Labor & BI: A view from the U.S.
Joel Rogers, UW-Madison
13th BIEN Congress, São Paulo, July 1-2, 2010
What I’ll be talking about
• Labor and BI, in general terms
• Exceptionalism of U.S. & U.S. labor
• Hope?
I made some slides for you
Like this slide
And this one
Power corrupts
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
Absolute PowerPoint?
Just can’t be good
Labor & BI, in general terms
Pro, con, maybe
• Improves power of labor relative to capital,
decommodifies labor power, enlarges space for social
experiment
• Undermines contributory solidarity, existing labor
contracts, and worker organizations built on them
• That no longer an effective basis of working class
organization:
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Boundaries of firm less clear
Job-based security disappearing (“precariat”)
Interest not best organized at the workplace underrepresented
Insider-outsider problems in social cohesion
Three public philosophies
Economic Development
A place’s wealth is determined by the productivity of its
human, physical, and natural capital, and its local capture of
the benefits of that productivity.
Productivity is a function of the value of products and services
(e.g. their uniqueness, performance, or quality) and the
efficiency with which they are produced (i.e., how much
output per unit of input). Productivity is best measured not
by volume but revenue produced per unit of input (land,
labor, capital).
Places can compete on low-road (price reducing) or high-road
(productivity increasing, with high and equitable local
capture) ways.
Three public philosophies
Taxes 1: supply-side egalitarianism
Basic unities: i + w + c = 1; p + w = 1
Taxes 2: Tax universalism
Three public philosophies
Worst case?
• Integrated global capital responds instantly and
punitively to any change in the rate of profit
• Rate of profit identical worldwide
• Cannot be lowered or raised
• So any new surplus goes to the immobile workers
who helped produce it
Real case
Economy still organized in places. Well-organized places,
and the high-road infrastructure within them, permits
bargaining with capital.
Where we want to be
Exceptionalism of U.S.
American exceptionalism
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No labor party
Little class-based popular politics
Vast wealth, military power, and waste
Religious, violent, anti-urban
America is the first country to have gone from barbarism
to decadence without the usual intervening period of
civilization. — Wilde
Exceptionally low public spending
Country
Total taxes
as % of GDP
Country
Total taxes
as % of GDP
Australia
30.6
Luxembourg
41.8
Austria
43.9
Mexico
16.0
Belgium
45.7
Netherlands
42.1
Canada
38.2
New Zealand
35.6
Czech Republic
40.4
Norway
41.6
Denmark
50.4
35.2
Finland
46.2
Poland
Portugal
France
45.8
Slovak Republic
35.3
Germany
37.7
Spain
35.1
Greece
37.1
Sweden
52.2
Hungary
39.2
Switzerland
34.4
Iceland
36.3
Turkey
31.3
Ireland
32.3
United Kingdom
36.3
Italy
43.3
United States
28.9
Japan
26.2
EU average
41.6
Korea
23.6
OECD average
37.3
34.3
Inequality
New Gilded Age
Gilded Age
Great compression
Great divergence
Middle class America
Inequality decomposed
Top 1% takes 23% of income. Top .1% ($1.7M in 2006) takes 9 percent
– twice share in UK (4.7%), five times share in France (1.6%)
Missed productivity dividend
Social efficiency and labor organization
Dynamics of bargaining
Social efficiency
Capitalist strategy & labor strategy
Labor power (density + centralization)
U.S. labor
• Membership defined as firm majorities
• “Contracts are us”
• Fragmented structure, silos of solidarity, little horizontal
coordination
• Dependent politics
Frankly I used to worry about the membership, about the size of
the membership. But quite a few years ago, I just stopped
worrying about it, because to me it doesn’t make any difference.
— Meany
Union density 1890-2008
Hope?
One answer 
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In a hundred years, all new people!
Antecedents even in U.S. labor …
What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less
jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less
vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less
revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our
better natures. — Gompers
• Open source and ongoing membership recruitment and
maintenance
• High road program
• Functional role at the workplace
Obviously
Current system no longer “delivering the goods”
• People getting better (tolerance, environmentalism,
international concern) and more open to alternatives
• Hold of neoliberal market orthodoxy weaker, need for public
goods more obvious, waste of present system more evident
• Science advancing at near “singularity” rate, and innovation
finally moving into government
• Scalable “high road” alternative available
•
Basic problem in U.S. is lack of democratic confidence. Basic
reason is not internationalization, but domestic political failure,
owing to lack of organized investment in relevant political
infrastructure, itself owing to lack of clear leadership.
Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
• Largest US anti-poverty program, bigger than
TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy
Families), Food Stamps, other
• Refundable tax credit, tied to earnings —“make
work pay” by eliminating “poverty traps”
• Expanded under Clinton; plan to expand further
under Obama
• More contested today than in the past, in part
because of growth, in part because of growth in
partisanship
Political infrastructure: CBSM4
• Communication: among leadership, to and from base, with the mass
public
• Blood (new, i.e. youth): recruitment, training, placement, etc.
• Message & program: something simple and positive to say to about
what we should be, and a few things to get us closer that
• Messengers: many people running for office and talking in public,
showing message discipline, shared frames, talking points, etc.
• Models: models of what works at scale and can be replicated
• Money: patient but demanding capital – long-term but experimental
and performance based, prepared to withdraw on failure or nonperformance
• Service centers: on a variety of functions best organized in one place
to realize economies of scale and scope; think leadership academies,
policy shops, centers of campaign expertise, media support centers,
etc.