Block Bork

By Deborah A. Ellis

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 1-2

The most appropriate celebration of our Constitution in this bicentennial year would be the defeat of President Reagan’s nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. Defeating Bork would demonstrate that we, the people, reject the Administration’s view of itself as above the law, and embrace a vision of our liberties and possibilities that is radically different from that of Judge Bork’s.

The continuing revelations in the Iran-Contra hearings prove that this is an administration with little regard for the Constitution’s fundamental separation of powers. High-ranking officials have acknowledged without shame that they lied to Congress and disregarded its prohibitions on aid to the Contras. Such an administration should not be permitted to extend its influence into the next century by making any appointment to the third co-equal branch of government, the Supreme Court.

The nomination of Bork is especially egregious because his confirmation would fundamentally alter the Supreme Court’s stance toward the protection of individual rights. Perhaps only Reagan would have the hubris to make such an ideological nomination at a time when his own Administration is under investigation for lawlessness.

With Bork’s nomination, President Reagan may hope to realize goals his Administration has otherwise been unable to accomplish, and he will succeed unless the Senate, in a wise exercise of its constitutional duty of advice and consent, rejects the nomination; Bork would replace Justice Lewis Powell, who often provided a swing vote in important civil rights and civil liberties cases.

Bork would not come to the Court as an unknown

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entity. As a Yale Law School professor, as Solicitor General under President Nixon, and now as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Robert Bork has condemned the Supreme Court’s efforts in areas including remedies for racial discrimination such as busing and affirmative action, voting rights, abortion, contraception, women’s rights, protection for free expression, and constitutional protection for the accused. In short, Judge Bork believes that the Court’s judicial responsibility to protect individual rights should be severely restricted. Such a view would relegate the Supreme Court to the same position that this Administration puts Congress, leaving the Executive with unfettered discretion.

Bork’s views on civil rights would compromise many of the gains made in the last thirty years in school desegregation, affirmative action, and voting rights. In a 1963 article for the New Republic, Bork opposed provisions of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, which required business to serve customers without regard to race, arguing that the act threatened “a loss in a vital area of personal liberty,” i.e., the liberty of those who practiced racial discrimination. Bork later retracted this position, but it is significant that he opposed basic civil rights protections at that pivotal point in history.

In a 1971 article in the Indiana Law Journal, Bork rejected the “one man, one vote” formula set forth in the 1964 case, Reynolds v. Sims, as too “rigid” and lacking “a single respectable supporting argument.” On several occasions, Bork has stated his opposition to busing as a remedy for school segregation. For example, in 1972 he was the only law professor to testify before the Senate in favor of the Nixon Administration’s proposal to curb remedies for school segregation.

Most importantly for thousands of American women Bork has vigorously criticized Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision which protects a woman’s right to abortion, on the grounds that the Constitution does not protect privacy rights. Because four other members of the court (Rehnquist, White, O’Connor and Scalia) have also expressed their disagreement with Roe, the decision might well be overturned or significantly restricted in the next few years if Bork is confirmed. Bork’s rejection of privacy rights also has implications for homosexual rights and even the right of married couples to use contraceptives.

Judge Bork’s general insensitivity to women’s issues is highlighted by two recent opinions. In a sexual harassment case, Vinsen v. Taylor, Bork’s suggestion that sexual harassment should not be recognized as a cause of action under Title VII was rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court in an opinion written by Justice Rehnquist. And in a case involving American Cyanamid’s “fetus protection” policy, which requires women workers to either become sterilized or lose their jobs, Bork ruled that the Occupational Safety and Health Act did not prohibit the company’s policy.

Bork describes himself as a believer in “judicial restraint” and the doctrine of original intent, stating that the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with the intentions of the framers. Thus, for example, Bork is unwilling to question the death penalty because it is “assumed to be an available penalty in the Constitution itself.” However, examination of some of Bork’s decisions reveals that he uses both theories selectively. He has practiced judicial restraint more vigorously when individual rights are at stake than when corporate interests are at issue. Many of the cases that come before Bork at the circuit court level question how much deference should be paid to decisions of administrative and regulatory agencies. Although Bork advocates deference to agency decisions, in practice he has reserved this deference to agency decisions supporting corporate interests. For example, in the American Cyanamid case, he ruled in favor of the company, even though OSHA argued that the workers involved were protected by the Occupational Safety and Health Act.

The Senate should block Bork’s nomination. Both the text of the Constitution and the history of Supreme Court appointments make plain that the Senate’s duty in confirming a nominee is as important as the President’s. To borrow from Bork’s own “original intent” analysis, it is clear that the signers of the Constitution believed it proper to oppose a Supreme Court nominee on political grounds. In 1795 when George Washington nominated a lawyer with impeccable credentials, Chief Justice John Rutledge of South Carolina, the Senate rejected the nomination fourteen to ten for political reasons; three of the fourteen rejecting Senators were signers of the Constitution. In total, the Senate has rejected almost twenty percent of Presidential Supreme Court nominees.

The Senate should carefully scrutinize not only Bork’s actions in dismissing Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1974, but also his view of the Supreme Court’s function, a view that jeopardizes the Court’s role in protecting individual rights against the majority.

Deborah Ellis is a lawyer in New York. She previously practiced in Alabama, where she also clerked for a federal circuit judge.

Unseen Partners in the Economy

By Barbara Ellen Smith

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 4-6

Women have long been “unseen partners” in agricultural production. They have been partners in the sense that their field labor in direct production and their household labor in maintaining the farm labor force have been essential components of U.S. agriculture for centuries. As slaves, black women worked in the fields and houses of the plantation system-picking cotton, stripping tobacco, preparing food for others. Low-income white women worked beside their husbands and children in the fields of family farms, or as tenants or sharecroppers on land owned by others. Wealthier white women functioned as managers and supervisors of the domestic economy of plantations. And yet, all of these women have been “unseen,” invisible, in the sense that their labor, their productive role, has gone largely unrecognized in popular images of the “American farmer” and in scholarly studies of our agricultural system.

For the last century, women have also contributed essential income to the farm economy through their off-farm labor. Black women, for example, long worked as domestic servants in the households of the more well-to-do. As recently as 1960, forty-five percent of all employed black women in the South worked as domestics. Their wages were meager (domestic service is the lowest paying occupation in the U.S.) but essential to farm families chronically strapped for cash.

Farm women, both black and white, have also worked for wages in agricultural processing-whether in canneries, poultry or tobacco plants. Women and, originally, children, predominated in the labor force of the South’s most important manufacturing industry, textiles. In all of these activities, farm women have generated cash income and in occasional cases, health insurance and retirement benefits, which have been critical to their families’ economic survival.

Beyond noting the broad trends of impoverishment and unemployment, it is difficult to gauge the specific effects of the present agricultural crisis on farm women per se. It is generally true in our society that the survival skills with which families weather impoverishment or periods of reduced income are vested primarily in women. It is women who end up patching or making clothes instead of buying them, stretching the food supply to make two meals instead of one, or treating a sick child with home remedies instead of an expensive trip to the doctor. In other words, women tend to intensify their domestic labor during periods of economic hardship, substituting their own hard work for the goods and services that their families can no longer afford to buy. One may surmise that this is happening in many farm families today.

It is also clear that women are increasing their wage-earning labor by seeking employment off the farm. Today, almost half of all farm women in the U.S. are in the paid labor force, as compared to only one-fourth in 1960. Like rural women throughout the South, however, farm women who are looking for jobs these days find few that pay a living wage. The economic crisis in agriculture has coincided with a drastic employment decline in many other traditional Southern industries.

For rural women, who have long been the backbone of the labor force in some of the South’s key manufacturing industries, this loss of jobs has been devastating. Women’s unemployment rates in many Southern states are well above those of men. For black women, unemployment in the fifteen to twenty-five percent range has become standard. The unemployment rate for Southern farm women has been double that of men.

Women of course have found employment in newer non-

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manufacturing sectors of the economy. In the rural South, as in other areas of the nation, the service sector is a key source of new jobs and a major employer of women. In the service industries of the rural South, women make up over forty percent of the labor force. For those with professional training in the traditionally female fields of nursing and teaching, the expansion of educational and health services (which account for a large portion of this sector) has brought increased job opportunities.

Women without professional training, however, tend to end up in the bottom ranks of the service sector, where wages are low, benefits few, and opportunities for advancement scarce. Cooks, maids, cashiers, secretaries, waitresses, nurses aides-these are the occupations of most women in the rural South today. Women displaced even from those industries traditionally considered low-wage are hard pressed to find a service job that matches their former wages. The average wage for workers in restaurants and bars, for example, is about two dollars per hour below that in the textile industry.

Crisis on the Farm

This “double whammy”-the farm crisis coupled with the loss of traditional off-farm jobs affects rural women in ways beyond unemployment statistics and wage rates.

Economic hardship also reaches into the heart of family life in the form of suicide, domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and marital breakup. It is difficult to document the extent of these problems among Southern farm families not only because the compilation of data lags behind the problem, but also because events like the breakdown of a marriage may lead one or both partners off the farm altogether. For example, the low percentage of female-headed families in the farm population may be in part because such women don’t remain on the farm.

