on BS jobs; David Gordon on "guard labor"

Revisiting the Spiritual Violence of BS Jobs

"Anthropologist David Graeber's celebrated theory of "bullshit jobs" continues to provide a critical window into why modern work is often so useless, soul-sucking, and absurd. By Christopher Pollard 15 Oct 2024

....Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, first published in 2018. A "bullshit job," according to Graeber, is a job where even the person doing it secretly believes the job shouldn't exist. But part of their condition of employment is to pretend it's not as pointless as they know it to be.

Bullshit jobbers, he writes, can include "box tickers," "flunkies," "goons," and "taskmasters" (more on them later). Such roles are prevalent in areas such as finance, admin, law, marketing, and human resources. The book has been translated into many languages, and while it has been criticized for some rather broad generalizations, he clearly struck a chord.

In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes suggested we were fast approaching a time when our new "labor-saving technology" meant we'd have to confront the issue of "technological unemployment." Due to the prodigious gains in productivity, wrote Keynes, we'd soon be working half as much—or less. By the postwar period, this had become a widely held belief.

Keynes, writes Graeber, was right. But rather than embrace more leisure time for workers, our response was "to make up a raft of new jobs," resulting in large swaths "of people, in Europe and North America in particular," spending "their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe[d]" did not really need to be performed.

The "proliferation" of these "bullshit jobs," Graeber suggests, is a significant part of the reason we don't have a 20- or even 15-hour work week....."

This is a good partial discussion of the problems with work. The late David Gordon wrote of "guard labor," a category including police, prison guards, military, many supervisors, et al. These are socially determined, and not productive. See, for example, these comments from his article in the LA Times:

"By increasing economic inequality and insecurity, conservative economic policies have exacerbated social tensions. As a consequence, an ever-increasing fraction of the nation's productive potential must be devoted simply to keeping the have-nots at bay.

Similarly, on the international scene, hawkish foreign and military policies aimed at reasserting U.S. global power have a comparably high price tag: A mounting fraction of the labor force is not producing goods for consumption or for investment but is either producing military goods or working for the Pentagon....."

jz

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[NJFAC] shift to bonuses from salaries: comment from goodjobs member

I think this is a creepy development, for several reasons:

 

1.  It will make it more difficult for employees to budget, since they will not know what their pay will be.

 

2.  Who will define the targets?  The power to define targets will place enormous power in someone's hands.  The only way to avoid a concentration of arbitrary power would be to have the targets be the subject of collective decision-making, whether through unions or through employee ownership.

 

3.  Unless the target is shared and the bonus is awarded to a group that includes all the individuals whose work contributes to the accomplishment of a stated goal, the bonus system will tend to fragment efforts and discourage teamwork.

 

Mr. Leon  also sent comment and links on employment-related stress:

I think this kind of connection is not sufficiently discussed.  Stress underlies a variety of medical conditions and contributes significantly to health care costs.  Some part of the elevated health care bill in the US is attributable to anxiety about health insurance and health care- financial iatrogenesis!

 

Sandy

 

Santiago Leon

Thanks, Sandy. June

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[NJFAC] worker stress affects their health

The Association Between Precarious Employment and Stress Among Working Age Individuals in the United States

This study examines the association between precarious employment and stress among U.S. working-aged individuals using data from waves 4 (2008-2009) and 5 (2016-2018) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Precarious employment (PES) was measured based on factors like low wages, work hours, job instability, and lack of benefits. Higher PES was associated with increased perceived stress and higher levels of C-reactive protein, a biological stress marker. The results suggest that precarious employment, a psychosocial stressor, may contribute to poor mental and physical health. The researchers recommend policies like improved job stability, better wages, and healthcare benefits to mitigate these effects and reduce health disparities.

Job Insecurity and Health and Well-Being: What Happens When You Really Need or Love Your Job?

Thanks to a goodjobs list member for these links.

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[NJFAC] AI that could benefit workers

A worker-centered approach to policy in the era of AI, EPI 10/24 

The deployment of AI in the workplace has shined a light on long-standing problems: The deployment of AI-powered technologies in the workplace has been associated with an array of worker experiences and outcomes that warrant concern, including discrimination, unsafe working conditions, loss of privacy, and seemingly arbitrary disciplinary action or discharge, among others.

