McJOBS: ACCORDING TO THE NATIONAL EMPLOYMENT LAW PROJECT, THE BIGGEST GROWTH IN PRIVATE-SECTOR JOB CREATION IN THE PAST YEAR OCCURRED IN THE LOW-WAGE RETAIL, ADMINISTRATIVE, AND FOOD SERVICE SECTORS OF THE ECONOMY

Posted by Andy Kroll at 5:50pm, May 8, 2011.

How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker
The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class

By Andy Kroll


Think of it as a parable for these grim economic times. On April 19th, McDonald's launched its first-ever national hiring day, signing up 62,000 new workers at stores throughout the country. For some context, that's more jobs created by one company in a single day than the net job creation of the entire U.S. economy in 2009. And if that boggles the mind, consider how many workers applied to local McDonald's franchises that day and left empty-handed: 938,000 of them. With a 6.2% acceptance rate in its spring hiring blitz, McDonald’s was more selective than the Princeton, Stanford, or Yale University admission offices.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a million souls flocked to McDonald's hoping for a steady paycheck, when nearly 14 million Americans are out of work and nearly a million more are too discouraged even to look for a job. At this point, it apparently made no difference to them that the fast-food industry pays some of the lowest wages around: on average, $8.89 an hour, or barely half the $15.95 hourly average across all American industries.

On an annual basis, the average fast-food worker takes home $20,800, less than half the national average of $43,400. McDonald's appears to pay even worse, at least with its newest hires. In the press release for its national hiring day, the multi-billion-dollar company said it would spend $518 million on the newest round of hires, or $8,354 a head. Hence the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of "McJob" as "a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement."

Of course, if you read only the headlines, you might think that the jobs picture was improving. The economy added 1.3 million private-sector jobs between February 2010 and January 2011, and the headline unemployment rate edged downward, from 9.8% to 8.8%, between November of last year and March. It inched upward in April, to 9%, but tempering that increase was the news that the economy added 244,000 jobs last month (not including those 62,000 McJobs), beating economists' expectations.

Under this somewhat sunnier news, however, runs a far darker undercurrent. Yes, jobs are being created, but what kinds of jobs paying what kinds of wages?  Can those jobs sustain a modest lifestyle and pay the bills? Or are we living through a McJobs recovery?

The Rise of the McWorker

The evidence points to the latter. According to a recent analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the biggest growth in private-sector job creation in the past year occurred in positions in the low-wage retail, administrative, and food service sectors of the economy. While 23% of the jobs lost in the Great Recession that followed the economic meltdown of 2008 were “low-wage” (those paying $9-$13 an hour), 49% of new jobs added in the sluggish “recovery” are in those same low-wage industries. On the other end of the spectrum, 40% of the jobs lost paid high wages ($19-$31 an hour), while a mere 14% of new jobs pay similarly high wages.

As a point of comparison, that's much worse than in the recession of 2001 after the high-tech bubble burst.  Then, higher wage jobs made up almost a third of all new jobs in the first year after the crisis.

The hardest hit industries in terms of employment now are finance, manufacturing, and especially construction, which was decimated when the housing bubble burst in 2007 and has yet to recover. Meanwhile, NELP found that hiring for temporary administrative and waste-management jobs, health-care jobs, and of course those fast-food restaurants has surged.

Indeed in 2010, one in four jobs added by private employers was a temporary job, which usually provides workers with few benefits and even less job security. It's not surprising that employers would first rely on temporary hires as they regained their footing after a colossal financial crisis. But this time around, companies have taken on temp workers in far greater numbers than after previous downturns.  Where 26% of hires in 2010 were temporary, the figure was 11% after the early-1990s recession and only 7% after the downturn of 2001.

As many labor economists have begun to point out, we're witnessing an increasing polarization of the U.S. economy over the past three decades. More and more, we're seeing labor growth largely at opposite ends of the skills-and-wages spectrum -- among, that is, the best and the worst kinds of jobs.

