Author: Andrew Moss

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Opinion The Last Word

The Growing Case for Medicare for All

In her debate with Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris declared, “Access to healthcare should be a right, not a privilege for those who can afford it.” Her stance is laudable, and the reforms she advocated that evening make political sense in a tight presidential race, i.e. widening access to care through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and extending negotiated drug prices (e.g., insulin capped at $35 per month) to all Americans, not only Medicare recipients. 

But such reforms only go so far in realizing the fundamental value of healthcare as a right belonging to all Americans. The reforms won’t address the inequities and structural problems plaguing our fragmented healthcare system (or “semi-system,” as political scientist Jacob S. Hacker has described it).

This past year, the U.S. experienced a national medical emergency affecting millions of Americans. Known as the “Great Unwinding,” this underreported emergency entailed the disenrollment from Medicaid of 23 million Americans, many of them children. Medicaid, the joint federal-state program providing healthcare coverage to poor Americans, had put millions of people on continuous coverage as a result of 2020 legislation passed at the outset of the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, Medicaid recipients had to undergo regular checks on their income-related eligibility for the program, checks that often interrupted care with red tape and bureaucratic glitches (patients moving, or not getting adequate notifications, as well as confusing instructions for individuals with disabilities). Continuous coverage meant that approximately 90 million people received necessary medical appointments and medications without interruption. 

But when the pandemic-era program expired last year, states began disenrolling patients (some states more aggressively than others) with results that were highly disruptive to patients’ ongoing care. One young Florida couple, whose 7-year-old daughter has cerebral palsy and epileptic seizures, was given a 10-day notice of their daughter’s disenrollment, a notification that meant disruptions to the visits with her daughter’s therapists, as well a threat to the continuous supply of her medications. Another couple was informed that their 12-year-old daughter had retained her Medicaid coverage, while their 6-year-old son was disenrolled.

Over the course of this past year, 56.4 million people (69 percent of the people who had been disenrolled) were eventually able to have their coverage renewed, while 25 million (31 percent) remain disenrolled, many for so-called “procedural” reasons (e.g., outdated contact information, inability to understand or complete renewal packets). Overall, 25.6 million Americans lack health insurance altogether. 

These figures are unacceptable in a nation as wealthy as the U.S. — a nation that spends more on healthcare per capita than any comparable nation in wealth and size. As Adam Gaffney, a critical care physician, has noted, any short- or long-term gaps in coverage can “precipitate potentially deadly ruptures of care.” Citing recent medical studies, Gaffney explains that, “most of the benefits of modern healthcare, after all, emerge not from emergency care provided in places like ERs or ICUs, as important as that is. Rather, health is protected through long-standing therapeutic relationships between patients and primary care physicians that allow medical problems to be recognized and chronic problems carefully managed.”

For these reasons (i.e., the fragmented nature of our healthcare system, the medically harmful discontinuities of care, the unacceptable number of uninsured individuals), our nation deserves a genuine Medicare for all: a single-payer healthcare system that’s publicly financed, and that provides individuals with comprehensive care and choice in selecting providers. And, as recommended by the advocacy group Physicians for a National Health Program, the delivery of care would remain “largely in private hands.”

The provision of coverage itself, however, must not be compromised by the introduction of for-profit insurance plans, like the Medicare Advantage (MA) plans that now enroll half of all Medicare recipients. Under such plans, a private insurer is paid a fixed monthly amount for each Medicare recipient who selects the option, and the plan handles the coverage for that individual. Introduced during the Reagan administration, the MA plans were intended to provide more efficient care, but they’ve ended up being more costly than traditional Medicare, have posed problems to patients and rural health facilities because of frequent denials of care, and have been investigated for fraudulent overbilling.

In its Project 2025 blueprint for governance, the Heritage Foundation has called for privatized MA plans to be the “default option” for Medicare, and they will likely be Donald Trump’s preferred option were he to be elected president this November. He would also be likely to follow the Project’s recommendations on stripping certain key consumer protections from the ACA.

If Kamala Harris is elected president, she will have before her an array of policy options that go far beyond the reforms she mentioned in her debate with Trump. These are options that can provide all Americans, no matter what their employment or socioeconomic status, with comprehensive and continuous healthcare.

For example, there is proposed Medicare for All legislation now before the Senate and House (Sanders, Jayapal, Dingell), with 15 cosponsors in the Senate and support from half the Democratic caucus in Congress. In addition, the 2024 Democratic Party platform includes a plank calling for a “public option” to supplement the marketplace plans in the ACA. Such an option, which Harris advocated in her 2019 bid for president, would give Americans of any age the opportunity to enroll in Medicare-style, publicly funded coverage.

In recent weeks, Harris has said that although her policy positions may have changed, her values haven’t. If she is elected president, she should seize the opportunity to align her values — healthcare as a right, not a commodity — with policies that offer the best chance of realizing those values fully. 

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor, nonviolence, and culture from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from California State University.