But these outcomes are not inherent to the use of AI. Employers' use of other technologies and even garden-variety management practices have perpetuated these outcomes for decades. The use of AI has shined a light on the challenges workers with little bargaining power and insufficient on-the-job protections face in our labor market.

Broader solutions are needed to improve worker outcomes in the era of AI: Policymakers should address the negative outcomes experienced by workers today, but they also should look beyond how the use of specific AI systems may degrade job quality and look deeper to the underlying conditions that enable employers to use AI in this manner: the imbalance of power between businesses and their workers.

Workers should have greater protections and a voice in workplace policies: Decades of weakened bargaining power and heavy reliance on employers for life necessities, such as healthcare and retirement, has made it exceedingly difficult for most workers to bargain over how AI technologies are being used in the workplace—let alone opt out of the use of AI-powered management and surveillance at work or walk away from unlawful or poor working conditions.

The objective of worker-centered AI policy: Increase the ability of workers to meaningfully engage their employers in how AI technologies are deployed in the workplace.

To achieve this straightforward objective, policymakers will need to address long-standing imbalances in the labor market; reduce AI-specific barriers to worker voice while banning the most egregious uses of AI; and support workers' ability to find better jobs.

....
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[NJFAC] shift from salaries to bonus-based pay

The Big Shift From Salaries to Bonus-Based Pay, Fuhrmans, WSJ 9/24

More Americans are in jobs where a chunk of their pay isn't guaranteed.

In incentive pay programs, base salaries are often fleshed out with monthly or quarterly bonuses conditional on hitting certain targets. Twenty-eight percent of more than 300 companies surveyed said they were building incentive pay into new roles, according to a 2024 survey by revenue-management consulting firm Alexander Group.

The practice has long been common for salespeople and top brass. Yet apart from the yearly raise—and for some, an annual bonus—the vast majority of the workforce makes the same amount every payday.

Now, more companies are trying to get the most out of rising payroll costs by making a part of workers' pay contingent on completing prescribed goals.

Employers say the new way to pay professionals from accountants and human-resource managers to marketing assistants can fuel greater productivity. Plenty of overachievers say they are relishing the often-rich upside potential. Yet some workers say they are making less than they bargained for.

"There's absolutely risk, but in my experience there's been more reward," says Hannah Brown, 32, a chief of staff at business-software company WalkMe.....

Jobs close to the sales process, such as marketing and after-sales support, are the most likely to be swept up into pay-for-performance plans. But some firms, such as WalkMe, are using short-term bonuses to shape pay for everyone from accountants to human-resources managers.....

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[NJFAC] former prisoners find work by composting waste

Recycling the Discarded By Damon Orion, originally published by Resilience.org September 12, 2024

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

The stigma of a criminal conviction can be a major barrier to community reentry for recently released prisoners. A December 2021 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics highlighted the employment barrier faced by the more than 50,000 who were incarcerated, with 33 percent of them being unable to find any employment "over four years" after their release from prison in 2010.

Meanwhile, a 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Justice of employers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, found that

"ex-offenders… [were] one-half to one-third as likely to receive initial consideration from employers relative to equivalent applicants without criminal records."

In 2018, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that more than 27 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals were unemployed—a figure "higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression."....

The Compost Co-op, a worker-owned service in Greenfield, Massachusetts, offers formerly incarcerated individuals an alternative to this path. Its workers collect compost from customers' curbsides and bring them to western Massachusetts's largest commercial composting site, Martin's Farm. This enables staff members to earn a living wage through meaningful work.....

Positive Environmental Impact

With 30-40 percent of food in the U.S. going into the trash—nearly 60 million tons per year—the Compost Co-op serves as a model for food waste reduction. It also promotes environmental health. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes, composting reduces greenhouse gas emissions and "improves a community's ability to adapt to adverse climate impacts by helping soil absorb water and prevent runoff of pollutants during floods. It also helps soil hold more water for longer, mitigating the effects of drought."....

link from nakedcapitalism.com

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[NJFAC] Ending special tax treatment afforded to superrich can cover estimated climate finance needs

Countries can raise $2 trillion by copying Spain's wealth tax, study finds Ending special tax treatment afforded to superrich can cover estimated climate finance needs

....