A recent study of homeless people in Charleston, the West Virginia state capital, is suggestive. Contrary to popular impressions, the research found that the single largest portion of homeless people were not the deinstitutionalized mentally ill, petty criminals, or alcoholics. They were rural people who had been left destitute by economic decline, and who had migrated to the city on a well-worn path called “in search of opportunity.” As part of the growing homeless population of Charleston, most had not found it.

The overall point is that women’s labor has been essential to the rural Southern economy for centuries; as a result, women are deeply affected by present trends in that economy. This occurs not only indirectly through their husbands’ changing economic fortunes, but also directly through their own experiences in the labor market and household. Rural women are intensifying their domestic, household labor at the same time they are increasing their wage-earning labor outside the home. Simultaneously, they are struggling to deal with the destructive effects of economic crisis on their families.

Prospects for the Years Ahead

So, what of the future? What forces are shaping the future for rural women? Specifically, how is public policy shaping their future? First, the obvious must be stated because it is so important: the economic hardship facing rural people, especially women, is being compounded by drastic cutbacks in programs that once cushioned the impact of such hardship. This has occurred not only with transfer payments and income support programs like AFDC and food stamps, but also with programs that helped people participate more fully and fruitfully in the wage economy-retraining programs for displaced workers, job skills development for young people, etc.

Since 1980, funding for all federal employment and training programs has declined by sixty-five percent. These cutbacks have coincided with a policy of actively undercutting affirmative action in both employment and education. Increasingly, women and minorities are neither trained for nor granted access to higher paying jobs. These policies seem so obviously harmful and irrational, given present unemployment and poverty rates in precisely these groups, that they require no further comment.

Other greatly needed programs have never seen the light of day. For example, the need for high quality, locally controlled day care, especially in rural areas, is so urgent it

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can scarcely be overestimated. We are long past the time when rural women, including farm women, stay home to tend house and children while rural men go off to the fields or the paid labor force. Indeed, for many rural families, particularly black families, a non-wage-earning wife and mother is a luxury they could never afford. And yet, the fact that a majority of mothers-those in whom primary responsibility for child-rearing traditionally has been vested-now spend at least eight hours each day working in the paid labor force simply has not been absorbed on the social policy agenda. As a result, many lower-income women face a heartbreaking choice between providing direct care for their children, or leaving them inadequately tended while they work to put food on the table.

The irony in this neglect is that child care represents an excellent target for local economic development. Low-interest loans and technical assistance for the development of locally controlled day care centers, coupled with child care subsidies for low-income working mothers, could promote long-term development by directly offering employment to child care workers, providing a service that would enable women to take advantage of education and training programs. Development can also be enhanced by offering enrichment programs to pre-schoolers and after-school programs to older children.

The Price of Economic Progress

Having catalogued some of the activities that governments are not undertaking, what are they doing? One of the most important economic development strategies currently being pursued by state governments across the South is the promotion of tourism. This is important not only in the sense that tourism is growing rapidly in certain areas, but also in the sense that this industry has a deep effect on rural communities where it takes hold.

The Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition is presently working with women in four Southern states who face the growth of tourism in their rural communities. Unfortunately, the stories they tell are not full of promise and hope, but of anxiety and fear. Along the coast of South Carolina, for example, women from predominantly black, low-income island communities are witnessing the destruction of their traditional means of survival: agriculture and fishing. Their story is typical.

Escalating property taxes and land values are forcing indigenous residents to give up their most important resource. Scarcely a week goes by without news of another resident having sold his or her land, often because of inability to pay the rising property taxes. As “prime waterfront” property increasingly changes hands, the indigenous residents find their access to traditional fishing areas closed by new landowners who forbid trespassing. As a result these trends, the indigenous community is rapidly being destroyed.

What is positive about this situation is the fact that people are organizing to challenge these trends. The low-income rural women with whom we’ve been working do not oppose tourism outright, but they understandably do not want it to destroy their own resources-their land, their culture, their community. They are attempting to pull their communities together around a common vision of economic development that preserves their integrity as a community and protects their control over valuable resources, especially land.

If there is hope for the future of the rural South, it lies with women and men in community organizations like these. The South not only has the highest poverty rate in the United States, it also has the most unequal distribution of income. The problem is not simply one of disparity between the South and the rest of the United States, or between the rural and urban South, but within the South. It is between those who have a great deal and those who have almost nothing. It is unrealistic to expect government at any level to take on this fundamental inequality in a consistent, long-term fashion. Poverty will be reduced in the rural South in the same manner that denial of voting rights was reduced. It will come about when those who are rural and poor organize and declare “No More.” Those who wish to serve the rural poor would do well to listen to the voices and support the efforts of those who are attempting to organize their communities to shape their own future-and particularly to the voices of rural women, who have been unheard and unseen for too long.

Barbara Ellen Smith is a researcher with the Southeast Women’s Employment Coalition, Lexington, Kentucky.

Barbara Ellen Smith’s essay is an edited version of a talk presented to the 1986 Professional Agricultural Workers Conference held at Tuskegee University. A collection of the papers of the Conference is available from Dr. Thomas T. Williams, Director, Human Resources Development Center, P.O. Box 681, Tuskegee, Alabama 36088.

Coalition-Building for a New Labor Climate

By Kenny Johnson

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 8-9

The release last fall of the Southern Labor Institute’s report, The Climate For Workers in the United States, marked the first comprehensive look at our national economy from the perspective of those who produce the goods and services that fuel the economic engine. The document, sharply different from the usual business climate report, revealed that despite numerical gains in job growth that lead the nation, and despite recent improvements in state funding of education, the South has failed to keep up with the rest of the nation in almost every other way:

For example, the South has recorded the smallest gains in wages and per capita income, is home to the largest proportion of working poor, and maintains the highest incidences of poverty.

This report was followed in the spring by a conference focusing on the profound impact the South’s changing workplace is having on the region’s working people. Central to both the report and the conference was an attempt to sharpen the questions and stimulate answers about economic development in the South and the nation. The framing of such questions has traditionally been the province of government, chambers of commerce, and narrow business interests, and the resulting analysis has typically been slanted toward measurements of a climate pleasing to the managements of major companies. In the low-wage, low-tax South, that climate has usually been given good ratings.

However, it is ever more clear that what is good for big business is not always good for the South, and the considerable economic growth that has come to the region has hardly resulted in a comparable improvement in the lives of most Southern workers. To quote from the Labor Climate Report “The challenge and the task that face the South today and in the future is to create jobs with the income and benefits needed to bring the region’s workers above the poverty level–not just new jobs as in the past, but jobs that will significantly improve the standard of living for people who work full-time, year-round.”

With the Report as a starting point, the challenge of the recent conference was to develop strategies that could help improve the standard of living in the region. To accomplish this, the conference brought together leaders from the ranks of organized labor, local governments, religious organizations, and civil rights groups. The members of this broad-based and potentially powerful coalition were asked to re-examine state policies and practices on economic development.

In the articles that follow, several of the speakers from the conference share some of the insight and discussion from the valuable weekend of strategizing in Atlanta. As the Labor Climate Report had done, the conference challenged the basic notion that economic development depends on cheap land, unreasonable tax concessions to industry, and an unorganized, untrained, and undereducated labor force willing to work for less than elsewhere.

The Report attracted widespread publicity both to the concepts it addressed and to the Southern Labor Institute which produced it. The conference was an effort to build upon this attention while expanding participation in the examination of the national economy’s current transformation, and what world economic trends mean to most citizens.

One omission of the Report was a lack of specific policy recommendations–geared to the realities of the 1980’s and the 1990’s–of what the states should be doing to improve the standard of living. The conference helped in this respect by bringing together leaders who may only rarely concern themselves with long-term development policy and who, for the most part, may not readily see the links between their interests in economic development and the interests of others. Labor unions, religious denominations, civil rights organizations, and local governments tend to see only their own interests, occasionally becoming involved with state economic development policies that may affect them. They may never recognize the need to combine forces. This spring’s conference was a chance to unify a large number of organizations and agencies in the South whose common interests have not yet been combined for common activities.

One of the first steps of the conference was to provide a common knowledge base about problems, issues, past practices, and the status of the South today.

Then, discussion was sought. While unemployment, for example, was a major issue for labor unions and for black community leaders, representatives of the two groups approached the issue differently. A local leader from the Alabama Black Belt talked about the desperate need for jobs for his community. He was interested in job creation– whether those jobs were low-wage, unionized or not. But labor unions saw a shrinking job market that they felt a need to protect. The conference goal was to get the partici-

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pants to understand these differences and to focus on common needs rather than accenting differences.

An important aspect of developing this mutual understanding rests in the ability to get community leaders to understand that at the minimum wage full-time workers can still be stuck at the poverty level, unable to afford those things one usually thinks of as the rewards of working for a living–such things as decent housing, educating one’s children, and providing the family with adequate medical care. These things labor unions, too, viewed as important. In short, the conference brought to the same table people who do not ordinarily meet to discuss economic issues and policies.