At one end of job growth, you have increasing numbers of people flipping burgers, answering telephones, engaged in child care, mopping hallways, and in other low-wage lines of work. At the other end, you have increasing numbers of engineers, doctors, lawyers, and people in high-wage "creative" careers. What's disappearing is the middle, the decent-paying jobs that helped expand the American middle class in the mid-twentieth century and that, if the present lopsided recovery is any indication, are now going the way of typewriters and landline telephones.

Because the shape of the workforce increasingly looks fat on both ends and thin in the middle, economists have begun to speak of "the barbell effect," which for those clinging to a middle-class existence in bad times means a nightmare life.  For one thing, the shape of the workforce now hinders America’s once vaunted upward mobility.  It’s the downhill slope that’s largely available these days.

The barbell effect has also created staggering levels of income inequality of a sort not known since the decades before the Great Depression. From 1979 to 2007, for the middle class, average household income (after taxes) nudged upward from $44,100 to $55,300; by contrast, for the top 1%, average household income soared from $346,600 in 1979 to nearly $1.3 million in 2007. That is, super-rich families saw their earnings increase 11 times faster than middle-class families.

What's causing this polarization? An obvious culprit is technology. As MIT economist David Autor notes, the tasks of "organizing, storing, retrieving, and manipulating information" that humans once performed are now computerized. And when computers can't handle more basic clerical work, employers ship those jobs overseas where labor is cheaper and benefits nonexistent.

Another factor is education. In today's barbell economy, degrees and diplomas have never mattered more, which means that those with just a high school education increasingly find themselves locked into the low-wage end of the labor market with little hope for better. Worse yet, the pay gap between the well-educated and not-so-educated continues to widen: in 1979, the hourly wage of a typical college graduate was 1.5 times higher than that of a typical high-school graduate; by 2009, it was almost two times higher.

Considering, then, that the percentage of men ages 25 to 34 who have gone to college is actually decreasing, it's not surprising that wage inequality has gotten worse in the U.S. As Autor writes, advanced economies like ours "depend on their best-educated workers to develop and commercialize the innovative ideas that drive economic growth."

The distorting effects of the barbell economy aren't lost on ordinary Americans. In a recent Gallup poll, a majority of people agreed that the country was still in either a depression (29%) or a recession (26%).  When sorted out by income, however, those making $75,000 or more a year are, not surprisingly, most likely to believe the economy is in neither a recession nor a depression, but growing.  After all, they’re the ones most likely to have benefited from a soaring stock market and the return to profitability of both corporate America and Wall Street. In Gallup's middle-income group, by contrast, 55% of respondents claim the economy is in trouble. They're still waiting for their recovery to arrive.

The Slow Fade of Big Labor

The big-picture economic changes described by Autor and others, however, don't tell the entire story. There's a significant political component to the hollowing out of the American labor force and the impoverishment of the middle class: the slow fade of organized labor. Since the 1950s, the clout of unions in the public and private sectors has waned, their membership has dwindled, and their political influence has weakened considerably. Long gone are the days when powerful union bosses -- the AFL-CIO's George Meany or the UAW's Walter Reuther -- had the ear of just about any president.

As Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has written, in the 1960s and 1970s a rift developed between big labor and the Democratic Party. Unions recoiled in disgust at what they perceived to be the "motley collection of shaggy kids, newly assertive women, and goo-goo academics" who had begun to supplant organized labor in the Party. In 1972, the influential AFL-CIO symbolically distanced itself from the Democrats by refusing to endorse their nominee for president, George McGovern.

All the while, big business was mobilizing, banding together to form massive advocacy groups such as the Business Roundtable and shaping the staid U.S. Chamber of Commerce into a ferocious lobbying machine. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Democratic Party drifted rightward and toward an increasingly powerful and financially focused business community, creating the Democratic Leadership Council, an olive branch of sorts to corporate America. "It's not that the working class [had] abandoned Democrats," Drum wrote. "It's just the opposite: The Democratic Party [had] largely abandoned the working class."