The study documents that previous tax reforms targeting the superrich did not result in the superrich relocating to other countries, despite media headlines claiming the contrary. Just 0.01% of the richest households relocated after wealth tax reforms targeting the richest households were implemented in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Crucially, the extreme accumulation of wealth doesn't just create extreme imbalances that have harmful consequences, it renders that accumulated wealth less economically productive – for example by diverting disproportionally more wealth towards speculative derivatives instead of goods and services in the "real" economy.¹⁶ The Tax Justice Network's spokesperson attributes this to "why the world might not feel any richer today despite there being more wealth than ever before."....

"There's this idea that billionaires earn wealth like everybody else, they're just better at it. This is bogus. It's impossible to earn a billion dollars. The average US worker would have to work for a stretch of time 13 times longer than humans have existed to earn as much as wealth as the world's richest man has today. Salaries don't make billionaires, dividends and rent money do. But we tax dividends and rent money much less than we tax salaries, and this is destabilising the earner model our economies are based on....

Read the report

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[NJFAC] Meaning of the jobs data revisions--Dean Baker

Mixed Story: What the Revision to the Jobs Data Means

August 21, 2024 Dean Baker

First, the people complaining that this downward revision exposes cooked jobs data in prior months need to get their heads screwed on straight. Let's just try a little logic here.

If the Biden-Harris administration had the ability to cook the job numbers, do we think they are too stupid to realize that they should keep cooking them at least through November? Seriously, do we think they are total morons? If you've been cooking the numbers for twenty months, wouldn't you keep cooking them until Election Day?

Okay, but getting more serious here, the staff of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a professional outfit that does exactly what we want it to do. They produce the data about the economy as best they can in a completely objective way. And they use methods that are completely transparent.....

Every year the BLS adjusts the data from the survey based on state unemployment insurance (UI) filings which have data from nearly every employer in the country. These UI filings are a near census for all payroll employment. If the UI data gives a different picture than the survey of employers, then the filings are almost certainly right and BLS revises it data accordingly.

For reasons that we can only speculate about, there was an unusually large gap this year. Many economists and statisticians will spend many hours trying to figure out why this is the case. But one thing we should be confident of is that no one cooked the data. BLS did the best they could in structuring their survey of employers. If they can find ways to improve it, they will, as they have in the past.

What Does This Tell Us About the Economy?

Turning briefly to the substance of the revision, I realize many people will be quick to say that this is bad news for our picture of the economy. That is not clear at all.

First, we should be clear that even with the revision the economy still created jobs at a very rapid pace in the period covered, from March 2023 to March 2024. While BLS had previously reported that we created 2.9 million jobs over this period, or 242,000 a month. The revision means we created 2.1 million jobs or 172,000 jobs a month. By comparison, in the three years prior to the onset of the pandemic, we created jobs at a rate of 179,000 a month. Even with the downward revision, we were still creating jobs at a very healthy pace.....

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[NJFAC] Manufacturing Jobs: Unions Made Them Good, Not the Factories--Dean Baker

Manufacturing Jobs: Unions Made Them Good, Not the Factories--Dean Baker

The effort to bring back manufacturing jobs has been a major theme in the 2024 election. Both parties say they consider this a high priority for the next administration. However, there is a notable difference in that the Biden-Harris administration has actively supported an increase in unionization, while the Republicans have indicated, at best, neutrality if not outright hostility towards unions.

This distinction is important in the context of manufacturing jobs. Many people seem to assume that manufacturing jobs are automatically good jobs, paying more than non manufacturing jobs.

While that was true four decades ago, before the massive job loss of manufacturing jobs due to trade, it is not clear this is still the case. The figure below shows the average hourly pay, in 2024 dollars, for production and non supervisory workers in manufacturing and elsewhere in the private sector.[1]

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author's calculations.

As can be seen, workers in manufacturing had a substantial edge in pay at the start of this period, earning a premium of more than 5.0 percent over their counterparts in other industries. However, this flipped in 2006, and since then pay for non manufacturing workers has outpaced pay for workers in manufacturing. In the most recent data, non manufacturing workers get almost 9.0 percent more in hourly pay than workers in manufacturing.