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Opinion The Last Word

Healthcare at a Crossroads

Kamala Harris plans to expand access to healthcare. (Photo: Hush Naidoo Jade Photography | Unsplash)

As the November election approaches, the nation again nears a crossroads on healthcare, with candidates diverging on a basic question of equity: Who is to bear the risks and costs of care? For Donald Trump, his congressional allies, and conservative policy analysts, the answer is clear: cut government spending and shift the risks and costs back onto individuals, employers, and states. For Kamala Harris, the priorities move in a strikingly different direction: expand access to healthcare, strengthening the federal government’s role in guaranteeing healthcare for all Americans, no matter what their socioeconomic status may be.

The differences show up most pointedly in the candidates’ positions on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Medicaid. Fourteen years after Congress passed the ACA, providing subsidies that enabled millions of Americans to obtain health insurance, the percentage of uninsured Americans has declined to a historic low of less than eight percent. Vice President Harris has advocated for, and defended, the ACA, and is expected to support the extension of enhanced subsidies, introduced during the pandemic, beyond their expiration date of 2025. These subsidies have made it possible for many people to obtain marketplace coverage.

Donald Trump tried and failed to repeal the ACA in 2017, and since then he has vowed he “would make it much better than it is right now,” though without providing specifics. One likely course of action, however, would be to target the ACA’s protection of individuals against insurance denial because of preexisting health conditions. As president, Trump authorized the expansion of short-term insurance plans as an alternative to the more comprehensive ACA marketplace plans. These short-term plans allowed insurers to bar people from coverage because of preexisting conditions, and to set rates based on their medical histories.

More recently, the Republican Study Committee, a group comprising four-fifths of Republican congressional members and their leadership, released a budget proposal calling — among many other things — for an end to the federal government’s regulation regarding preexisting conditions, and allowing states to decide whether or not to keep the rule.

Medicaid also represents a major difference between the candidates. A joint federal-state program established in 1965 along with Medicare, Medicaid now provides health insurance for almost 75 million low-income Americans. When Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2014, it included a provision to expand Medicaid coverage to all Americans earning up to 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. Forty-one states, including the District of Columbia, adopted the expanded coverage, along with federal matching grants to go with it, and 10 states (primarily Republican-controlled states) rejected it, keeping insurance out of reach for many low-income residents. 

As president, Donald Trump approved waivers allowing states to set work requirements in order for people to receive Medicaid, and waiver programs have proved costly and ineffective. The Biden-Harris administration withdrew those waivers, claiming that work requirements do nothing to advance the purpose of Medicaid, which has been to expand access to healthcare.

What should voters make of these differences? One way to begin answering the question is to listen to people closest to the issues. An internist working at a San Francisco public hospital writes of treating an indigent man who requested hospice care rather than undergoing an amputation for a bone infection in his arm, an infection that didn’t respond to antibiotics. The man explained that with an amputated arm, he’d be much more vulnerable to assault on the streets, and thus he opted for hospice — unless he was able to get housing — a goal far out of reach in a city with a critical shortage of available housing.

The man eventually died of sepsis (the physician refers to the cause as “end-stage poverty”), and the internist explains, “ … that illness in our patients isn’t just a biological phenomenon. It’s the manifestation of social inequality in people’s bodies.”

The U.S. spends more money per capita on healthcare than any comparable nation in wealth and size, and yet life expectancy in the nation is lower than that of any peer nation. There are many reasons for this, one certainly having to do with the U.S. being the only advanced nation without universal healthcare for its citizens. Poverty and racism factor significantly as well, with persistent indicators like major racial gaps in maternal and infant mortality. A recent California study found that babies born to the poorest Black mothers have almost twice the mortality rate of the poorest white mothers, and even babies born to the wealthiest Black mothers have a higher mortality rate than the poorest white mothers.

The U.S. has been slowly moving in the direction of other advanced nations, gradually increasing the federal role in guaranteeing healthcare for all. This November’s election will be a referendum of sorts, indicating a continuation of the present direction or a significant reversal of policy. At stake is a choice between leaving individuals more or less to their own devices in a highly unequal society, or recognizing that healthcare — and the eradication of inequity — is a collective responsibility. 

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor, nonviolence, and culture from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from the California State University.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Union Idea and Its Adversaries

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American workers made great strides in 2023. Autoworkers, UPS drivers, Kaiser health workers, screenwriters, and actors all scored significant gains in earnings and benefits as a result of their respective unions taking tough, assertive stances in strikes and other forms of workplace activism. The agreements emerging from these actions will mean substantial improvements in the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families.

But daunting obstacles face millions of other workers who’ve been attempting to unionize their workplaces or simply secure a fair and just contract when a previous contract expired. Global companies like Starbucks and Amazon, for example, have managed to avoid any kind of contract settlement with unionizing employees, and in my home city of Los Angeles, where existing contracts expired on June 30th for over 60 hotels, the largest hotel worker strike in U.S. history continues to drag on, soon into its sixth month. Only five hotels thus far have come to any tentative agreements with workers.

A major problem, particularly for workers seeking to unionize their workplaces for the first time, is that U.S. labor law places workers at a serious disadvantage with respect to employers. The latter can, for example, subject employees to “captive audience” meetings that promulgate anti-union messages, and can indefinitely drag out collective bargaining with virtually no penalties — a process that can simply wear workers down by attrition.