The GOP, of course, has a long history of battling organized labor, and nowhere has that been clearer than in the party's recent assault on workers' rights. Swept in by a tide of Republican support in 2010, new GOP majorities in state legislatures from Wisconsin to Tennessee to New Hampshire have introduced bills meant to roll back decades' worth of collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions, the last bastion of organized labor still standing (somewhat) strong.

The political calculus behind the war on public-sector unions is obvious: kneecap them and you knock out a major pillar of support for the Democratic Party.  In the 2010 midterm elections, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) spent nearly $90 million on TV ads, phone banking, mailings, and other support for Democratic candidates. The anti-union legislation being pushed by Republicans would inflict serious damage on AFSCME and other public-sector unions by making it harder for them to retain members and weakening their clout at the bargaining table.

And as shown by the latest state to join the anti-union fray, it's not just Republicans chipping away at workers' rights anymore. In Massachusetts, a staunchly liberal state, the Democratic-led State Assembly recently voted to curb collective bargaining rights on heath-care benefits for teachers, firefighters, and a host of other public-sector employees.

Bargaining-table clout is crucial for unions, since it directly affects the wages their members take home every month. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union workers pocket on average $200 more per week than their non-union counterparts, a 28% percent difference. The benefits of union representation are even greater for women and people of color: women in unions make 34% more than their non-unionized counterparts, and Latino workers nearly 51% more.

In other words, at precisely the moment when middle-class workers need strong bargaining rights so they can fight to preserve a living wage in a barbell economy, unions around the country face the grim prospect of losing those rights.

All of which raises the questions: Is there any way to revive the American middle class and reshape income distribution in our barbell nation?  Or will this warped recovery of ours pave the way for an even more warped McEconomy, with the have-nots at one end, the have-it-alls at the other end, and increasingly less of us in between?

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a firmly -- and happily -- middle-class household. His email is andykroll (at) motherjones (dot) com. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Kroll discusses what grim news lurks under the monthly unemployment figures, click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 Andy Kroll

LIES, BIG LIES, AND DAMN LIES - ABOUT THE AMERICAN WORKER BY THE SO-CALLED "LIBERAL" MEDIA

Public Employee Unions Don't Get One Penny from Taxpayers and Can't Require Membership, But the Big Lie That They Do Is Everywhere

Nobody has to belong to a union or support its political activities, but you'd never know that from reading the news.

AlterNet / by Joshua Holland

March 5, 2011 | Let us begin with this simple, indisputable truth: public employees' unions don't get a single red cent from taxpayers. And they aren't a mechanism to “force” working people to support Democrats – that's completely illegal.

Photo Credit: vaxomatic

Public sector workers are employed by the government, but they are private citizens. Once a private citizen earns a dollar from the sweat of his or her brow, it no longer belongs to his or her employer. In the case of public workers, it is no longer a “taxpayer dollar”; it is a dollar held privately by an American citizen. Public sector unions are financed through the dues paid by these private citizens, who elected to be part of a union – not a single taxpayer dollar is involved, and no worker is forced to join a union against his or her wishes. No worker in the United States is required to give one red cent to support a political cause he or she doesn't agree with.

There is no distinction between the role public- and private-sector unions play: both represent their members in negotiations with their employers. At the federal level, both are prohibited from using their members' dues for political purposes. They donate to political campaigns – to elect lawmakers who will stand up for the interests of working people – but only out of voluntary contributions their members choose to make to their PACs.

“Unions cannot, from their general funds, contribute a dime to any federal candidate or national political party,” says Laurence Gold, an attorney with the AFL-CIO. “They can only do it through their separate political PAC and only according to strict limits.”