To be clear, this is not a comprehensive comparison of relative pay. A full comparison would have to incorporate benefits and also adjust for differences in the workforce, such as education and location. An analysis done by Larry Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute in 2018 found that there was still a substantial premium for manufacturing workers over the years 2010-2016 when controlling for these factors. A more recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Board found that this premium had disappeared altogether, even when controlling for these factors.

While further research may produce different results, there is little doubt that the manufacturing premium has been sharply reduced, if not eliminated altogether, over the last four decades. The main reason for the decline in the premium is not a secret. There has been a huge drop in the percentage of manufacturing workers who are unionized.

In 1980, 32.3 percent of manufacturing workers were union members. This compares to a unionization rate of 15.0 percent for the rest of the private sectors. By comparison, in 2023 just 7.9 percent of manufacturing workers were union members, only slightly higher than the 5.9 percent rate for the private sector as a whole.

The implication of the loss of the wage premium coupled with the decline in unionization rates is that there is little reason to believe that an increase in the number of manufacturing jobs will mean more good jobs unless they are also unionized. It is not the factories that make these jobs good jobs, it is the unions.

[1] The category of production and non supervisory workers includes roughly 80 percent of the workforce. It excludes managers and highly paid professionals, so changes in pay at the top end will not have much impact on these data.

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[NJFAC] Effect of AI Adoption on Jobs

The Effect of AI Adoption on Jobs: Evidence from USCommuting Zones August 12, 2024 Bonfiglioli, Crinò, Gancia, & Papadakis, Voxeu 8/24 Harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence has become one of the top priorities for policymakers around the world. Yet, doing so first requires a thorough understanding of the effects of these technologies on labour markets. Using data across US commuting zones over the period 2000-2020, this column presents evidence that AI adoption has reduced employment, except in high-paying occupations and those requiring a degree in STEM disciplines.

....

Between 2000 and 2020, the employment share of AI-related occupations has almost doubled in the US, rising from 0.14% to 0.20%. Most of this increase has taken place after 2010. There are sizable differences in the diffusion of AI technologies across industries. AI adoption is most prevalent in the service sector, especially in advanced branches such as information, professional, scientific and business services. It is also important in some utilities, such as electricity, and in some areas of the public sector, such as national security and international affairs. Conversely, AI adoption is still limited in manufacturing. This feature distinguishes AI adoption from the use of industrial robots, which is mostly concentrated in the manufacturing sector (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2020).....

Conclusions

Recent improvements in the field of AI have triggered much hype about the future of work. While nobody can predict the exact direction that new innovations and applications will take, we think that it is important to start from understanding the consequences that these technologies have already had. Our results point toward robust negative effects of AI adoption on employment for most workers and sectors. While more micro-level evidence is needed to precisely identify the mechanism through which these negative effects unfold, our evidence is nevertheless consistent with the view that AI is contributing to the automation of jobs and to widening inequality.

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[NJFAC] Eliminating non-competes improves workplace conditions

Are Non-Competes Really Ending?

The Federal Trade Commission proposed a full ban in April. What's the status of that ban? Plus, more than a dozen states have acted after the effort of journalists, lawyers, regulators, and citizens.

Matt Stoller Aug 2 "My employer comes far too close to owning me than should be possible in a 'free' country." - Anonymous commenter to the FTC Over the past year, lawyers and human resource experts are starting to recommend an unusual strategy for corporate America. Treat your employees better. A few months ago, for instance, James Moore & Co., an accounting and services corporation, suggested to clients that they start the "enhancing workplace conditions, offering competitive compensation packages and providing opportunities for career development and advancement." In late July, Steven Clark of Wealth Management magazine wrote that "firms may need to focus more on creating a positive work environment and attractive compensation packages to retain talent." Why? Because non-compete agreements, which are standard contractual provisions for tens of millions of employees that lock them to their current employer, are getting harder and harder to impose and enforce. Firms are removing non-competes from employment contracts, big law lawyers are launching complex sites for their clients on how to track what contracts are outlawed, corporate CEOs are starting to brag that they do not force employees to sign non-competes, and creative labor-focused lawyers like Matt Bruenig are taking on cases and voiding these provisions in front of newly sympathetic judges.....