In a broader sense, however, the U.S. — unlike many advanced industrialized countries — is pervaded in its political culture and institutions by a deep anti-union ideology. Extending in the modern era as far back as the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act), this ideology has guided a wide range of efforts to unravel the New Deal endorsement of government as a regulator of corporate power and as a protector of workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively.

As early as the 1940s, business groups and conservative politicians advanced “right-to-work” legislation and litigation undermining unions by preventing them from requiring membership or dues from workers at sites where the unions represented all workers in collective bargaining. These legislative and judicial efforts portrayed right-to-work as a defense of workers’ rights and as a counter to union racketeering and corruption. Since then, 26 states have adopted right-to-work legislation.

In addition, union busting emerged as a sophisticated way of countering union influence. Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein documented how an attorney and Walmart executive vice president named John Tate helped perfect, from the early 1970s on, a highly effective strategy that fended off the most assertive efforts to unionize that retail giant’s stores. As Tate declared in 2004 to a meeting of assembled Walmart executives and managers, “Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living.” Noting that unions represented a third of all workers in the private sector 50 years earlier, he said, “I am part of the reason that today they represent 9 percent.”

Since Mr. Tate uttered those words, the public approval of unions has shifted upward in the wake of a major recession, an ever-widening inequality, and a devastating pandemic. In these altered circumstances, therefore, it’s instructive to read a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article entitled “The Labor-Savvy Leader,” in which three management experts associated with the Aspen Institute and MIT’s Sloan School of Management advise corporate leaders to work with, rather than against, organized labor. These experts (Roy E. Bahat, Thomas A. Kochan, and Liba Wenig Rubenstein) argue that companies choosing greater collaboration with labor can reap such benefits as improved employee satisfaction and retention, while companies seeking to bust unions can expose themselves to “existential risks,” including harm to their corporate brands, i.e. as consumers become more aware of companies’ treatment of workers.

This advice to corporate leaders is well-taken, but anti-union ideology is so pervasive that it will take a lot more than savvy corporate leaders to change the culture. The HBR authors may write that union busting poses an existential risk to companies that practice it, but a glance at the boiler plate language of corporate annual reports will find that unions themselves are often perceived by management as the existential risk. Marriott International, for example, the largest hotel chain in the world, tells stockholders in its most recent report that labor disputes and increased demands from labor unions could, among other things, “harm our relationship with our associates [employees], harm our relationships with our guests and customers, divert management attention, and reduce customer demand for our services.”

For the striking hotel workers, these “increased demands” are for contracts that ensure economic stability and security. In this regard, workers are striking on behalf of the union idea, a concept that, by and large, informs all struggles for economic justice. Uniting the values of solidarity and social freedom, this idea affirms that all working people, no matter their background or educational status, have the right to lives of dignity and well-being.

The struggle for this idea, for the values of solidarity and social freedom, plays out on the picket line — and in courtrooms, legislative chambers, think tanks, educational institutions, and places of worship. For the hotel workers I know, the idea translates into the right to enough compensation that one needn’t sleep in one’s car or work two or three jobs to make ends meet. It means having time and resources enough to care for an elderly parent or disabled family member, enough to be with one’s children and see them grow.

At the individual, human level, this is what’s at stake in the struggle for the union idea today.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor and immigration from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from the California State University.

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Opinion The Last Word

One Day for Labor Day Is Not Enough

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The state of labor this year is so fraught, so weighted with issues and problems, that a single day of homage and reflection doesn’t seem enough. It’s as if a year or more is needed to engage the issues, challenges, and possibilities facing American workers today. Consider the following:

Some 37.9 million Americans, about 11.6 percent of the population, live in poverty. But as sociologist Matthew Desmond has noted, about one in three Americans lives in a household with an income of $55,000 per year or less, an income barely enough to cover the rising costs of rent, healthcare, and food. Some 10.2 percent of American households (13.5 million households) have been food insecure, lacking access at one time or another to an adequately nutritious diet.

At the same time, organizations that best represent the material interests of working people — labor unions — are at an all-time low in membership (10.1 percent), down from 20.1 percent of working adults in 1983, when comparable data was first available. As studies have shown, unionized workers tend to make wages higher than those of non-union workers, and they tend to be less vulnerable to such corporate labor strategies as outsourcing.

But outdated labor laws and weak enforcement continue to hamper the efforts of thousands of workers seeking to organize unions and achieve fair collective bargaining agreements. Despite some important successes (e.g. the wage raises and safety provisions recently won by UPS workers), major employers like Starbucks and Amazon stonewall negotiations, and union busting remains a lucrative enterprise: a highly effective instrument deployed by many companies.

To complicate matters, AI has entered the workplace, threatening jobs in call centers and other places of employment — and remaining a contentious issue in ongoing strikes by screenwriters and actors.

Recent polling indicates that public support for unions (71 percent) is the highest it’s been since 1965. But it’s one thing to indicate approval on an opinion poll; it’s another to express that support in concrete ways.

One way, of course, is to continue educating oneself about labor issues and the way they’re played out in public discourse. With the 2024 election 14 months away, for example, one can scrutinize the words and actions of candidates who profess to care about working families.