The need now is to bring that same kind of regional discussion to the state and local level. As an example, the Southern Labor Institute is now working in Birmingham to bring unions together with the black community. The unions are interested in organizing health care workers, and, for the first time, prior to taking that kind of action, these labor leaders are sitting down with black leaders. The message of labor in Birmingham is that the service industry, and health care in particular, remains one of the fastest growing sectors in the city, increasingly becoming a larger percentage of the total job base. Black workers make up a disproportionate share of the orderlies, nursing assistants, maintenance workers, and other service workers who are finding full-time employment in this industry. However, the wage scale on these jobs is doing very little to improve their overall standard of living.

The low wages of service industries are especially significant to female heads of households, who, with their children, are the fastest growing poverty group in the country. On a purely economic basis, a single female with two children often cannot afford to take a minimum-wage job. The cost of transportation, day care, and housing costs exceeds what she can earn.

Cities like Birmingham have to do better in attracting jobs that pay better wages, and their workforces in the existing service jobs must be organized to increase wages and deal with other issues related to the workplace–issues like health care and job security. It is in the interest of black community leaders to begin forming coalitions with unions who are organizing the workplace.

The mission of the Southern Labor Institute and the Southern Regional Council is to sustain and accelerate this unification. The Council is currently studying the temporary workforce issue, which is probably the most serious threat to the workplace that has come along in a long while. Employers are moving away from permanent workers to whom they have to pay not only some sensible salaries but also benefits, and they are moving instead to a temporary workforce with lower pay and no job benefits. At one time, these temporary workers were basically day laborers, but temporary workers are now moving into skilled job categories.

These are some of the issues of the 1990’s that were on the minds of the participants at the recent SLI conference, of which excepts are offered in the following articles.

Kenny Johnson is director of the Southern Labor institute. Copies of The Climate for Workers in the United States are available for $20 each from the SRC, 60 Walton St., N.W., Atlanta, GA 30303-2199. An abridged version of the Labor Climate Report is contained in Southern Changes, Octember [sic] /November 1986, which is available for $5.

Texas Finds Home-Grown Is Best

By Jim Hightower

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 9-15

Everybody, of course, is all for economic development, but traditionally what that has meant is economic development for the few and the rest of you get in line-the “take that old cold tater and wait” plan.

Now I know some will wonder what an agriculture commissioner has to say to them on economic development-after all most people don’t own a pen of hogs or a field of corn. But as that old bumper sticker reads, “If you eat, you’re involved in agriculture.” However, my message is not about cows and plows, but rather about plowing up common ground, about planting new seeds of economic growth in our region, and, if we do it right, throughout this nation.

My message is simply this: the economic future of the South does not rest in the continuing pursuit of high-tech, high-cost pie-in-the-sky deals that are being shopped by national conglomerates going state-to-state to see what kind of deal they can get. Rather we ought to be putting our resources, public and private, into grunt-level, here-and-now economic development programs that invest in our own people. People who are already here.

We need to be investing at a grass-roots level in new enterprises that are based on small- and medium-sized businesses, that are based on workers in their unions and in cooperatives, that are based on small farmers and community enterprises, that are based on the entrepreneurs and on the wildcatters in our society. Not the powers that be, but the powers that ought to be. And the powers that can be if we just put a little bit of investment out there and lay some tools down that people can pick up. This is not trickle-down, but percolate-up. It is a policy of clearing a broad foundation out of small- to medium-scale enterprises on which communities can build for years to come.

Needless to say, this is not what we have been doing in the country at a national, state, or even local level. Really what we’ve got now is an approach to economic growth that says it’s okay to help the rich get richer. That puts government in the pocket of the big boys and never holds them accountable for the results that they produce for the larger public. Basically, we’re talking about a perverted public policy of greed. An attitude of “I got mine, you get yours. Never give a sucker an even break. Caveat emptor. Adios chump.” That’s pretty much what it comes down to.

For the past six years, of course, at a national level we’ve called this policy Reaganomics, with the predictable result that rigor mortis is spreading throughout our economy. The apologists on the other side say, “Nonsense, Hightower, look at this, the economy’s just booming. Here’s the head-

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line from an April Dallas Times-Herald, ‘Dow Passes 2400 Mark. Wall Street’s record-breaking bull market zipped past yet another milestone of the history books Monday as the Dow Jones Industrial average closed above 2400 for the first time.'”

By their standards, America’s standing tall. The economy is booming. Wall Street’s whizzing.

And it is, it’s whizzing on us, because if you look down here right beneath that headline it says, ‘General Motors to lay off 2,000 workers at local plant.’ And right over here in the column right next to it it announces that Safeway is going to be closing 141 stores in north Texas.

Reaganomics has created a boom but for whom? Who is profiting? Stockholders, they say. Those little democrats out there who own America’s great economic fortress. Well, eighty-one percent of all U.S. households own no stock at all. And if you want to look at it the other way, eighty-five percent of all stock is in the hands of the wealthiest ten percent of U.S. families. In fact, forty-three percent of all stock is in the hands of that one-half of one percent of families that make $280,000 and more.

Do you want to know who’s really making money out of this whizzing that Wall Street is doing? In 1981, only four corporate executives made more than $1 million in salary and other compensation. In 1985 we had 146 executives making more than $1 million. Those shiny new leaves at the top of the tree are looking mighty pretty as we continue to sprinkle and polish them with our governmental policies.

But you know you can’t keep a tree alive by watering it at the top. Meanwhile down here at the roots our economic tree is dying. Now I’m not talking just about poverty, not talking just about the illiterate, the unable, the folks who just gotta have welfare. I’m talking about our most productive people, the middle class that is supposed to be the hallmark of our economy. I’m talking about the workers and the businesses that we’ve been counting on to make this economy actually run over the years.

Of course, as a commissioner of agriculture I work out there with those dirt farmers, you know, and probably six years ago they voted for Ronald Reagan. He was promising a seven-course dinner and they didn’t know until later it was a possum and a six-pack.

In the intervening six years we have lost a half-million U.S. farmers. In my state alone we’ve lost 49,000 farmers-17,000 in the last two years. That’s ten percent of all the farmers in our state, but it is one-third of the full-time, commercial, family-farm operators who have gone bankrupt, who have had their farms, their productive assets, their economic potential and that of their families and their future generations, stolen from them by government policy that establishes a price on their commodity that is about one-half of what it actually costs to produce that commodity.

With those disappearing farmers have gone the local implement dealers, hardware stores, and government services that are financed by the taxes of people on the land-when they’re able to pay taxes. And we have had the greatest collapse of banks in the United States since the 1930s.

Bankers are now beginning to understand their direct tie to those productive families that are being wiped out as a matter of Washington economic policy. The farm families are going down. People who six years ago had a cash flow and considered themselves a full member of the middle class now find themselves out of business and often off the farm.

Working families are involved in the same struggle.

Ronnie Reagan did promise to get American industry moving again, and he has-it’s moved to Japan, to Brazil, to Korea, everywhere except within our own country. Since 1978 we have lost 11.5 million manufacturing jobs. Some of which have been replaced by service economy jobs that pay only forty-five percent of what the manufacturing jobs paid. It seems that forty-four percent of the jobs created under Reaganomics now pay poverty-level wages, $180 dollars a week or less. And thirty percent are part-time jobs. And two-thirds of the people filling those part-time jobs are people who want and need full-time work.

Well, we have the minimum wage.

In 1968 a minimum-wage earner could make ninety-four percent of a poverty-level income. Today a minimum wage earner makes about sixty-two percent of a poverty-level wage. And that’s if you’re working at all. None of us are more than about two paychecks from poverty. If you do get laid off, you’ve got only a sixty percent chance of finding a new job. That’s unless you’re black. If you’re black you’ve got a forty-one percent chance. And if you do get a new job, it’s going to pay eighty percent of your old wages.

Not surprisingly what this adds up to in our society for the first time in fifty years is a national policy of downward mobility. From 1965 to 1973-a period of rising expectations in our society, a period during which the bad old government was on our backs, remember-annual incomes for families with children rose by twenty-three percent. In 1985, the annual income of those families was 6.6 percent less than it was twelve years ago. And for the poorest twenty-four percent of Americans, it was one-third less than it was in 1973. From the 1940s through the 1960s, people at thirty years of age were making a third more than their parents were making a decade earlier. Now people at thirty years of age make only ten percent more than their parents made ten years ago. In 1973 it took twenty-one percent of the gross monthly wages of a thirty-year-old worker to buy the average home. Today it takes nearly half of his or her gross wages to buy a home.

We’re talking about downward mobility in our society. The decline of the middle class. We’re not talking about

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people coming up out of poverty but people falling down into poverty in greater and greater numbers. In Texas from 1981 to 1986 we added 891,000 people to the poverty rolls. That is the population of a city bigger than Dallas that previously was in the middle class and is now officially on the poverty rolls.

What in the world’s going on?

An old singer in Texas years ago wrote a tune that went like this: “Little bee sucks the blossom but the big bee gets the honey. Little man picks the cotton but the big man gets the money.”

What we really have today as a result of Reaganomics is freedom for the capital to flow into what some are calling a casino economy, essentially money chasing its own tail rather than being invested in enterprises that create new growth, new jobs, new products, new productivity, new competition, new wealth for our people.