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[NJFAC] Inequality and its impact on climate, child poverty, democracy

The Spirit Level at 15 Income Inequality July 22, 2024

In 2009, the bestselling and award winning book, The Spirit Level, sounded the alarm on the corrosive effects of economic injustice. At a time when only a few academics were exploring this issue, the book provided a comprehensive analysis linking the negative effects of inequality to a wide range of social ills – from higher rates of imprisonment and mental health issues to eroded trust within society. It revolutionised the way we looked at, measured and understood the impacts of inequality.

Authors Professor Richard Wilkinson and Professor Kate Pickett, along with the Equality Trust, have released an update which revisits its original research with new data and analyses. It introduces two new indices, and expands on the original Spirit Level to offer updated data on a total of 27 newly analysed dimensions. It underscores how inequality harms us all and lies at the root of our escalating environmental, health and social crises. Its message is a rallying cry to reject the false narratives that have justified inaction, and to boldly confront systemic inequalities.

The Spirit Level at 15 shows for the first time how greater income inequality is particularly bad for the climate. It finds that nations with high levels of equality have the greatest focus on reducing carbon emissions, while the richest 10% of the population are responsible for more than half of all global emissions. It shows how inequality impacts every aspect of society, including our economy, highlighting that the UK's record on child poverty in recent years is not an aberration, but what is expected in a country this unequal.....

Findings on democracy and trust underline warning signs from the general election: inequality dramatically lowers trust, social cohesion, and levels of democracy. The rise of the far right and collapsing trust in democratic institutions across the world has gone hand-in-hand with exploding wealth and power for the ultra-rich. This should worry us all. ....

Download the report

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[NJFAC] A New Era of Endless Labor Shortages?

A New Era of Endless Labor Shortages? A Critical Analysis of McKinsey's New Report Article by Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm The McKinsey report's highlighting of an extremely high job vacancy ratio in recent years does not reflect the true state of the U.S. labor market. Excerpt: "Every so often a publication comes along that more or less perfectly captures the Zeitgeist of world business elites. So it was on the 26th of June when the McKinsey Global Institute issued a new report: "Help Wanted: Charting the Challenge of Tight Labor Markets in Advanced Economies." The message its few pages of charts and text deliver is dire indeed: "Labor markets in advanced economies today are among the tightest in two decades, not merely a pandemic-induced blip but rather a long-term trend that may continue as workforces age." However, "There is no doubt that the rise in the job vacancy ratio is spurious, i.e., not related to real labor-market tightness, but instead most likely caused by a sharp increase in manipulative job postings." Learn More

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[NJFAC] Union ‘effects’ on hourly and weekly wages

Union 'effects' on hourly and weekly wages: A half-century perspective David Blanchflower Bruce V. Rauner Professor of Economics Dartmouth College; Professor of Economics University Of Glasgow Alex Bryson Professor of Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute University College London  25 Jun 2024

Union membership across the developed world has been falling for decades. This column uses data on wages and hours worked in the US over the last 50 years to examine whether this has led to a fall in the 'union wage premium'. The authors find that while the hourly wage premium for union members has fallen notably since the 1970s, the differential in weekly wages has remained large, driven in part by union members working longer hours. This underexplored role of unions is important for the welfare of workers whose consumption is dependent not only on a decent hourly wage, but the offer of sufficient paid hours of work.

Across the developed world the proportion of workers who are union members has been declining for decades (Garnero et al. 2017).  Today the rate of membership in the US stands at 33% in the public sector.  In the private sector it is 6%, down from 24% 50 years ago. 

This decline is perceived by some to be indicative of a shift in bargaining power between employers and workers which has resulted in a decline in labour's share of income (Summers and Stansbury 2020).  Since the root of a union's ability to bid up wages above the market rate is its ability to call on its members to support its bargaining position and, if necessary, withdraw its labour through strike action, one might expect this decline in union density to have resulted in a secular decline in the union wage premium – the mark up unions achieve over the wage similar workers would get in the absence of the union.  But has it? The short answer is no.

....

source: nakedcapitalism.com

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

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[NJFAC] expanding union movement in the South

How Workers Are Revolutionizing the South

David McCall, international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

Independent Media Institute

....

