The decline of worker power (with David Rolf and Larry Mishel)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2019

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Not so long ago, economic growth was shared widely among Americans thanks to a suite of policies that boosted the bargaining power of workers. In recent years, employer power has increased while worker powers have been significantly eroded—and as a result, income inequality has grown at record rates. Experts David Rolf and Larry Mishel explain how this collapse of worker power came to be, and offer solutions that will tilt the scales of power back in the right direction. David Rolf is a labor leader, organizer, writer, and speaker working to build the next American labor movement. He is the founder and President Emeritus of SEIU 775 and a former Vice President of SEIU International. He led campaigns that helped organize hundreds of thousands of minimum-wage home care workers, and helped lead the nation’s first two successful campaigns for $15 minimum wages in SeaTac and Seattle. Twitter: @DavidMRolf Larry Mishel is a distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute after serving as president from 2002-2017, where he has helped build it into the nation’s premier research organization focused on U.S. living standards and labor markets. Mishel has co-authored all 12 editions of ‘The State of Working America’, and has written extensively on wage and job quality trends in the United States. Twitter: @LarryMishel Further reading: https://tcf.org/content/report/roadmap-rebuilding-worker-power/?session=1 https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-have-generated-inequality-and-wage-suppression-employer-power-is-significant-but-largely-constant-whereas-workers-power-has-been-eroded-by-policy-actions/ https://psmag.com/economics/what-caused-the-decline-of-unions-in-america

Transcript

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0:00.0	I mean we're bombarded with anti-union propaganda daily.
0:06.0	I like to think of the story of my maternal grandfather who was born in poverty and who died as a member of the great American middle class.
0:14.0	Everybody in the country feels like they're working harder than ever before but falling
0:18.6	farther and farther behind. From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics, with Nick Hanauer.
0:35.2	An honest conversation about how to make capitalism work for everyone.
0:39.7	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:45.0	I'm Jessen Farrell and I'm Senior Vice President at Civic Ventures and a former
0:50.2	State Legislature.
0:51.5	So Jessen today on Pitch worker economics we're going to talk
0:54.9	about wage suppression. Wage suppression and the decline of worker power.
1:00.0	What has happened over the last 40 years? Well, a lot of crazy things have happened.
1:04.0	I mean, the story is pretty simple that for most of the middle of the last century,
1:10.0	when productivity went up, wages for the typical family went up, wages for basically everybody went up.
1:16.9	And then in the middle 1970s, neoliberalism came along and all of that began to change and we we either
1:28.3	stopped doing the policies that kept wages tracking with productivity and economic growth, or we instituted
1:36.7	a new set of policies that decoupled wages from productivity and growth. And as a consequence, the country did not stop growing.
1:47.0	The growth rate essentially stayed the same, but for most families, certainly for the bottom 90% of Americans, wages essentially stagnated.
1:58.7	And the statistics are pretty astounding.
2:02.3	Yeah, it's pretty astounding.
2:02.6	Yeah, it's pretty astounding.
2:04.6	Since 1979, the bottom 90% of the American workforce has seen their pay shrink as a percentage
2:10.4	of their total income.
	...

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