Consider, for example, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott’s declaration, at the recent Republican presidential debate, that “the only way we change education in this nation, is to break the backs of the teachers unions.” What does it mean to represent unions in this way — to erase any consideration of teachers as both parents and as members of a community?

And what kinds of legislation, what kinds of policies, best represent the interests of workers — like those at Starbucks and Amazon — who seek to organize and achieve fair contracts? Consider the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which, among other things, would make it illegal for employers to force workers to attend anti-union, captive audience meetings. The PRO Act was passed by Congress in 2021, but it has since languished in the Senate. What will it take for basic legislation like this to become law?

Behind these questions lies the fundamental issue of accountability. How to hold candidates and public officials accountable for stances and actions that help or hinder workers? How to hold ourselves accountable as citizens, willing to take the extra steps to look beyond campaign rhetoric as educated and discerning voters? And how to look around our own neighborhoods — informing ourselves of local labor issues, respecting (even joining) picket lines, and supporting workers’ rights to organize whenever possible?

The need for accountability applies to unions and union members as well. In my home city of Los Angeles, where screenwriters and actors continue their strikes, 32,000 low-wage hotel workers have also been on strike for two months. In a city where exorbitant rents have made it impossible for housekeepers or hotel bartenders to live where they work, the union is demanding not only better wages, but, among other things, a 7 percent surcharge on rooms to help fund affordable housing for workers.

Strongly contested by the hotel owners, this latter demand nevertheless shows a unique kind of accountability: not only a union’s investment in fair wages, working conditions, and benefits for workers, but also an investment in the housing stock and well-being of entire communities.

This Labor Day was marked by requisite speeches, marches, and other forms of observance. And it should. But may it also mark a deepening, an intensifying, of the ongoing struggle for workers’ rights and labor justice.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor and immigration from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from the California State University.

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Opinion The Last Word

How America Undervalues Working People

America undermines its workers. (Photo: Wirestock | Dreamstime.com)

America is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Yet when compared to other advanced industrialized countries, it fares dismally in national laws and policies affecting workers. This is a major claim of a recent cross-national study sponsored by the humanitarian organization Oxfam America, a report that offers a powerful lens for understanding the major strike activity now underway in the U.S. The study notes how political choices create environments that favor or undermine working people — choices that in the U.S. have largely been to the detriment of workers.

In light of the current strikes (e.g., writers, actors, hotel workers, Amazon delivery drivers), the study reminds one that, whatever the political environment may be, it’s the workers themselves — and the unions that represent them — that must continue to assert the leadership needed to bring about a more just and equitable society.

Perhaps the disadvantaging of U.S. workers is no more readily apparent than in policies setting the minimum wage. Unlike 80 other countries that mandate an annual review of a national minimum wage, the U.S. requires no such review, and Congress has failed to raise the hourly wage from $7.25 since 2014, and failed as well to raise the tipped minimum wage (from $2.13) since 1991. Many states and localities have set their minimum wage above the national standard, from $8.75 per hour in West Virginia to $16.50 in the District of Columbia.

But these numbers only begin to become meaningful when you factor in the cost of housing. According to latest figures from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, workers in this country must earn on average $28.58 an hour for a “modest two-bedroom rental home” and $23.67 for a “modest one-bedroom rental home.” In California, where housing costs are the highest in the nation, a working person must earn $42.25 an hour for a two-bedroom rental.

For hotel housekeepers in Los Angeles, who currently make on average only $20 to $25 an hour, the only way to survive financially is to take on two or three jobs — or to commute two or three hours a day from distant, less expensive locations. So these workers, represented by UNITE HERE Local 11, opted to take collective action. Once contracts with 61 Southern California hotels expired on June 30th, they began a series of rolling strikes, walking off the job at selected groups of hotels to make clear to employers their critical role to the industry. The strikes continue to this day.

As hurtful as the rent/wage disparity is, it’s still part of a much bigger picture of policy failures. The U.S. is almost alone among advanced industrialized nations in tying health insurance to employment. Without universal, tax-based health insurance, many workers risk losing their insurance as a result of work-related issues and changes.

As the current SAG-AFTRA strike has made clear, many actors are at risk of losing their insurance if they’re not able to work a minimum number of days per year or reach a minimum earnings threshold. Some 86 percent of the union’s 160,000 members do not earn enough to qualify for health insurance.

And healthcare is only one of the comparative indices with which to measure a nation’s commitment to the well-being of its workers and their families. The U.S. stands alone among advanced nations in lacking a federal mandate to provide paid leave. By way of contrast, consider Spain’s mandate of 16 weeks of paid maternity leave and 16 weeks of paid paternity leave for new parents.

As challenging as the current strikes are for workers in a wide range of sectors, it’s even more challenging for workers to begin organizing unions and securing fair contracts. In a nation where union busting is a major industry, and where penalties against companies for labor violations are relatively minor, it’s not difficult for large corporations like Amazon or Starbucks to stonewall efforts at collective bargaining.

Though Starbucks workers have voted to unionize at more than 340 stores since the first successful vote in 2021, the company has failed to negotiate a single contract with workers at any of the stores.