Local 1025 [USW] members shared firsthand accounts of how the union boosted their wages, gave them a voice, and kept them safe on the job. And in May 2024, the workers at Tarboro filed for an election to join the USW.

They're among a growing number of workers across the South eager to leverage the power of solidarity and build brighter futures, even as CEOs and Republicans in this part of the country still conspire to hold them down.

....

About 1,400 workers at the Blue Bird electric bus factory in Fort Valley, Georgia, in 2023 voted overwhelmingly to organize through the USW.

The vote was a breakthrough for workers on the front lines of a vital, growing industry. It also sent a pointed, defiant message to a Republican governor who lies about unions and tries to prevent Georgians from joining them.

On the heels of that monumental victory, autoworkers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, overcame Republican opposition and voted by a huge majority to unionize.....

Unions lift up entire communities, a U.S. Treasury Department report confirmed in 2023.

They raise members' wages by as much as 15 percent, creating a competitive environment in which non-unionized employers also must increase pay to hold on to workers. Union contracts provide workers with better benefits and retirement security than they'd otherwise earn, and their focus on workplace safety "can pull up whole industries," the report concluded.

Unions fight favoritism and discrimination, creating more equitable workplaces and communities. The collective spirit forged inside the organized shop extends beyond the plant gates, with union members not only voting more often than other workers but also volunteering and donating to charity more often.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Minn. Fed.: Income Distributions and Dynamics in America: Chart and Map Toolkit

Income Distributions and Dynamics in America: Chart and Map Toolkit | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

The charts and maps on this page use statistics from the Income Distributions and Dynamics in America dataset to visualize how income is distributed across dimensions that reflect communities and geographies in the United States.

The tabs organize the data based on four characteristics: race and ethnicity, sex, U.S.- or foreign-born, and age. The menus customize the map and chart to your particular values of interest. First choose the percentile of the earnings distribution you want to see. Next, choose the type of earnings. You then choose the group you want to see values for.

The map displays data for the year you choose, while the line chart displays your selected values over time.

Explore the X percentile of the distribution of [income] among people who are [race or ethnicity, sex, US,foreign-born] in [year]

Compare these values with White incomes?  Yes No

Income Distributions and Dynamics in America: Chart and Map Toolkit | Fe...

cited by an article in Counterpunch

Newsflash: Inequality in Neoliberal America David Schultz If anyone is perplexed or surprised why Americans are so upset about the economy, they should look no further t...

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Americans Across the Political Divide Want a Federal Job Guarantee

Americans Across the Political Divide Want a Federal Job Guarantee ByThe Center for Working-Class Politics

A look at all the available survey data on public support for a job guarantee shows consistently strong support for the idea. It's a winning idea for the Left.

Workers prepare to lift a new pedestrian bridge into place at the Stamford Transportation Center on August 26, 2023 in Stamford, Connecticut. (John Moore / Getty Images)

There has been steadily increasing interest in a federal job guarantee since Bernie Sanders reintroduced the concept to the American public in the wake of the 2016 presidential primaries.

The idea of a job guarantee is to provide a public option for struggling workers to find gainful employment — especially contributing to badly needed public infrastructure projects but also a wide range of other service-based work in education, health, recreation, and the arts. The idea has a long history in the United States going back to the large-scale job creation programs of the New Deal in the 1930s to the lesser-known Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) that, by 1978, had put 725,000 people into public sector employment.

Job guarantees, explained Dylan Matthews Imagine if a well-paying job were a human right.

Support for a job guarantee is remarkably consistent across key demographics, including partisanship. A 2023 survey by Data for Progress, for example, found that while Democrats were more likely to support the policy than other voters (88 percent of Democrats responded favorably), independents were also overwhelmingly supportive (74 percent), as were a solid majority of Republicans, particularly those under forty-five.

....