Last year there were 4,022 mergers, leveraged buyouts and takeovers in the United States of America. More than four thousand companies bought by larger companies, soaking up $190 billion in capital. In the last three years, nine thousand companies changed owners at a cost of nearly $500 billion in capital. For what? They didn’t build any new plants. They didn’t create any products. They’re not doing new research. They’re certainly not hiring new people. They’re not adding new competition to our society. They’re not decentralizing wealth.

They’re paper shuffling, that’s all. The lawyers, account brokers and bankers have achieved hundreds of millions of dollars in income through non-productive fees associated with these transactions that build nothing. Shareholders-that ten percent of America that owns eighty-five percent of the shares, or that one-half of one percent that owns forty-three percent of the shares-split $20 billion in profits out of those mergers. Twenty billion dollars in profits for which they did nothing. They created nothing.

We have a little case study right now down in Texas with the buyout of Safeway corporation. There’s a company called Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts-not exactly a household name. But it is an investment syndicate that since 1979 has made about two dozen buyouts. In 1986 they bought Beatrice Foods, which at the time was the largest food conglomerate in the U.S., for $6.1 billion. Beatrice had previously bought Norton-Simon for $1.1 billion and Esmark Corporation for $2.8 billion. Now those are all one company under Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts. Ten billion dollars spent to create nothing except they are now the largest food conglomerate in America, built on financial finagling.

Who pays for this? Well, we’re going to pay for it, because as a means of paying off that leveraged buyout Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts is shutting down three thousand Safeway stores and unemploying thirty thousand people. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local in Dallas, representing some 8,500 workers in Safeway alone, was told initially to expect a five dollar average pay cut and then later was told that those 141 stores were going to be closed and/or sold.

Those that are going to be sold are going to be sold largely to non-union or anti-union companies that have no interest in picking up those workers. If they do get hired they’re going to take much less pay than they were getting under the union contract and two-thirds of those workers stand to lose their retirement and pension benefits.

Safeway is hardly alone in this process. In fact, in the pension playing that’s going on there are some ten thousand pension funds-covering some ten million workers-that have insufficient assets to fulfill the promises that have been made. And there’s just example after example of that. Here’s LTV, Inc., when it declared Chapter Eleven bankruptcy last year announcing that of course they were going to have to do away with some of the pension programs and health benefits of the workers. But they also announced that while they were doing that they were also going to give performance awards to their executives to the tune of $829,000. The chief executive, in fact, was to get a $165,625 bonus for his work in driving the company into Chapter Eleven and he was going to get a $2 million life insurance policy and a golden parachute worth 150 percent of his annual salary.

Here’s the Eddie Chiles corporation, the Western Company of North America, talking of cutting its employee pension benefits at the same time it was implementing a plan to give key executives bonuses ranging from thirty to fifty percent of their annual pay. Texas American Corporation freezing the pension of their workers. General Motors announcing that its profits were down 31 percent and that it therefore could not pay workers the production bonuses that they were entitled to, but GM would of course be able to give 5,700 top executives some $169 million in bonuses.

So, you get the sense of it. At the same time corporations overall have stripped employee pension funds in this country of nearly $16 billion in assets in the last ten years-and there is another $145 billion in promises on pension plans

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and health benefits that they have set aside no money to provide for.

If you did to a 7-Eleven what these folks are doing to our economy, you’d be doing ten to twenty down at the state penitentiary. But they’re getting away with golden parachutes, more money, buying Jaguar cars and feeling good about themselves. That’s the situation we’re in.

What are we going to do about this? Well it seems that we have a couple of things to do.

First, we can be developing our own enterprises.

I use agricultural examples because that’s where I come from. In Texas, we’ve been working with farmers, small business people, poor people, and local officials to try to do three things.

One, help farmers sell what they produce. It seems obvious to do that, but it has not been a focus of agriculture policy in the past. Instead, we’ve tried just to produce more-higher yield out of each seed and out of each acre, never worrying what we’re going to do with the yield once it becomes a surplus and nobody’s buying it.

Now we’re trying to help folks sell their yield. Part of this is localizing our economy again. For example, when we started our first project in Houston, Kroger Corporation was importing watermelons from Florida. Meanwhile, Texas melon farmers were losing sixty percent of their crop because they didn’t have a market for it. It was rotting in the fields. What little they did sell was out of a pickup truck on the side of the road, getting a penny a pound for it.

So we persuaded Kroger to try Texas melons and we organized a coop to handle the distribution. In 1984, the

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first year of that co-op, we sold Kroger every melon the farmers produced, 500,000 pounds of watermelon, not at a penny a pound but at seven and a quarter cents a pound, a negotiated price. Those farmers had a 165 percent increase in their income as a result.

The consumer benefited because instead of paying $3.50 for that Florida melon they got that sweet Walker County melon for $1.98. And the money they spent stayed right there doing good and rippling though that local economy. This year those farmers are producing a million and a half pounds of watermelon and other crops not only for Kroger but for distribution to other supermarket chains. We’ve got dozens of these co-ops in the state of Texas now organized to sell directly into the market that’s already established within our state and now even going out of it. We’ve got the Pathmark chain in the Northeast buying directly from low income Mexican-Americans in the Rio Grande valley, who are able to get four times what they were getting down at the packing shed for their squash and peppers by selling it directly to Pathmark. And Pathmark gets a cheaper price than they were getting and a quality that meets their specifications. We can do that across the board. We’ve got beef co-ops, all kinds of co-ops that are involved in this business.

Then another step that we are taking in marketing is going international. There’s no reason the South and individual states can’t form their own foreign relations. You don’t have to go through the State Department for this. We made a formal agreement with Mexico called the Mexico-Texas Exchange Commission. We are organizing trade projects, joint ventures, dealing in educational programs with each other, solving bureaucratic problems, going direct to Mexico. We’ve done the same thing with Israel. We’re about to do it with Italy. We’re finding markets around the world directly from our state.

The federal government’s international trade development policy for agriculture amounts to hoping that the Russian wheat crop fails and that Cargill and the big conglomerates can make a sale to them, rather than going out there and finding small purchases that these people want to make and bring them home. Of course we’ve got an advantage in Texas-we’ve got a high volume of production, diversification, and an awfully good-looking agriculture commissioner. That may give us a leg up, but other states can do it, too, and we can begin to do put together some international trade programs as a region.

In addition to marketing we can work with people throughout our economy to diversify what they produce. There’s no reason all of our blueberries have to come from Maine and Michigan. We can produce blueberries in Texas and now we’re doing it. Blueberries are going to be a $50 million a year crop for us. You can make a living on forty acres of blueberries in our state. In fact if you diversify your acreage and set aside maybe four acres for blueberries you’ll make enough on that four to subsidize the cow and wheat operation that you’re running on the other four hundred acres that you might have. We have west Texas farmers farming two sections of land-that’s two square miles-who have been producing wheat and going broke. Now they are producing sprouts on an area about the size of a kitchen table and making a ton of money off that sprout production.

The point is to find things that you can make money on. We’re not opposing what another state is doing but we are trying to regionalize and localize our economy in a way that makes sense for little folks out there.

The third step that we are taking is building food and fiber processing facilities. The South has done a poor job of this. We have grown the raw commodities and shipped them to Chicago and Philadelphia and Los Angeles where they chop it up, put it in a box, freeze it, and sell it back to us at a hundred times what we sold it to them. We can get into that business ourselves. We have wheat farmers on the high plains of Texas that this year will mill the first flour to be milled in the panhandle in a generation’s time. We were producing wheat which was selling to Kansas because they’re wasn’t a flour mill within 150 miles of Amarillo. In Kansas, they were making Texas wheat into plain old white flour in barrels and selling it back to hotels and bakers in Amarillo for twenty-eight cents a pound. For every twenty-eight cents a pound that Amarillo consumers bought they were sending twenty-three cents to Kansas because the Texas farmers were only getting a nickel a pound.

Now those farmers are building their own enterprise in Dawn, Texas, outside of Amarillo that is going to make 300,000 pounds of flour a day. That’ll make a pretty good biscuit.

We’re not talking about a science fair project; this is a real enterprise that will put $10 million a year into Dawn and in its first year of operation will create fourteen jobs right there. Now that doesn’t solve Texas’s unemployment problem but it takes care of it in Dawn pretty well. Instead of worrying about the global situation, let’s worry where our people live. A little bit here and a little bit there will add up.

Rice farmers in the Gulf Coast area who have been going broke producing rice get about four cents a pound have moved into crawfish. Texas is a crawfish-deficit state, believe it or not, but we can produce crawfish and get seventy-five cents a pound for them in the same area where we produce that rice. And all you do is put a little bad hay out there in that rice paddy and throw some crawfish in and come back later with some nets. But then we’ve been sending our crawfish crop over to Louisiana, which was cutting the heads off the crawfish and deveining them, putting them in a box, freezing them and selling them to Houston at wholesale for $7.50 a pound. Now maybe we’re not too bright in Texas, but we can dehead crawfish. We’re

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about to be in the crawfish processing business in Port Arthur.

My point is, if you have lemons, make lemonade.