The states have a patchwork of different laws, and many do allow unions to donate to campaigns. But membership is entirely voluntary – when a group of workers elect to form a union, it doesn't mean that everyone must sign up. The union negotiates on behalf of all the workers in the group – and all of the workers get the job security and other benefits that come with collective bargaining -- but by law it can't compel them to pay union dues. “It is a right-wing canard that anyone needs to join a union,” Gold told AlterNet. “If a union member doesn't like what his or her union is doing, he or she is ultimately free to walk, without any diminution in their employment rights. They still get all the benefits and the union still has to represent them – just like it did the day before.”

In states that haven't passed so-called Right-To-Work laws, the union can charge all workers in a “negotiating unit” for the direct cost of representing them, but cannot, by law, force them to pay for the union's political activities. “They can only be required to pay for their share of bargaining costs and representation costs – not politics, not legislative stuff, not anything else,” Gold said. “Compulsory union dues are a canard, everywhere, and without exception. Anybody who says, oh you can compel somebody to support the union's electoral activities – well, that's simply false.”

Now that we have established a baseline of factual reality, let's take a look at what much of the media – even the ostensibly “liberal” media – are telling the American people.

In a widely cited opinion piece in the Washington Post, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson claimed that "public employee unions have the unique power to help pick pliant negotiating partners -- by using compulsory dues to elect friendly politicians." Again, a blatant falsehood, and one that prompted economist Dean Baker to point out that “if Mr. Gerson knows of any violations of the law, I'm sure that there are many ambitious prosecutors who would be happy to hear his evidence.”

The irony here is that while unions can't compel workers to fork over a penny for political campaigns, corporations can donate unlimited amounts of their shareholders' equity to do so – they are, in fact, in the “unique position” to elect pliant lawmakers. “What the right-wing and the business community always try to portray is that you have these union bosses that are forcing helpless employees to give them money,” says Gold, “when the reality is that these are their members who chose to be in a union and then elected their officers democratically, in sharp contrast to corporations, none of whose officers are elected democratically unless you count shareholders voting at an annual meeting as a real democratic system.”

And conservatives have long held that voluntary donations to political campaigns are a high form of free speech. The double standard is clear-- “money equals speech” unless it's money freely donated by working people to advance their own economic interests.

The corporate-backed Heritage Foundation – which has waged a longstanding propaganda war against the American labor movement -- notes that “state and local employees in 28 states are required to pay full union dues” – patently untrue -- and, “using this government coercion, government unions have amassed tremendous financial resources that they use to campaign for higher taxes and higher pay for government workers.”

There are no “government unions,” just unions of private workers. And they have no interest in campaigning for higher taxes – they are unions of taxpaying citizens. They do push for better pay, benefits and working conditions, like private sector unions, but officials elected by American voters determine the number and size of public programs and therefore the ultimate cost of government.

Heritage also makes much of the fact that public unions lobby for various policies that conservatives don't like, and claims, yet again, that they do so with “taxpayer dollars.” That's false, as we know, but it is true of another group: private contractors. They routinely include a line-item billing the government for part of the money they spend on lobbying – they, rather than the unions, actually use taxpayer dollars to lobby for, as Heritage puts it, “legislation and ballot measures that raise taxes and spending.”

Writing for Newsweek, Mark McKinnon writes that “it is the abuse by public unions and their bosses that pushes centrists like me to the GOP.” (McKinnon was a political adviser to both George W. Bush and John McCain.) His enthusiasm to spin public unions as something to be feared is so great, he ends up making this confused – and confusing – argument:

Unlike private-sector jobs, which are more than fully funded through revenues created in a voluntary exchange of money for goods or services, public-sector jobs are funded by taxpayer dollars, forcibly collected by the government (union dues are often deducted from public employees’ paychecks).

I don't pretend to know what he means when he says private sector jobs are more than fully funded – we do have an underemployment rate of about 17 percent – but the rest is an incomprehensible mish-mash of “public sector jobs,” which are obviously paid for out of tax revenues, and public sector unions, which, as he notes, are funded out of the paychecks of private citizens working for the government – workers who choose to belong to a union.