Once again, a contrast with other nations is instructive, particularly in countries like Austria, where sectoral bargaining allows panels of workers to bargain with employers across an entire industry, rather than company by company.

Workers and unions do need allies in government and in the community. They can’t change laws and policy without strong support.

And current strikes demonstrate how such support can be manifested in many ways — from open letters to employers, to legislative initiatives, to direct participation in worker-led actions, including civil disobedience.

But ultimately the initiative, the perseverance, and the courage lie with the workers themselves — seeking dignity and a better life for themselves and their families. It is out of this leadership that a more equitable society must, in the final analysis, emerge for us all.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor and immigration from Los Angeles.

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Opinion The Last Word

Why the Fight to Unionize Starbucks Matters to Us All

Photo: Khadeeja Yasser | Unsplash

For good reason, the fight to unionize Starbucks has drawn considerable public attention since workers at a Buffalo, New York, store voted to unionize in December of 2021. Since that time, workers at more than 300 stores, representing more than 8,000 workers, have so voted. The campaign has been met with strong company resistance, resulting in legal rulings that found Starbucks violating federal labor law by (among other things) illegally surveilling workers, firing workers involved in union organizing, and adding workers at specific workplaces to dilute union strength. In an eventful year and a half, the company has failed to negotiate a single contract.

This union fight, like those at other large corporations, has exposed the public to current practices of “union busting,” and such exposure carries an additional charge in the case of Starbucks because of the personal connections many people have to their local stores and to the workers who prepare and serve their coffee. But there’s another dimension to the fight that, for many, is less readily apparent, and this has to do with the struggle’s implications for American democracy. As political scientist Danielle Allen put it, a democratic society means “equality entailed in sharing ownership of public life and in co-creating our common world.” That shared ownership and co-creation extends to the workplace as much as it does to other aspects of our everyday lives.

The issue came into sharp relief at a March hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a hearing that served as grand political theater for an airing of ideas and attitudes about the Starbucks campaign and about labor relations in general. The committee chair, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), focused his introductory remarks and his questioning of former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz to represent the company’s resistance to the union as sustained, pernicious, and illegal.

Some of the most revealing comments, however, were offered by Sanders’ colleagues, including those of Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah). Romney began by acknowledging the legal right to form a union, and he affirmed the need for accountability if the law is broken. But he disclosed a rather different kind of attitude when he declared, “There are some employers who are not good employers, and a union is necessary to protect the rights of those individuals.” Here Romney implied that good employers obviate the need for unions in their workplaces, begging the question as to who determines who a good or bad employer is. Romney went on to say, “There are legitimate reasons why an employer might choose not to become unionized,” suggesting that the question could be decided by the employer, not the workers. Romney has it wrong.

The right to form a union and to bargain collectively is a fundamental human right, articulated in Section 7 of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act and in Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a fundamental building block of a democratic society, strengthening workers’ capacity to impact the conditions and quality of their working lives. To resist good faith negotiations is to violate that fundamental right.

Recognizing these concerns, in March the Starbucks shareholders commissioned an independent investigation of the company’s behavior as measured by core labor standards of the International Labour Association. The shareholders did so over the objections of the Starbucks board.

Starbucks union members are demanding, among other things, a base wage of at least $20 an hour, full-time status for individuals working 32 hours a week or more, benefits for those working fewer than 20 hours, and affordable, 100 percent employer-paid healthcare. And on their union website, they list “the right to organize” as the first demand, calling on the company to adhere to an “ethical code of conduct designed to safeguard the organizing process.” In pursuit of these aims, unionized workers have engaged in a wide range of strategies, from strikes to a bargaining strategy involving regional in-person meetings.

In their continuing struggle with a $133 billion company, the Starbucks unionized workers and organizers are engaged in fulfilling a basic task of any effective union, i.e. representing the economic and political interests of working-class Americans. In so doing, they underscore the important role that unions play as economic and political counterweights to the hyper-concentration of power by wealthy elites (with the top 1 percent now owning 32.3 percent of the nation’s wealth). This hyper-concentration contributes to the marginalization and precarity of millions, as well as to the degradation of democracy.

As an industry, union busting wastes immense amounts of money ($400 million a year), while suppressing human creativity and the potential for collaborative working environments. This much has been acknowledged by scholars in management, who point out that unions can enhance morale and productivity in workplaces. And it has been understood in countries where the percentage of unionized workers far exceeds that of the U.S. (e.g. more than 60 percent in Denmark and Sweden versus 10 percent in the U.S.).

If you happen to be reading this column while drinking a cup of Starbucks coffee, it may be possible that the workers at the store where you bought it have voted union. Perhaps not. But whether or not that store is unionized, those workers — and the company — are now in a process of transformation, and the outcome of that transformation will affect far more than a brand. In some ways visible, in some ways less apparent, that transformation will touch us all. 

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor and immigration from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from the California State University.

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Opinion The Last Word

What Faith Activists Bring to the Struggle for Labor Justice

An exhibit of the Memphis sanitation strike at the NCRM (Photo: Jdpphoto12 | Dreamstime.com)

As millions celebrated Holy Week and Passover last week, many clergy and lay activists delved into their own faith traditions to link these observances with ongoing struggles for economic justice.