We have a lot of lemons throughout the South on which we can build enterprises. I work on behalf of agriculture, but opportunities also exist in all kinds of industries. We can have a decentralized economy that’s environmentally sound, that generates wealth at a local level, that has not only jobs but good-paying jobs that are upwardly mobile, that allows a local, diversified, abundant management opportunity for little people to be involved. It doesn’t have to be owned by some conglomerate. We can do this ourselves and our people can be the managers and the owners.

The role of the state is to be a catalyst. First you must recognize that there is a role for the state and you must stand up and say that. People understand that. They’re ready for it. They want help; if it’s pragmatic help that’s going to benefit them and their community, then they like to see the government working side by side with them.

Reagan said a couple of years ago that there was some lag in the economy but the magic of the marketplace was going to take care of it. The problem is that the magician performs an illusion. You cannot eat or pay your bills with an illusion. Magic has nothing to do with the marketplace, which works because of a lot of hard effort and a lot of good luck. It is a proper role of government to serve as a catalyst, working with local folks to create a pool of capital so they have the financing to do what they are wanting to do in an enterprise that makes economic sense.

You aren’t putting people in business to fail. You have work on the market development so what they produce actually has a market, preferably one that is already established and signed for before you build a processing facility. The object is not to put money in a few pockets but to generate for our region a substantial, sound, diversified economy where real money is made, is in the hands of a lot of people and stays in the region.

Some people say, “Now, Hightower, these are cute little projects but we have big economic problems. We need big industry coming in here.”

I saw where Kentucky spent $77 million of its economic development money chasing the Saturn auto plant that located in Tennessee [see Southern Changes, Oct./Nov. 1986]. Most states, including mine, were in that chase, all competing against each other, telling General Motors we will build you a railroad spur, we will give you free utilities, we will get you some water, we will train your employees, we will knock wages down, we will take your laundry out- whatever you need. Please come here. What was GM promising? Six thousand jobs were going to come with this, a great economic boom for any state. We all cheered and we should. You’ve got to pursue those things. But it turns out, of course, that now in Tennessee where that plant is being built that the economy is such that Saturn doesn’t look like quite the deal that it was. Now they are talking about three thousand jobs and a lot of those workers are going to be shipped in from other plants throughout the United States.

I looked last summer at three little projects in the Rio Grande valley, an area where real unemployment is between thirty and fifty percent-a desperately hard-hit economy. Two of the poorest Standard Statistical Metropolitan Areas in the nation are in that area. One project was a redfish hatchery and processing facility that is being built in the little town of San Benito. The second was by low-income Mexican-American cucumber producers who had been selling cucumbers to the local packing shed which shipped the cucumbers to Chicago where pickles were made of them. Now these farmers are building a pickle factory. The third project was a new enterprise making newsprint out of a plant called kenaf. Those three projects-the kenaf facility, a pickle farm, and a redfish farm, will put $157 million in first-year sales and create 3,800 jobs for the people in that region.

This is real economic growth. Texas now does six percent of the nation’s food processing. You have a similar situation in any state in the South. If we were to do just one percent more it would put $3 billion a year in sales into our economy and create ninety thousand jobs. The thousands and thousands of jobs and billions of dollars we have to generate will come from small enterprises, not conglomerates moving out from other states down to us.

To do that will require that we alter our national and state policies.

One vital area of work is capital formation, to counteract the capital being siphoned off by the federal deficit or by this

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casino economy. Congress needs to look at the Federal Reserve in terms of national policy. Congress needs to mandate some “greenlining”-guaranteeing that a certain amount of a bank’s assets or loan portfolio has to go to community enterprises and small business, to new enterprises, to co-ops, to union efforts in plant buyouts.

At a state level we can create, as we are doing now in Texas, small-enterprise growth funds. It’s time to generate some public projects again. We need the jobs. The economy is down. Many things that need to be done are relatively inexpensive to do and now is the time to invest in them. All those conservatives talking about the big, bad government are walking down the river walk in San Antonio marveling at how beautiful it is, and it was built by the WPA in the 1930s. We need to have those kinds of programs again. They do not have to come from a national level. We can do them at a state level as well.

Finally, we need to look at worker investment. The United States’ greatest economic advantage and most underutilized asset is its workforce-not based on its cheapness but based on its intelligence, its adaptability, and its gumption to make things work. The workforce is there. As much as eighty-five percent of the workforce for the year 2000, a dozen years from now, is already working. These are the people in whom we must make the investment of basic education programs, not cutting back on our public schools and higher education and technical colleges and vocational programs. We should put those loan and grant programs back out there so a typical family can get the kid into school again. Then we need training and constant advancement within the workforce. We need portable pensions that go with the worker, not with the job. We need child-care at an affordable level that meets the needs of families who are having to earn two incomes to make ends meet. We need health care.

The American public understands that need because they are the ones who are needy. We need not be afraid of advocating these things at a state and at a national level. The people are way ahead of the politicians. You go out there and talk these things and you will be supported on them.

Our programs will work if we base the nation’s growth not on the Rockefellers, but on the little fellers. It will work because it taps genius instead of greed.

There is a moving company in Austin that has an advertising slogan, “If we can get it loose, we can move it.” That is what we are talking about. If we can get this economy loose at a grassroots level, the people will move it themselves.

Jim Hightower is the Texas Commissioner of Agriculture.

Toward Economic Democracy

By Ray Marshall

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 16-19

The goals of economic development and job creation are terribly important but we must be clear that job creation means a job for everybody who is well and able to work and wants to work. We must be concerned not just with the number of jobs but with the quality of those jobs.

In spite of all the talk about the new unemployment, the problem caused by unemployment is the same as it ever was-serious material loss. The loss from unemployment this past year is over $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in America, over $200 billion total. We could have done a lot with that $200 billion.

Furthermore, unemployment’s human costs go beyond material loss. Unemployment is still heavily correlated with almost every social pathology-crime, alcohol and drug abuse, family breakups…even infant mortality. Unemployment shortens lives and kills people.

We should have a guaranteed job for people who are willing and able to work at decent wages and under decent working conditions. Since that ought to be our policy objective, we must get voters to accept the goal, and we must establish policies to move toward that goal.

We’re in a different world, though, than in 1946 when the Employment Act was passed or in the 1930s when a lot of basic full employment objectives were established. We need to adapt to that new world, to work within new institutional forms to build economic development from the grass roots up.

Democracy has several dimensions. Political democracy, people say they understand. At one time we had a commitment in this country to industrial democracy, too. It was an extension of political democracy and for the same reasons. In fact, if you try to preach democracy in the political process and deny it on the job you create strong social tensions. Added to that in recent years, is the realization that democracy is very efficient. We taught that to the Japanese who developed a very competitive system based on a simple proposition that many of our managers refuse to accept-that the people who know the jobs better than anybody else are the workers on those jobs. If you can harness the energy and ideas of those workers, you can build a terribly competitive system. It will be very efficient and it will improve the conditions for everybody. Now a lot of our managers are selling that idea but they don’t understand the other part of it-that worker participation without effective worker power is inefficient and temporary.

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Workplace democracy with a false concept will fail when management starts making unilateral decisions. Workers won’t identify with something that is authoritarian, undemocratic and elitist, which is what Taylorism, the basic American management system, is all about. If you want true democracy on the job, you have to give workers an independent source of power to protect and promote their interests. They must have the right to organize and bargain collectively. Society must protect that right; we’re not going to have a free and democratic political system without a free and democratic labor system.

Now the concept of democracy is being extended from political democracy to industrial democracy to social democracy, which means that we ought to as a society establish minimum conditions for people within the society. That’s social democracy…we are concerned about the development of our people so we are concerned about education, about health insurance, about income maintenance for those who are unable to participate effectively in the economic process. And then the final part which is on the horizon now is the extension from social democracy to economic democracy.

Economic democracy means greater ownership and control by the workers themselves of the places where they work. In an internationalized information world, if you’re not where the decisions are made you cannot protect the interests of workers. You’ve got to be on boards of directors, you’ve got to have part of the ownership of those enterprises, you’ve got to pay attention to stock ownership and stockholders and be a part of the financial system. All of these things-financial manipulation through leveraged buyouts, the use of your pension funds against your interests-have a vital effect on American workers, their jobs, their working conditions, and how well off they’re likely to be in the future.

To be concerned about workers’ interests today is to be an actor in the deals that get cut, to see to it that the workers’ interests are protected. By working together we can perfect some of those institutions and therefore do new things to meet the conditions in which we now live. We must develop employee stock ownership plans and labor cooperatives. Why should all these labor exchanges make a lot of money, exploiting workers and denying them benefits, sending them to work under unsafe. unhealthy conditions? We need labor cooperatives with workers who control themselves to supply that labor. It doesn’t take a lot of management expertise to run a labor exchange, and you could in the process protect the conditions for workers. We might fail with a lot of such efforts and will, but the way to progress is through failing and starting over and building to what you have got.

Such grassroots initiatives are important, but we also have to recognize the other reality-that policies made a long way from the South have a direct and immediate bearing on our lives. We therefore have to be concerned about international and national economic policy making, and if we don’t then what we try to build up can be eliminated overnight.