He then advances the Big Lie, essentially turning reality on its head:

Big money from public unions, collected through mandatory dues, and funded entirely by the taxpayer, is then redistributed as campaign cash to help elect the politicians who are then supposed to represent taxpayers in negotiations with those same unions.

This falsehood pitting public employees against taxpayers is ubiquitous. The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Ohio, Wisconsin shine spotlight on new union battle: Government workers vs. taxpayers”; Rush Limbaugh called public sector unions, "money launderers" for "Democrat politicians"; Mark Steyn called them, "rapacious, public sector-shakedown kleptocrats," and self-proclaimed liberal Joe Klein wondered if they “are organized against the might and greed...of the public?” 

All of this is meant to serve another, Bigger Lie – even more ubiquitous -- that the cost of public workers is killing state budgets. As Bill O'Reilly put it with typical understatement, state "governments can't afford to operate" because of "union wages and benefits."

Here's another factual baseline: those “cadillac” pensions we always hear about public workers getting actually average $22,000 per year and amount to just 6 percent of state budgets. Some states' pension funds have problems because they've been raided to pay for tax cuts, but in aggregate, pensions aren't eating up state budgets. Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon about what he calls  “the imaginary public sector pension fund crisis,” notes that because the stock market has recovered to a great degree, “those horrible 'shortfalls' everyone has been making such a big deal of are already in retreat.”

As economist Dean Baker notes, it was Wall Street, not a bunch of teachers and firefighters, which is to blame for the gaps that do exist. “Most of the pension shortfall,” he wrote, “is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today.”

Public workers' salaries are another 28 percent of state budgets. They get paid less than comparable workers in the private sector, even including benefits. The problem, as far as an honest debate goes, comes from the word “comparable.” Last week, USA Today (mis)informed its readers that workers in the public sector make more than in the private, a claim it backed up with misleading averages. The article only quoted in passing an economist who pointed out that their “analysis is misleading because it doesn't reflect factors such as education that result in higher pay for public employees.” It's actually meaningless, as public workers are twice as likely to have a college degree and have, on average, more years on the job than workers in the private sector.

State and local employees' wages and salaries have virtually nothing to do with the budget gaps which many states are grappling with – that too is a result of the recession caused by Wall Street, not Main Street. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “State tax collections, adjusted for inflation, are now 12 percent below pre-recession levels, while the need for state-funded services has not declined. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the last several years, states continue to face large budget gaps.” According to Census data, states' social welfare payments to struggling individuals and families increased by around 25 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the last quarter of 2010.

Most of the media lazily accepts that collective bargaining by state workers is a fiscal matter – a typical headline on AOL news asked, “Can collective bargaining bills stem state deficits?” as if there is some correlation between those two things. But the evidence doesn't suggest as much: There are already 13 states that restrict public workers' bargaining rights and it hasn't helped their bottom lines. As Ed Kilgore noted, "eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio," and " three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20%."

Tragically, the corporate media, rather than shedding light on these facts –which are necessary for a healthy debate -- is helping to obscure them under a cloud of anti-union spin.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

RALLY IN DC: EXCLUSIVE TO CHERCHE LA VERITE

Demonstration at Dupont Circle, Washington, DC, Saturday February 26, 2011

NOTES FROM DC RALLY TO SUPPORT WISCONSIN


By Arlene Montemarano

Saturday noon, about 300 people began to gather in Dupont Circle, many carrying signs and all looking very determined. Before it was over, the crowd seems to have doubled. These people understood what the dangers are in staying home when our right to organize is systematically being taken from us. They understood that the time is now to resist in the only way that resistance has ever worked. By coming together.

Following are some of the things that were said during this rally: A young man from Egypt spoke of his parents, both teachers, who have no health care and no ability to bargain for better working conditions in Egypt's dictatorship. They are living in fear and he wants us to know that is what awaits us if we let it happen. This is the fight of our lives. A woman spoke of the wars and the new policy that states we can attack any country though they never attacked us. With children and mothers everywhere dying. They did not deserve these attacks, and the cost of them is making us poorer and more and more in debt.