An interfaith worker-justice Seder in Long Beach, California, retells the Passover story of liberation in contemporary terms, relating the ancient narrative to contemporary struggles for freedom and economic justice on the part of hospitality workers. An interfaith “stations of the worker’s cross” drew workers, clergy, and community activists to Downtown Los Angeles hotels last Friday, where they walked from hotel to hotel, calling attention to the denial of hotel workers’ rights and dignity.

Such observances call to mind the important role, particularly since the mid-20th century, that clergy and lay activists have played in American labor history. These activists helped reframe workers’ struggles within the ethical language of scripture, calling on employers and the community at large to fulfill a collective responsibility to their fellow human beings, no matter their status or station in life.

When Dr. Martin Luther King took up the cause of Memphis’ striking sanitation workers in 1968, he supported their unionizing efforts in response to the dangerous working conditions and oppressive racism they faced every day — as well as to wage levels that left 40 percent of them living below the poverty level. In the speech he delivered to strikers and others on April 3, 1968, Dr. King called for what he labeled a “dangerous unselfishness,” citing Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan to frame the crisis at hand. He said, “The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ [but rather] ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question.”

The following evening, Dr. King was felled by an assassin’s bullet. It took 11 days of rage and violence in 125 cities all over the country before Memphis’ mayor allowed an agreement between the city and the sanitation workers, honoring their right to form a union. The agreement provided significant improvements in working conditions and prohibited the use of race as a barrier to promotion. As one sanitation worker explained to a reporter several years later, “When he [Dr. King] was here in the strike, every man wanted to stand up and be a man. And that was the whole story. We wasn’t counted as men before then. Every man be counted as a man now. It’s no more ‘boy.’ … It’s no more of that Uncle Tom now. … You be treated as a man.”

Faith traditions provide a language that widens the horizons of self-awareness and collective identity. They also motivate activists, clergy, and laity alike, to march and picket alongside workers, offering pivotal community support that can help turn the tide in labor conflicts. In 2008, Smithfield Foods, at the time the largest pork producer in the world, agreed to a union contract with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) at its 5,000-worker plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. As labor scholar and activist Jane McAlevey described the win, “It was the single largest private-sector union victory of the new millennium,” all the more significant for taking place in a state with a low union density and with a company that had fought off unionization for the preceding 14 years.

Religious leaders, including Reverend Nelson Johnson and Reverend Dr. William J. Barber, played a critical role in organizing pickets and in boycotting Smithfield products at a North Carolina grocery chain — as well as in leading a protest at an annual company shareholder meeting. Johnson framed these protests in terms of community: “By calling this a community struggle, we began to change the frame and break down the structural division and set it up so that if justice is the issue here, then everyone in the community is invited to be part of the campaign.”

These benefits of faith-based activism — ethical framing and on-the-ground community support — have helped energize struggles for economic justice throughout the nation.

When the Memphis sanitation workers struck, Dr. King’s close friend and associate, Reverend James M. Lawson, came to understand that event as a “threshold moment” which significantly broadened the struggle for human rights. When he moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s after teaching nonviolence and leading nonviolent campaigns throughout the South, Lawson began addressing more directly and forcefully what he called “the question of economic exploitation and rapaciousness.”

With other faith leaders, he cofounded in 1996 an organization called Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), an organization that mobilized activists in support of janitors, security guards, hospitality workers, and other low-wage workers — winning significant union victories along the way. The interfaith Passover Seder and stations of the worker’s cross I mentioned above are sponsored and cosponsored, respectively, by CLUE.

At a time when increasing inequality has pushed millions of Americans into poverty or great economic insecurity, the need to reaffirm genuine community within a framework of economic justice is more urgent than ever. This season of holiday observances is one in which these issues merit both deep reflection and action.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, writes on labor and immigration from Los Angeles. He is an emeritus professor (nonviolence studies, English) from California State University.

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Opinion The Last Word

DACA and the Politics of Cruelty

There is no good reason to deny permanent status to Dreamers. (Photo: Aaron Burden | Unsplash)

It wasn’t long ago that we awoke to images and stories of families separated at the border, of migrant children locked into dirty, crowded, chain-link pens. For many Americans, this was an alarming introduction to the politics of cruelty that have played out in different periods of American immigration history, but with particular force in the past few years.

Today that type of politics is moving back into the media spotlight. As I write this, it’s not yet clear whether DACA, the program created to protect from deportation the young people brought here as children, will last much longer. In response to a lawsuit brought by the attorney general of Texas and several other states, a federal judge ruled last year that the program was illegal, and his ruling was upheld this past October by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Unless legislation is passed during this year’s waning congressional session to extend the protections afforded to DACA recipients, the case may go to the Supreme Court, where its prospects would be dim.

If DACA is ended, it’s unlikely that the 590,000 young people currently protected by the program will be deported, but they would no longer have the federal protections that have allowed them to work and secure other benefits. They would be pushed back into the shadows and precarity of undocumented status.