We have many case studies of that if you look at the effects of U.S. economic policies on workers throughout the South. Take monetarism, which is one-half of Reaganomics. Stripped of its niceties, monetarism means we are going to use unemployment to keep wages down. Therefore, if you don’t want that to happen, you’ve got to be an actor in the economic policy making process.

Supply-side economics is based on the assumption that a huge tax cut in 1981 would so stimulate the economy that in spite of spending $1.6 trillion on defense, we would balance the budget by 1983. That didn’t happen, but what did happen is what some really had in mind all along-to so weaken the federal government that it could not do an effective job of providing human services or protecting the rights of workers and ordinary people in the country. That was the main agenda of a lot of people who are involved in this process and they have done it. The other thing they did was to cause misery for people all over the world. Because of the huge budget deficit, it means the federal government has to use most of the net savings in this country just to pay interest on the national debt–$170 billion this year. Lyndon Johnson. during the Vietnam War, put in the first $100 billion budget, and the interest on the national debt now is much larger than Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam-era budget and it is going to get bigger.

Now what effect does that have on you?

First, you and your children and their children are going to pay it. Second, in the process the federal government as the preferred borrower, with the Federal Reserve limiting the money supply, drove up interest rates and put a block on job-creating activities. Who’s going to invest to create a job when all you have to do to make ten, twelve or even twenty percent is draw interest? Nobody.

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But more important than that, it also costs us jobs because other countries wanted that high interest so they bought dollars so they could buy U.S. assets and that drove up the price of a dollar. That is like subsidizing imports and putting a use tax on exports. The trade policy of the United States is not only passive, it’s perverse. The trade policy of the United States has encouraged companies to ship jobs overseas simply because of tax reasons or because by opening the American market to competition from overseas the companies can then justify that level of wages and costs.

The essence of the trade policy is this-if you have a passive policy and someone else has an active policy, you don’t have to have a lot of imagination to see who’s going to call the shots. We tend to be reactive and that means that other people will decide which jobs we get to keep in this country. And they do what I would do if I were in their position. They keep the good jobs and give us the rest.

Instead, we ought to have an active policy, but we’re not going to get it so long as you are not actively involved in the policy process. Therefore, we need to pay heavy attention to this policy process and to recognize a number of realities.

The main trend occurs with technological change. We need to be technologically advanced to maintain rasher high wages. Why? Because if we lose our technological advantage, we compete according to wages. If we compete according to wages, we’ll lose, as wages will tend to go down.

The other thing we must worry about is the revolutionary effect those technological changes will have on our lives. Technology makes it possible for the international corporations to ship jobs around the world like they were pieces on a chess set. Technology would let a one-room company operate all over the United States and all over the world just as if they were in all of these places-we have a company in Dallas that has two hundred workers in Beijing, China. Those workers work every day for that company. They send stuff through satellite. Those Chinese workers make fifty dollars a month and they’re pretty well-trained and well-educated computer workers.

Technology can shift jobs. It has also been partly responsible for the fact that most jobs are now being created by relatively small enterprises-fifty or fewer workers. There are obvious implications for organizing and obvious implications for where the jobs are. But the big question is will this technology create more jobs than it displaces? That is one very important issue.

The second important issue related to technology is will those jobs be worse jobs than the ones we’ve got now? Technology can make better jobs and more jobs or it can make worse jobs and fewer jobs. It all depends on policy, on management and on whether workers participate in making the decisions for the introduction of machines. If we get enough growth to absorb the workers who are displaced by the machines, we can maintain relative employment.

Historically, technological change has always caused unemployment. The only reason most technology is introduced is to displace labor. That is what improved productivity means, that you produce the same output with less labor and new machinery therefore always causes unemployment. In the past we’ve absorbed a lot of unemployment through shortened hours, longer vacations, starting to work at later ages, etc. However, future unemployment is likely to be involuntary and therefore will increase joblessness.

The second trend we have to watch is the internationalization of the economy, which changes the whole concept of the labor movement. The basic idea behind the labor movement historically is to remove labor from competition, thus improving efficiency and equity and the human condition. You strengthen management because managers now have to manage. You strengthen efficiency because you don’t let parasitic employers continue to operate. If you don’t subsidize them and you have the proper policies, you improve efficiency because you shift people from the inefficient to the efficient, to those who can uphold good conditions and meet proper standards. Now, of course, we can no longer take labor out of competition by collective bargaining or by national regulations. Our rules don’t cover China, Korea, Japan and western Europe. Our contracts don’t cover Japanese workers and it’s a fundamental principle of collective bargaining that unless your contract coincides with the market, you’ll have trouble holding the contract.

The solution is to extend the rules internationally and that is why workers’ rights must be included in trade legislation. We can’t be any more complacent about Mexican and Korean workers getting cancer than we can workers in the United States. American companies can exploit Korean workers and send their goods back to the United States to compete with us. That doesn’t help Korean workers and it doesn’t help ours. The basic principle of international labor standards is the same principle of removing labor from competition through national standards.

The third basic trend is demographics, which is vital to the labor movement. As has been pointed out, eighty-five percent of all people who will be working in the year 2000 are already in the work force. And ninety percent of the increase between now and the end of the century will be women and minorities. By 2020, when the post-war babies’ generation retires, there will be a minority population of

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ninety-one million in the United States. Minorities will at that point be thirty-four percent of the population and forty percent of the work force. They are now seventeen percent of the population. Therefore, the future of the labor movement as well as the future of the American work force and therefore the future of the economy depends heavily on what happens to women and minorities now.

We know those things because demographics is predictable. See, the birth rate in most white populations is not even at the level required to replace themselves. We don’t know all the reasons why, but part of it is that the white population is older, and old folks don’t have as many kids as young folks. The median age of whites in the United States is 32 years and rising. The median age of hispanics is 22 and declining. The median age of blacks is 25 and rising.

Now if you don’t get women and minorities organized, educated, and trained, then you’re not going to be competitive in the international arena. And you’re not going to be able to maintain the labor movement unless you have a strategy to deal with women and minorities because that is where the future lies.

Given those trends, what do we do? How do we develop policies to achieve full employment with relatively decent wages and conditions?

First, we need to focus on our main objective, which is to try to achieve full employment and decent wages.

Our problem in dealing with international competition and in achieving this objective is not that we can’t do it. Our problem is that we don’t want to do it and that we have policy failures relative to other countries. Why do we have such bad policies in this country?

One basic reason is greed. Some people make out all right with a laissez-faire, non-government intervention climate. It’s not hard to figure out who those folks are-people who’ve got it, who have a lot of resources, are going to make it. I grew up in a Mississippi Baptist orphanage and had to go to church a lot and didn’t even know people could start a meeting without taking a text from the Bible and singing some hymns and giving a prayer. So, if I was going to put together a text for the Reagan administration policy it would be, “To him that have shall be given, and to him that have not shall be taken away, even that which he thought he had.” If we don’t recognize that is part of what supports this laissez-faire world, then we don’t understand what is happening.

The second reason for our bad policy is ideology. We have sold ourselves the notion that government is bad and the market will solve all problems, and therefore, we ought not to have government intervention in the market. That attitude will cause us to continue to decline.

It was creative pragmatism that caused us to have the longest period of sustained prosperity in our history, from World War II to the early 1970s. We didn’t ask ourselves if the G.I. Bill, the national highway program, our whole education system, that we enlarged greatly in those days, we didn’t ask if this agenda was socialism-we saw it as the thing to do. We maintained employment reasonably well by active government intervention. We built our agricultural system and our space program (the spin-off of which gives us our technological lead) and people didn’t ask themselves if it is right for government to do that. Only recently have we begun to get this ideological belief that whatever the government does is negative.

We’ve got to get away from that. We can’t solve our problems without a strong federal government actively involved as a partner. When we recognize that reality, then it is not hard to look at the components of policy that we need to build the just and humane society we feel is important.

To make the policy, we must recognize that at every level-international, national, in the plant, in state and local policy-making-if you are not there, people who do not necessarily have your interests at heart will determine the policies.

Second, we must recognize the internationalized environment that we are in.

Third, we must assemble a decent set of national policies to deal with our problems. We have to develop our people-a human resource development strategy. We must have an active trade policy that will promote our own interests. We need industrial policies. As a part of that industrial policy, we must pay attention to our financial institutions. We now have the financial tail wagging the economic dog. With this, we need to have an international arena-an international bank that is a lender of last resort, to bring discipline, to prevent disasters like the third world debt. Our financial systems tend to have a short-run orientation. They make it hard for companies to develop the technology that will cause them to be competitive. We need to change that. We need to concentrate on research and development. Finally we need to build democratic institutions. Our political system is too dominated by economic interests. We need campaign finance reform so that people can’t buy elections and so the democratic processes can work better. We need to encourage new forms of democratic organizations.

Above all, we need to re-examine our labor laws, particularly with respect to collective bargaining. American labor laws were designed to make it possible for workers to organize and bargain collectively to represent their own choosing. Today those labor laws do more to protect the interests of employers than the interests of workers. They have been perverted. They don’t even work as well as they used to and they never worked as well as they should. That is why we fought so hard for labor law reform. We need to speed up the NLRB processes and to strengthen the penalties for violation of those laws. We also need to convince the country it’s in the national interest for workers to be able to organize and bargain collectively. In the 1960s the United States and Canada had about the same proportion of the work force organized, about thirty percent. Today Canada has forty percent and we have eighteen percent. The main difference, I think, is public policy with respect to collective bargaining.