Wall Street collapses and they blame the teachers. During these terrible economic times, with so much suffering, they have chosen to ignore us and cut taxes for the obscenely rich for a second time. What to do when the robber barons we need protection from... are our leaders. The teachers in Wisconsin are protesting by taking their own sick days and the resulting cut in pay. The fire fighters, who are exempted from Walker's law, have joined them and all the other demonstrators because they know we must stand strong and united. Wisconsin working people have said that if the bill passes, they will have a general strike. We are not going to continue to take it on the chin as we have for the last 30 years. Wisconsin is the state that was first to have unemployment insurance, workman's comp, and collective bargaining for public employees. Saw signs saying "We Are Wisconsin" 2/3 of our people are employed by business, and 1/3 by government. Do giant corporations invest in America? Do they even pay their own share? Do they export jobs and import oil? We should be entering the middle class, not falling out. We should be giving charity, not getting it. We have the right to demand that our government work for us. A man got up and told of what it meant to grow up in a union family. Father held two or three jobs, worked hard and educated all his children on union wages. They lived the good life, felt pride of accomplishment, and had hope for the future. We are the people. We get to decide! This country has always been the strongest when our unions are the strongest. The rich businessmen are just trying to take everything they want, because they do not respect us. In the past, when people stood together for their rights, nothing could stop them. We are fighting for the decent standard of living that comes from union jobs all across America. There was a march from Dupont Circle to the White House and then the crowd dispersed, for now, at about 1:30.

An important note from the same author:

In Walker's bill: section 168.96; the Wisconsin publicly-funded and built state of the art geo-thermal plants would be up for grabs by Koch Brothers. Gov could sell them at whatever price he determines to be fair to anyone without approval of the public service commission.

That is one of the onerous hidden provisions of this bill. The Koch brothers want these plants.

Forces Behind the Egyptian Revolution

Submitted by Michael Collins on Fri, 02/11/2011 - 04:57

 

(Washington, DC) Two critical forces behind the Egyptian Revolution are missing from the front pages, or any pages, of the corporate media.. They are the critical role of Egypt's union movement and the universal desire of all people to live in peace, freedom and dignity. The grievances of Egypt's workers and their struggle to unionize effectively receive no attention. The connection between that struggle and the right to assemble to change conditions, the demonstrations, has yet to enter the public dialog. It is as though this were some aberration rather than an expression of a fundamental human aspiration suppressed in Egypt for decades.

The Egyptian people were poised for a mass celebration following what they hoped was the farewell speech by former President Hosni Mubarak. For seventeen days, the people massed in Cairo's Tahrir Square and protested throughout Egypt, including the boomtown of Port Suez. No G-20 leader has provided unequivocal support for the peoples' demands for Mubarak and his entire regime leave immediately and for open and fair elections. Today, with signs of annoyance, President Barack Obama said Mubarak needed a, "credible, concrete and unequivocal path to democracy." He isn't quite there yet. What does a "path to democracy" look like? How long does it take to walk that path?

But the Egyptian military leaders may have acted already.

Like most insulated, pampered tyrants, Mubarak's contact with reality is extremely weak. He didn't get the message from the Egyptian military Supreme Council. Aljazeera reported that the leaders promised, "measures and arrangements … to safeguard the nation, its achievements and the ambitions of its great people." The news service concluded that the council's notice that it was in session indefinitely indicated that a military coup had already taken place.

When Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida premiered in Egypt in 1871, there were twelve elephants on stage for a scene showing the triumphal return of soldiers from battle. Nobody missed the elephants. But the two elephants in the living room of the Egyptian peoples' movement get little press. They are prime movers in the events leading up to the Egyptian revolution.

Egypt's Labor Movement

The Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF) is a part of the Egyptian government since 1957. The anti-worker organization created problems for workers when many enterprises were state owned. Things got worse with the introduction of a "market economy."