That is where the politics of cruelty come in. For this particular kind of politics is not only about policies like family separation, which were intentionally designed to inflict suffering and ostensibly “deter” migrants from coming to the U.S. The politics of cruelty also incorporate a language, a discourse, that casts migrants in dehumanizing terms (“illegal aliens”), presents them as threats to Americans’ physical and economic security, and excludes any reference to America’s need for immigration to maintain a robust economy and revitalize communities.

There is every good reason to extend protection, indeed, permanent status, to DACA recipients, and no good reason to deny it. With the umbrella of the program protecting them since 2012, DACA recipients have been able to go to college, enter professional careers, start families, buy homes, serve as essential workers during the continuing pandemic, and pay their fair share of federal and state taxes.

In short, America is their home, and they have every right to a permanent status that legislation can bring. That is why major political organizations like the U.S. Conference of Mayors have supported such protections, and why business organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have called for legislative action on the recipients’ behalf. Polling data from recent years has consistently shown that a majority of American voters support the continuation of DACA or permanent status for DACA recipients.

Certainly, protecting DACA, or giving a pathway to permanent status for DACA recipients in this congressional session, represents a contraction of the original, ambitious Biden administration goal of extending a path to citizenship to the 11.5 million undocumented individuals in America. This contraction only goes to show the power of the opposition to substantive reform. Still, in light of this opposition, the achievement of legislated protection for 590,000 people would represent a significant accomplishment indeed.

As of now, a proposed “bipartisan framework,” co-created by senators Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), is floating in the Senate. It would provide a path to legalization for DACA recipients, but it would also be accompanied by border security measures that include an additional $25-$40 billion for increased staffing and pay raises for border agents. It also would provide for the creation of regional “processing centers” that would house asylum seekers and ostensibly expedite the processing of their asylum requests. Until such centers would be operational, a Trump-era policy known as Title 42 would remain in effect, turning migrants back to Mexico and preventing them from filing asylum claims. This policy had been set to expire this December 21st.

Protecting DACA recipients is a stand-alone human rights issue that should have no place in negotiations over border security, particularly when those negotiations involve the suppression of other migrants’ rights. That said, there remains formidable opposition even to the Sinema/Tillis framework, an opposition fortified by the filibuster rule that requires a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. If the current Congress, with its substantial Democratic House majority, fails to extend protection to DACA and its recipients, the failure will represent a victory for the politics of cruelty, a politics powered by demagoguery and the fears it generates.

It will mean, too, that the struggle for human rights will continue, sparked by the kind of organizing and truth-telling that helped push DACA into existence a decade ago. And it will mean, more clearly than ever, that it’s time for the filibuster, that onerous impediment to democracy, to be relegated to the dustbin of history, where it has long belonged.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an emeritus professor (English, nonviolence studies) at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

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Opinion The Last Word

Scarcity Amid Abundance

Photo: Frank Armstrong | Dreamstime.com

Though labor unions continue to rack up significant victories, the most recent being a successful organizing vote at a Staten Island Amazon facility, there are still immense challenges facing workers in an economic and political landscape strongly tilted in favor of employers.

In California, some 48,000 grocery workers in 540 stores stretching from central California to the Mexican border authorized a strike on March 27th against two major chains, Kroger and Albertsons. Whether or not the strike is now in effect as you read this column, or whether it’s been averted (or is still pending the outcome of bargaining), the strike authorization itself represents a powerful response to untenable conditions for workers. These conditions underscore the deep inequality continuing to erode the quality of life for millions of people.

This past year, financial stresses impacting grocery workers have drawn increasing attention. A recent survey of workers employed by Kroger-owned supermarkets found that almost two-thirds of the workers surveyed reported being unable to meet basic monthly expenses, and of this group, a significant number (39 percent) indicated that they were unable to pay for groceries, and 44 percent reported being unable to pay rent. Fourteen percent said that they were either currently homeless or had been homeless in the preceding year. A New York Times account began with the story of one young worker at a Kroger-owned store who has been selling blood plasma to make ends meet.

These circumstances, defined by low wages and company policies favoring part-time scheduling, contrast sharply with reports of substantial profits and payouts to investors, as well as high executive compensation. Kroger, the largest grocery chain in the nation, with 465,000 workers, earned $4.05 billion in 2020, recently adopted a stock buyback program benefiting its investors and rewarded its CEO, Rodney McMullen, with $22.4 million in compensation in 2020. That executive pay is 909 times greater than the median pay of Kroger workers ($24,617).

For its part, Kroger defends its compensation for workers, pointing to a 2017 increase in average hourly wages from $13.66 to $16.68 — as well as to benefits that include healthcare, retirement savings, and tuition assistance. Still, this average wage, when placed in the context of today’s cost of living, is a far cry from the pay that full-time senior workers made 30 years ago, when hourly wages (the equivalent of $28 an hour today) would help sustain a middle class existence.

At issue is the concept of a living wage, a sufficient level of compensation that allows individuals and families to maintain a decent standard of living, providing enough for food, housing, medical expenses, transportation, education, childcare, and other essentials — and still provide enough to handle unforeseen expenses that can tip a precarious household into eviction and hunger.