Finally, we should not fear the trying of new things and we ought not to fear failure. But what we ought to fear is the judgment of history that we understood what needed to be done and refused to even try to do it.

Ray Marshall, who was Secretary of Labor in the Carter Administration, teaches at the University of Texas-Austin He is the president of the Southern Labor Institute.

Of Movements and a Man.

By David Chalmers

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, pp. 20-22

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. By David J. Garrow. (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. $800 pp. 19.96 [sic] )

Society castrates its saints and turns them into idealized plaster-cast statuary. In order to live with them, we trivialize their lives and dilute their message to the point that they no longer make us uncomfortable. St. Francis, whose radical poverty challenged the wealth and power of the Church, became the kindly friend of the birds and animals, and the Martin Luther King of memorial orations and student papers offers an unthreatening message of love and non-violence. In the Epilogue to his Pulitzer-prize winning account of King and the civil rights struggle, David Garrow approvingly quotes Vincent Harding’s complaint that King is being turned into a “rather smoothed-off respectable national hero.” However, if anything threatens to crack the plaster of that respectability, it is not King’s radicalism, but his humanity. As the recent struggles of presidential candidates, TV evangelists, the United States Marines, and the Roman Catholic Church remind us, there are no easy answers to coming to terms with human sexuality, and there is always the danger of discrediting information falling into unfriendly hands, in King’s case, the FBI which set out to destroy him.

At the core of western Christianity is the Jesus who is both suffering human and son of God, and a deep religious conviction was the mainstay of King’s thirteen-year public ministry. King was twenty-six in 1955 when he was called to lead the bus boycott in Montgomery; when he was killed in Memphis, he was thirty-nine. It was in Montgomery, sitting alone in prayer at his kitchen table, that he found himself in the voice of Jesus which told him to fight on and promised “never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone.” From that vision, which echoed through the rest of his life, he came to accept the role from which he realized he could never escape and that he foresaw would lead to his death. This acceptance is central to his life and the account of that ministry which David Garrow appropriately entitles, Bearing the Cross. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It is a monumental piece of research, based on more than seven hundred interviews (over two hundred conducted by Garrow himself), tens of thousands of pages of material obtained from the government under the Freedom of Information Act (including hundreds of King’s tapped phone conversations), and the careful search of archival and secondary sources. For years, David Garrow, an associate professor of political science at the City University of New York, has been the best-informed and most thoughtful historian of the Southern civil rights movement, freely sharing his work with other interested students. His previous studies on Protest at Selma (1978) and The FBl and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1981) also helped prepare the ground for Bearing the Cross.

Although the Pulitzer award was for biography rather than in the history category, a shift made by the governing board, Garrow is basically interested only in King’s life in the civil rights movement. Until his death, first the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and then the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were his life, and his, theirs. What was going on in Washington, Mississippi, Chicago, in the King family, and elsewhere, are presented only from the angle of his participation; the rest simply lies outside of the scope of Garrow’s book.

From this “movement book,” much can be learned about movements for social change. Overshadowing everything else is how difficult it was to keep going. Unlike a corporation, political party, or government, it did not sell a product candidate, or the exercise of public power. There was no

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firmly institutionalized structure and source of income. The SCLC was essentially one man; King was its policy, image, and, often, funding. He had to make the decisions, give the word on the strategy of the campaigns and the tactics in the streets, reconcile the conflicts within SCLC and between it and SNCC, the NAACP, and the power structures of Birmingham, Chicago, and Washington. Often the fees for his speeches were SCLC’s major source of income. As a result, he was continuously in motion, not just in the South but across the country, speaking, preaching, fund raising, planning, conferring, negotiating, persuading. Mixed in with these were marches, court appearances, jail time, and violence. He was the recipient of blows, missiles, and a stab wound close to the heart, death threats, and pressure from the FBI. The combination of all of these repeatedly brought him to the point of physical and emotional exhaustion.

The civil rights movement was threatening not only to white supremacy, but to black arrangements as well. This meant the hostility of the NAACPs Roy Wilkins as well as the National Baptist Convention’s Joseph Jackson. Cooperation often proved difficult for black ministers more accustomed to domination over their own congregations. The jealousy of Ralph Abernathy, the prickly independence of Fred Shuttlesworth, the imperiousness of Wyatt Walker, the uncertainty about Jesse Jackson’s motives, the alienation of E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks, and the hostility of Ella Baker produced problems, and there was always conflict between top staffers to be addressed. In his emotionally demanding world, King was closest to his old Montgomery friend Abernathy and particularly came to depend on Andrew Young and Stanley Levison.

Levison’s recent ties with the Communist Party were the occasion for FBI surveillance that wrapped itself around and sought to destroy King’s life. Despite warnings from the Justice Department and the White House, King maintained his relationship with Levison. By Garrow’s account, Levison served King well as editor, advisor, and friend, showing no signs of a separate agenda.

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After Selma, Levison summed up for King the limitations that the civil rights movement faced. The American people were “not ready for a radical restructuring of the economic order.” While they would react strongly against “shocking violence and gross injustice,” they were not prepared to make deep changes in order to free the Negro, and the movement had to act within this limit. It was King who was becoming more radical than Levison, but the question was always how to proceed. He never deviated from his commitment to non-violence, but he came to realize that it had to be a political strategy as well as moral persuasion. By the mid-sixties, no one any longer talked about “redeeming the soul” of the South or of America. The concern was with the power to make changes.

The failure of the Albany campaign in 1962 had been a particularly instructive experience. The key to change was “federal commitment” and provoking violence was the essential way to force its hand. A “Bull” Connor or a Sheriff Jim Clark was necessary to dramatize the situation, bring tensions to the surface, reach a national government that placed “order” above social justice. Action had to be focused. Specific targets were necessary. Attacking segregation in general was too broad. Where voting strength was lacking, it was a mistake to go after the politicians. The economic power structure was more crucial and the local business community could be frightened by the threat of black disorder. Not only were school children used as demonstrators in Birmingham, but crowds of black spectators were liable to erupt into brick and bottle throwing when the police used dogs and firehoses on demonstrators. This and masses of unrestrained black teenagers downtown had more of an impact on businessmen than peaceful picketing and sit-ins.

Coming off of the failure in Albany, the lessons of Birmingham were those of better planning and preparation, the importance of selecting specific goals, and the power of economic boycott, youthful protest, and spontaneous participants. Both King and the Kennedys became convinced that legislation was necessary. The murder of Medgar Evers, on the night of the President’s television address against segregation, surely underlined that persuasion alone was not enough. Protest tactics alone were not enough. Political action and coalitions were necessary for change.

Although the crucial audience had become national, the battle for that attention had to be fought locally. This meant local people, local organizations, and local goals. Despite appearances, local unity was often fragile or lacking; middle-class black people and college students were often hesitant to take part. One of the real achievements in Selma was the participation of the school teachers. Local campaigns could not be sustained for very long periods. There had to be a way to convince local people that it had all been worthwhile. Focus on two or three points could produce a sense of victory, so the campaign could wind up and move on elsewhere. It was sometimes difficult for local people to understand the broader symbolic consequences of small, tangible gains. The irresolvable conflict between King and SNCC was that SCLC was using local turf to fight national battles within the system, while SNCC’s young activists sought to develop grassroots organization and power. SCLC’s strength was the person of Martin Luther King, Jr., not participatory democracy, and King’s jail time was a strategic resource, not an everyday tactic.

Like everything else, the role of the press was ambiguous. Its coverage was the essential gateway to the national scene, but it fed on conflict, praised Albany Police Chief Laurie Prichett for “remarkable restraint” when he didn’t produce any, and undercut civil rights strategy by sharing their inside information with him. The agendas of the press were not always favorable; when King committed himself against the Vietnam War, it was not only Life Magazine but also the New York Times and the Washington Post that denounced him.

For King and SCLC, the problem was always “What next?” As he went north to Chicago to agitate about jobs, housing, and education, he was increasingly concerned about the problems of wealth and class in American society. By failing to speak out against the Vietnam War, he believed that he was shirking his responsibility. Racism, militarism, and economic exploitation were all tied in together. His radicalism and his pessimism grew together. The civil rights movement was too middle class and America as a nation had never committed itself to economic justice. The leaders who preached non-violence through the democratic system were “not given enough victories,” but still within its context he searched for a new strategy. Although no one was really enthusiastic over it, he decided on a “poor people’s campaign.” Waves of the “poor and disinherited” would descend on Washington, practice civil disobedience in the streets, and lobby and pressure Congress. Tired, drained, increasingly melancholy, he more and more referred back to his kitchen vision in Montgomery, and talked of his own death. A march in support of striking garbagemen in Memphis broke down into a riot, so King went back again to Memphis, to Golgotha, to show that it could be carried off nonviolently.

David Chalmers is Distinguished Alumni Professor at the University of Florida and is author of Hooded Americanism, The History of the Ku Klux Klan. He is at work on a history of social change in the 1960s.