Egypt began a series of reforms in the 1990's that stacked the deck against workers and farmers. The government sold off the large state enterprises. New owners had little incentive to keep people in jobs or jobs in Egypt. The government enacted new measures to protect large farmers, with peasant farmers left on their own.

When conservative Prime Minister, Ahmed Nazif, took power in 2004, the situation became desperate. With the help of a new law anti labor law, pressure mounted on Egypt's industrial workers. The ETUF had little to offer in support and frequently overruled the votes to strike of local chapters.

Two strikes drew the battle lines between workers and the government. In 2006, local union officials overturned a vote by 24,000 textile workers to strike in Ghazl al-Mahalla. When workers appealed to the EFTU, the official government union organization reminded workers that a 2003 labor reform law made it illegal to form unions independent of official government labor organization. The strike took place but was eventually broken.

The same labor movement that staged the 2006 strike and a follow up in 2007, called for a national strike on April 6, 2008 to raise the nation's minimum wage and protest high food prices. Mubarak's government sent in police who took over the factory in hopes of preventing the strike. Conflict broke out with violence on the part of police toward the union members calling for the strike. Police arrested workers. Trials, convictions and prison sentences handed out by special national security courts followed quickly. Other members continued to protest.

An Egyptian writer noted, "In the 6 April uprising, the demands of the workers and the general population overlapped. People called for lower food prices as workers called for a minimum wage."

In addition, the April 6 Youth Movement emerged as a key player advancing the aims of the national strike. This is the same organization that has been central to rallying crowds throughout the country.

Food was a critical issue in 2008. The solution to that issue would have addressed food and other problems of economic exploitation in Egypt, a national living wage.

We didn't hear about the 2008 strike, however. We did about the 2008 "food riots." CNN News reported, Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket, April 14, 2008. The words "strike" and "union" were never used, nor was there any reference to the basis for the strikes, a demand for a living wage. Huffington Post carried a lengthy article on the events, Egypt Grants Bonuses After Deadly Food Riots, April 8, 2008. The word "strike" was just once but the article failed to include anything mentioning a "union" or labor conflict.

Food is critical. But the desire to earn a living wage to afford food is more fundamental to the Egyptian people. They don't want a handout form their leaders, they want the right to determine their own future by organizing an independent labor movement. That desire flowed into the streets of Egypt in a movement larger than the union effort but the history of worker struggles is a key part of the history of this revolution. On January 30, 2010, workers in Tahrir Square formed the Egyptian Federation for Independent Unions. The organization is separate from the official union and in full defiance of current labor law adopted by the Mubarak regime.

Why Fundamental Rights Matter

The Egyptian people didn't require any special training to know what they deserved. The ability to assemble, plan, organize, and attempt to effect change in a civilized fashion emerged before conditions became intolerable.

The workers in Mahalla didn't need a year at the Harvard School of Government to learn their rights.

The desire was fundamental. No study Maslow's hierarchy of needs was required to tell them that there was more than just survival at stake. They knew that meeting the basic needs required an exercise of the more fundamental rights of freedom of association and action in a society that respected their rights as citizens.

Finishing the Work

There are great powers and commercial interests lurking at the edges of the this remarkable peoples' movement. The call for an "orderly transition" is just another form of paternalism. What is orderly? Time enough for Mubarak or his proxy to stay long enough to rig another election? Time enough for things to cool down enough to walk just a few steps forward rather than a revolution? Time enough for U.S. and European Union leaders to install a new leader to deliver what Mubarak did so well for 30 years?

The fundamental rights and the exercise of those rights by a sovereign people should be inviolable, particularly in a part of the world where the West claims that it is promoting democracy. The Egyptian revolution has at it's core, the demand for the elimination of a massively corrupt government and the opportunity create an honest one in its place. That is a goal of people everywhere, a goal that will be met if those few obsessed with control for their own purposes would just step aside.

END

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