Obama: Use Strike as Spark for Wider Program

Photo: Republic Windows Sit-Down Strike

Leveraging the Chicago
Sit-Down to Help All Workers

By Peter Dreier
Huffington Post

December 9, 2008, - Since Friday, 240 members of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), a small but feisty union that has always been in the progressive wing of the labor movement, have displayed uncommon courage. They have illegally occupied their Chicago factory after their employer abruptly told them that it was shutting down the plant.

Equally impressive, President-elect Barack Obama, by quickly endorsing the workers' protest, showed the kind of bold leadership that progressives have been hoping for, but didn't expect to see so soon. Indeed, Obama's statement puts him ahead of Franklin Roosevelt, who didn't embrace worried workers' escalating demands until after his inauguration in March 1933, when a quarter of the workforce was unemployed.


The workers began their sit-in on Friday, after their employer, Republic Windows and Doors, closed the factory with only three days notice. The company management told the workers and their union, UE Local 1110, that the Bank of America had canceled Republic's line of credit, making it impossible to stay in business -- or even pay employees the severance and vacation pay they'd earned. The company immediately terminated the workers' health insurance.

The BofA said that the cancellation was routine business practice, caused by Republic's cash flow problem in the wake of declining sales in the nation's housing construction downturn.

"When a company faces such a dire situation, its lender is not empowered to direct the company's management how to manage its affairs and what obligations should be paid," declared the North Carolina-based BofA in a statement. "Such decisions belong to the management and owners of the company."

The BofA's antiseptic statement reflected the kind of cold-blooded market fundamentalism that has led a growing number of Americans to demand more government regulation of big business.

But the Republic workers didn't wait for government action. They refused to walk away from their jobs quietly or to accept the argument that the lay-offs were an inevitable result of the nation's economic hard times. They peacefully took over the plant, where some of them had worked for decades, and demanded that the Bank of America and Republic management find a solution. The workers insist that they won't leave until getting assurances they will receive severance and vacation pay, but they also hope to find a way to keep the plant open.

Although by occupying the factory they are breaking the law, no politician has called for the Chicago Police Department to arrest them -- a sure sign that their action has become a symbol of working families' distress in the unraveling Bush economy. Millions of Americans, watching interviews with the workers on TV during the past few days, can identify with their plight - the loss of their jobs, their health insurance and perhaps their homes - only a few weeks before Christmas.

The sit-in began the same day that President Bush reluctantly acknowledged, for the first time, that the country was in a recession. He released a Department of Labor report revealing that U.S. employers axed 533,000 jobs in November, the biggest monthly cut since 1974. As a result, the official unemployment rate has jumped to 6.7 percent. Now in its twelfth month, the recession is already the longest since a 16-month slump in 1981-82. Some economists predict that this downturn will set a new post-World War 2 record.

"When it comes to the situation here in Chicago with the workers who are asking for their benefits and payments they have earned," Obama said during a press briefing on Sunday, " I think they are absolutely right. What's happening to them is reflective of what's happening across this economy."

With that statement, Obama used his bully pulpit to endorse the workers' protest and to put pressure on the Bank of America and Republic to forge a solution. Representatives of the company, BofA, and the union have been meeting at the bank's office in downtown Chicago. Congressman Luis Gutierrez has been moderating the talks.

The symbolism of the workers' take-over also adds credence to Obama's call for a major government-funded infrastructure program that will stimulate several million jobs -- almost all of them in the private sector -- and help jump-start the ailing economy.

"The workers want Bank of America to keep the plant open and the workers employed," said UE President Carl Rosen. "There is always a demand for windows and doors. But with Barack Obama's stimulus proposal, there will be even greater demand for the products made by Republic's workers. It doesn't make sense to close this plant when the need is so obvious."

"We were cutting out glass for an order for 1,000 new windows last week," 34 year-old Vicente Rangel, a Republic employee for 15 years, told the Los Angeles Times. "There was work to do. Then, the bosses called us to a meeting and said everyone was quitting, whether they wanted to or not." The union workers earned an average of $14 an hour, and received health insurance and retirement benefits as part of their union contract.

"I'm not scared because I'm not alone on this," said Raul Flores, according to the Chicago Tribune. The 25-year old Flores, who had worked at Republic for eight years, added, "We're strong and we're going to stay. This gives us the strength to keep going. This is going to be for everyone."

Americans have rallied to the Republic workers' cause. They've sent money, food, clothing, blankets, and good wishes. (To donate, go here). On Monday, protesters picketed a Bank of America branch on Chicago's West Side, explaining that they support the workers' sit-in. A coalition of unions and community groups, Jobs with Justice, held a rally at Chicago City Hall and threatened to organize a boycott of the Bank of America if the problem isn't resolved.