Yet the surveys also show that how you present a job guarantee to voters matters. Not surprisingly, given many Americans' concerns about government spending, the two polls that tied a jobs program to potentially costly guarantees of a "good standard of living" (American National Election Studies) or a high guaranteed minimum wage and government-guaranteed health care (Rasmussen) found less backing.....

ps here is the website of CWCP:The Center for Working Class Politics jz

The Center for Working Class Politics

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Bloomberg:Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor

Corporate America Never Really Quit Forced Labor

Inmates do billions of dollars of work for companies and governments each year. A landmark lawsuit alleges many are being kept in prison because the business is just too good. By Josh Eidelson May 11, 2024

Lakiera Walker was lying in her bunk bed a year ago, sick with flu and too weak to stand, when a prison supervisor came in to chastise her for missing the afternoon van to work. Walker's job was on an assembly line at Southeastern Meats Inc., a supermarket supplier. The 12-hour shifts on her feet in 30-some-degree cold made her body ache and turned her fingers a deep red. Southeastern Meats paid about $13 an hour for Walker's work packaging its frozen peas and corn, but the state pocketed most of that, including two-fifths for the Alabama Department of Corrections to "assist in defraying the cost" of her incarceration.

That afternoon, a fellow inmate would need to carry Walker to a medical ward. But when the ADOC officer found her in her room, she says, her health wasn't his concern.

"I am so sick," she told him.

"Get up and go make us our 40%," he replied.

"It made me feel," Walker recalls, "like he was a pimp."

Now Walker, a 37-year-old recently paroled after 15 years in prison, has teamed up with nine still-incarcerated fellow plaintiffs, as well as some prominent labor lawyers and unions, to file a class action. They're suing Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, the state's attorney general, the prisons commissioner, parole board leaders, and a slew of cities, along with companies they claim rely on forced labor, including Hyundai supplier Ju-Young, beer distributor Bama Budweiser of Montgomery, and franchisees of KFC, McDonald's, and Wendy's. The workers suing are all Black. Their class action accuses the defendants of human trafficking, racketeering and violating the Ku Klux Klan Act, which targets conspiracies to deprive people of their constitutional rights. They argue that the government officials colluded to keep Black people imprisoned and available as cheap labor and that the companies conspired to profit from the coerced work. The suit, filed right before Christmas, says it seeks "to abolish a modern-day form of slavery." ....

There are 800,000 incarcerated workers in the US, and they do roughly $10 billion worth of work a year, more than $2 billion of it for clients outside the prison system, according to a 2022 study by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] US Billionaires Pay Lower Tax Rate Than Working Class for First Time

'Absurd!': US Billionaires Pay Lower Tax Rate Than Working Class for First Time "It's time to tax the billionaires," economist Gabriel Zucman argues in a new analysis. Jake Johnson Common Dreams, May 03, 2024

An analysis published Friday by the renowned economist Gabriel Zucman shows that in 2018, U.S. billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate than working-class Americans for the first time in the nation's history, a data point that sparked a new flurry of calls for bold levies on the ultra-rich.....

To begin reversing the decades-long trend of surging inequality that has weakened democratic institutions and undermined critical programs such as Social Security, Zucman made the case for a minimum tax on billionaires in the U.S. and around the world.

"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote Friday. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the super-rich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."....

"The idea that billionaires should pay a minimum amount of income tax is not a radical idea," Zucman wrote Friday. "What is radical is continuing to allow the wealthiest people in the world to pay a smaller percentage in income tax than nearly everybody else. In liberal democracies, a wave of political sentiment is building, focused on rooting out the inequality that corrodes societies. A coordinated minimum tax on the super-rich will not fix capitalism. But it is a necessary first step."

Responding to those who claim a minimum tax would be impractical because "wealth is difficult to value," Zucman wrote that "this fear is overblown."...

The last 2 paragraphs seem inconsistent--a tax on wealth is not a min. tax on income.  However, from the Times article: "There is a way to make tax dodging less attractive: a global minimum tax. In 2021, more than 130 countries agreed to apply a minimum tax rate of 15 percent on the profits of large multinational companies. So no matter where a company parks its profits, it still has to pay at least a baseline amount of tax under the agreement.... ....another coordinated minimum tax — this one not on corporations, but on billionaires. The idea is simple. Let's agree that billionaires should pay income taxes equivalent to a small portion — say, 2 percent — of their wealth each year. Someone like Bernard Arnault, who is worth about $210 billion, would have to pay an additional tax equal to roughly $4.2 billion if he pays no income tax. In total, the proposal would allow countries to collect an estimated $250 billion in additional tax revenue per year, which is even more than what the global minimum tax on corporations is expected to add."

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

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