That precariousness is the subject of a new Oxfam America report, “The Crisis of Low Wages in the U.S.,” which notes that almost one in three American workers, or 51.9 million people, earns less than $15 an hour. The report reminds readers that the federal minimum wage hasn’t budged from $7.25 an hour since 2009 and that the federal tipped-minimum wage has remained at $2.13 since 1991. Considering that $15 an hour in itself hardly constitutes a living wage in many parts of the U.S., the report documents the vast extent of working poverty in a country where the top 0.1 percent of earners make 196 times that of the bottom 90 percent.

This is why recent union victories, and the resurgence of interest in unions, have become critical. As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson explain in their landmark book, Winner-Take-All Politics, unions represent a significant “organizational counterweight to the power of those at the top.” Of all progressive organized interests, they note, “labor is the only major one focused on the broad economic concerns of those with modest incomes.”

The pandemic has helped raise awareness of the essential roles that millions of low-wage workers play in fields as diverse as health- and home-care, agriculture, construction, and food manufacturing and distribution. That awareness can certainly help a union like the United Food and Commercial Workers in its struggle on behalf of those 465,000 workers who voted to authorize a strike.

But awareness alone won’t make up for a decline in union membership that has taken place over many decades, a decline propelled in large measure by hostile legislation and vast corporate resources spent on union busting. Much hard work lies ahead — as does the need for an ascendant narrative affirming the role that unions play in leveling the economic and political playing field of America. It is a narrative that speaks to a collective reality — but also to the individual reality of each and every worker: a world in which a person surrounded by an abundance of food at work can be compensated enough, and fairly enough, to share in that abundance at home.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an emeritus professor (English, Nonviolence Studies) at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

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Opinion The Last Word

Which Immigration Story Will Prevail?

Asking for a more democratic, more inclusive narrative (Photo: Nitish Meena | Unsplash)

Like a gravitational field, there’s a narrative that exerts a powerful pull on U.S. immigration policy. It features hordes of migrants besieging our southern border, bringing crime, and lured (as the latest version goes) by erratic border enforcement and a lenient Biden administration. It’s a narrative as powerful as it is untrue, and it needs to be countered, not just for the sake of immigrants but for the nation as a whole.

On November 19th, when House Democrats passed a $2.2 trillion social safety net and climate bill, they left out a signature Biden administration commitment: a path to citizenship for the 10.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. Instead, they included in the budget bill a provision for a temporary status called “parole,” a five-year protection from deportation along with eligibility for work permits. If the provision is passed in the Senate, it will also give immigrants an opportunity to renew the protected status for another five years. But even that development is iffy. Senate negotiations on the budget bill, particularly on immigration, may be more grueling than in the House.

While some immigration advocates hail parole as a step forward, others decry it as a betrayal: an endorsement of a second-class status for millions of individuals, including DACA recipients, who have been contributing to their communities and working in essential fields (e.g. agriculture, construction, and healthcare) for many years. Clearly a narrative of menacing migrants held sway, as House Democrats in swing districts got nervous about being associated with “expansive immigration reform.”

How can such a narrative hold so much power, particularly when opinion surveys show that Americans strongly support a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and millions of essential workers? One reason is that the story serves the interests of influential politicians, commentators, think tanks, and private detention companies, all of whom profit from it in one respect or another. When prominent individuals and organizations repeat the story often enough and loudly enough, its influence grows exponentially.

Early in November, 39 Republican Congress members representing border state districts wrote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, urging them not to incorporate any immigration provisions, including parole, into the social safety net and climate bill. Citing the large numbers of border encounters recorded this year by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, they sought to paint the migrants’ presence in ominous terms, associating the migrants with criminality and arguing that “we cannot afford to create new incentives to illegal migration in the midst of this crisis.”

In painting such a picture, the 39 Republicans ignored numerous studies showing conclusively that immigrants, including unauthorized immigrants and immigrant youth, have lower crime rates than native-born citizens. These studies make clear that harsh anti-immigrant policies, including detention and expulsion, have little value in fighting crime.

The 39 also ignore the powerful “push” factors that cause people to leave their homes in search of safety, freedom, and livelihood. Their negative narrative says nothing about the Haitians who fled their country after a 2010 earthquake that left 217,000 people dead and 1.5 million homeless, nor about the political instability and violence that have racked the country after its president was assassinated this year.

Nor do they reference the Hondurans left devastated and desperate by the back-to-back hurricanes Eta and Iota last year, as well as by food insecurity, corruption, and extortion by gangs. Nor is there any mention of peoples from other countries where war, corruption, destitution, and climate-related drought and flooding have made life untenable.

It’s not in the interest of these 39 Congressional representatives, and their allies in the media and other institutions, to recognize another immigration story entirely: a narrative rooted in law, a narrative that sees immigrants as essential to revitalizing entire regions and to maintaining a robust economy as U.S. population growth declines.

It is in the nation’s interest to lift up that other story, for it is in this narrative that the seeds of another kind of nation are found: a country less fearful, more inclusive, more democratic, and more encouraging of human possibility and reinvention.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an emeritus professor (English, Nonviolence Studies) at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.