The Organization Behind the Man.

David Chalmers

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, p. 21

To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. By Adam Fairclough. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. 505 pp. Paper, $17.95. Cloth, $35.)

Arriving coincidentally with David Garrow’s overwhelming work on the same topic, this thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and well-written study by a British historian is likely to life under the shadow of being “the other book,” yet there is much that can be learned from it. Fairclough uses Garrow’s earlier writing, expresses appreciation for personal sharing, and does not basically disagree with his interpretation of King and what happened in and to the movement. The difference in emphasis is indicated by the ordering of the sub-titles. Garrow names King first, and Fairclough, the SCLC. Both authors are in agreement on King’s achievements, on the centrality of religion and non-violence in King’s life and King’s centrality in the SCLC, the collapse of the civil rights movement after the Voting Rights Act, and King’s growing radicalism, but Fairclough is writing organizational history, not biography.

Although recognizing housing as the “bedrock” of school and job segregation, neither author has much favorable to say about King’s 1966 campaign in Chicago, which may underline how difficult the basic problem was. In the face of white backlash, a hostile coalition in Congress, black nationalism, urban rioting, the Vietnam war, and the loss of presidential backing, there was little hope for new gains. Fairclough seems to suggest that King and the SCLC might have fared better by concentrating on voter registration and political organization, but the “movement phase” of change was probably over. Movements are hard to organize and difficult to maintain. It is not easy to repeatedly face possible injury, arrest and job loss, particularly when one has a family to support. People have other personal priorities and lives to live. Problems beyond the defeat of legal segregation were too deep to be touched by non-violent demonstration in the streets. Coalitions were fragile, and maintaining unity was difficult. Even during the “great days” in Birmingham, only about ten percent of the city’s black ministers actively supported the campaign.

Fairclough gives less importance to Birmingham than Garrow does and offers a more favorable picture of Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth. He particularly admires the political sophistication of the older left activists Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison, but even they had no real path to offer after the middle sixties.

Because of his focus on the organization, rather than King, Fairclough often gives a much broader picture of what was going on. He begins with a brief description of the bus boycotts in Baton Rouge and Tallahassee which set the scene for Montgomery and explains what went on during the fatal Memphis garbage strike in 1968. He offers useful thumbnail biographical sketches of James Bevel, Wyatt Walker, Harry Wachtel, James Lawson, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, C.T. Vivian and other movement leaders, and he carries the story through the Abernathy years after King’s death. In summing up, Fairclough comes back to King again. Desegregation and the ballot did not end discrimination and poverty, but it did knock away major props of institutionalized white supremacy and helped black people achieve dignity. With idealism, dedication, and courage, Martin Luther King, Jr., understood the history and culture, and expressed the aspirations of black Southerners. “SCLC itself was far more than King,” Fairclough concludes, “but his death revealed how completely he dominated it through intellect, personality, moral example, and organizational skill.”

Preacher’s Parable.

By John Egerton

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, p. 23

Forty Acres and A Goat. By Will D. Campbell. (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, Ltd., 1986. 336 pp. $14.95.)

An unusual combination of life experiences has shaped Will Campbell’s career as a preacher, farmer, social activist, and writer.

He was born and raised in a hardscrabble farm family in south Mississippi during the lean years between the two world wars. He was ordained in a country Baptist church when he was 17 years old. He was a medic in the Pacific in World War II. He graduated from Wake Forest University and the divinity school of Yale University. For six years in the 1950s, he was a race relations troubleshooter in the South for the National Council of Churches. And for the past 25 years, he has headed a Nashville-based “rag-tag bunch of bootleg preachers and drop-out parishioners” known as the Committee of Southern Churchmen.

Nine years ago, in a book called Brother to a Dragonfly, Campbell told the story of two boys become men–he and his brother Joe–in those years of poverty and turmoil that marked the South in the middle decades of this century. It was a remarkable book, lavishly praised by such literary giants as Walker Percy and Robert Penn Warren, and it was a finalist in the National Book Awards competition and a winner of several other non-fiction honors.

Before and after Brother to a Dragonfly, Campbell wrote a half-dozen other volumes on religion, race, and the human tragedy, including a novel, The Glad River, that linked 16th-century Anabaptists in the Netherlands and 20th-century Southern Baptists in Louisiana.

He is an unconventional man, an uncommon preacher and writer with a common touch that is incisive, inclusive, and often eloquent. His new book, Forty Acres and a Goat, is more in the style of Brother to a Dragonfly than his other works, and it is, like the man himself, hard to classify. His publisher calls it a memoir, but it is more nearly a parable or an allegory. Its characters include historical figures, ordinary people, multiple souls in singular bodies, animals that behave like humans (and vice versa), and several members of the Campbell clan.

The forty acres in question make up a rocky patch of hillsides and creeksides where Will and Brenda Campbell have lived for more than twenty years. The goat was a family pet named–like so many people and things in middle Tennessee–for Andrew Jackson, who once lived in the neighborhood. The story, in its most basic dimension, is about the little farm and its menagerie of animals and the people who have come and gone there.

But there is much more to it than that. It is about land and time, ancestry and kinship, civil rights and human wrongs, manifest destiny and original sin. The two protagonists, Will Campbell and a more symbolic but no less real character named T. J. Eaves, grapple throughout with the crucible of race, a white man and a black man striving to understand the single most complex and enduring test ever to face this country of immigrants and captives.

“Say good-bye to Jackson,” Eaves tells Campbell as the two men part company near the end of the story, and when his friend and brother is out of sight, Campbell hears his own voice saying, “Well, we almost made it.”

In real life–and in good books–things are never quite finished, never wrapped up in pretty little bundles that won’t come undone. So it is in Will Campbell’s parable. And so it is with Campbell himself, and with the people about whom he writes so compellingly, and with us all.

John Egerton’s most recent book is Southern Food. He lives and works in Nashville.

The Cold Hard Truth

By J.L. Chestnut, Jr.

Vol. 9, No. 3, 1987, p. 24

Mine enemies are legion and I can barely remember when that was not the case. In a somewhat perverse manner, I find that comforting and suffer no reason to embrace popular, superficial mainstream conclusions I know to be wrong and misleading.

There are no American heroes in our relations to South and Central America, now or ever. The Iran/Contra mess is a foul, dangerous scandal and international disgrace.

For centuries, America, for rank, selfish economic reasons, helped to sustain oppression and misery throughout South and Central America. The CIA toppled an entire government on behalf of United Fruit Incorporated. Rich multi-national corporations owning thousands of acres have opposed every effort at land reform. The result of systematic exploitation blankets the pitiful people of South and Central America like a suffocating cloud.

Unspeakable conditions were maintained by a line of dictatorial despots as bad as any the world has known. They were kept in power for almost 150 years primarily by American military might and power. In turn, powerful American economic interests enjoyed a virtual license to plunder and exploit.

As a rule, neither people nor nations turn from true friends to embrace an unknown–much less to welcome the bloodsucking Russian Bear; communists are in South and Central America because we created a perfect opportunity for them.

A desperate father in South America struggles daily to feed his hungry children and he has little or no education, health care or land. His very existence has been ruled by governments so opressive [sic] they are difficult to describe. That father really doesn’t give a damn about Ronald Reagan or Mikhail Gorbachev. Would you?

The current administration in Washington invaded one Latin American neighbor, whose population is smaller than the City of Birmingham, and unlawfully mined the harbor and fomented civil war against another. All to halt the spread of communism and bring Jeffersonian democracy to that desperate land.

Hogwash!

Latin American is a place where the rich always got richer and the poor systematically poorer until the bottom fell out. Hard-disciplined work might forestall starvation, but little else. A handful of super rich owned the continent. American power was always there to back them up.

Communism, as distinguished from the governmental mechanisms through which it is promoted, is an ideology. Guns, tanks, marines and missiles, by definition are virtually useless in halting the spread of an idea. One would assume official minds in Washington would eventually come to recognize that obvious and fundamental truth. Fortunately, communism consistently proves to be its own worse enemy. It is a wholly unrealistic and impractical concept weighted down with enormous bureaucratic burdens and a myriad of imperialist manipulations in behalf of Mother Russia. Those considerations, more than anything else, have impeded the spread of communism.

Every nation in the world seems to understand except America and possibly England. Not a single Latin nation, including Mexico, favors the U.S. clandestine-military activity in South and Central America. Indeed, the U.S. had to ignore the Organization of American States and the vital mutual security pact to wrangle a bogus invitation to invade Granada and engage in the “no-win” resurrection of the Contras in Nicaragua. If we are to stop the spread of communism we had better get busy with genuine and innovative efforts to stop the spread of poverty, ignorance and racism. Fidel Castro was intimately acquainted with all three before he took to the mountains.

The self-righteous crap we hear in the Iran/Contra hearing about fighting for freedom and halting communism is in reality a catalogue of inappropriate, off-base policies which violate international law and are singularly ineffective. We have even undermined the Constitutional basis of our own government [sic] .

To date, our efforts in South and Central America are unworthy of a great nation and a good people.

Peace.

J. L. Chestnut is an Alabama trial lawyer and writer.