Union members, politicians, and others have highlighted the irony that Bank of America just got $25 billion of the federal government's bank bail-out funds, designed to push banks to start lending money again. BofA's refusal to extend Republic further credit seems cold-blooded and hypocritical.

The bank's hypocrisy hasn't been lost on elected officials. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich threatened to suspend all state government business dealings with BofA if a reasonable solution is not achieved quickly. He asked the state Department of Labor to investigate if Republic had violated Illinois' plant closure laws. The company may also have violated the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a 1988 law that requires employers to provide employees and community 60 days notice in advance of plant closings and large-scale layoffs.

After U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) visited the plant, he expressed support for the workers, observing, "The taxpayer dollars going into these big banks are not for dividends, they're not for executive salaries," according to the Chicago Tribune (which, ironically, just declared bankruptcy). "They're for loans and credit to businesses just like Republic so they can stay in business and so these workers won't be out on the street unemployed."

Chicago aldermen have called for hearings on Republic, which received over $10 million in city redevelopment funds. They and Cook County officials suggested withdrawing hundreds of millions of dollars of government funds from the Bank of America.

"We never expected this,'' Melvin Maclin, a factory employee and vice-president of the UE local, told the Associated Press about the support they've received. "We expected to go to jail."

Inside the factory's lobby, local residents and workers covered the walls with hand-scrawled signs, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"Thank you for showing us all how to fight back!" wrote one person. "Here's to change, from the bottom up," penned another.

These sentiments will sound familiar to anyone who followed Obama on the presidential campaign trail. "Change comes from the bottom up," the former community organizer said frequently during his stump speeches.

During the past two weeks, as Obama appointed moderates and former Clintonites to high-level positions in his economic brain-trust, some progressives worried that the president-elect was already moving to the center, even as the economy nosedived. But Obama's call for the largest public investment plan since the interstate highway program begun in the 1950s, his support for a major federal loan to the Big 3 auto companies if they retool to become more energy-efficient, and now his embrace of the Republic workers' occupation of their factory has given many progressives assurance that Obama hasn't forgotten his liberal instincts.

Its worth recalling that FDR did not campaign for president in 1932 -- three years into the Great Depression -- as a proponent of government activism or with a clear plan for economic recovery. But in the five months between his election victory and his March 1933 inauguration, Depression conditions had worsened, and grassroots worker and community protests escalated throughout the country. As soon as he took office, Roosevelt became more vocal, using his bully pulpit -- in speeches and radio addresses -- to promote New Deal ideas, pushing banking reform, public works, relief for struggling farmers, and help for homeowners within the first few months of his administration. In June 1933 he signed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which for the first time recognized workers' right to collective bargaining.

Immediately, union activists gave speeches and posted signs -- on posters and billboards, and in store windows -- proclaiming, "The President wants you to join the union." Workers responded, and union membership began to climb. When the Supreme Court ruled in May 1935 that NIRA was unconstitutional, FDR and Congress immediately enacted the National Labor Relations Act, often called the Wagner Act, to preserve workers' right to organize. Workers became even bolder in order to protect their jobs and defend their rights. Department store clerks, bakers, hospital laundry workers, longshoremen, meatpackers, steelworkers, tire and auto workers, and others engaged in various forms of protest, including the first wave of "sit-down" strikes demanding recognition of their unions. The combination of government intervention and union activism laid the foundation for the post-World War 2 prosperity that lifted the majority of Americans into the middle class.

That social contract has now been shredded, spurred by two decades of government deregulation of business, widening inequality, increasing job insecurity, and the unraveling of the social safety net, including health insurance. These trends have been compounded during the Bush years -- corrupt crony capitalism, the mortgage meltdown, escalating foreclosures, and large-scale lay-offs.

The bold factory take-over by the Republic workers in Chicago may be a fluke, or it just could be the opening salvo of a new wave of grassroots activism, not only by workers and their unions, but also by community groups, enviros, religious congregations, housing crusaders, and the millions of Americans inspired by Obama's campaign who voted for the first time in November. Clearly the Republic workers' protest has struck a nerve with the American people, including many who don't share their plight but can nevertheless empathize with their predicament.

It would be uplifting and useful to see vigils and rallies in cities around the country on behalf of another New Deal -- a pump-priming infrastructure plan, a "green jobs" investment program, a universal health insurance proposal, a long-overdue reform of corporate-friendly labor laws, a strategy to help Americans afford housing, and a significant federal investment in public schools and college financial aid.

Like FDR, Obama can use his bully pulpit to encourage Americans to organize and raise their voices -- as he did Sunday in support of the workers at Republic Windows and Doors, a month before he officially takes office. But if Americans want the country to change direction, as the election results indicated, they'll have to follow Obama's advice, and the Republic workers' example: change happens from the bottom up.
[Peter Dreier, professor of politics at Occidental College, is coauthor of "The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City" and "Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century."] View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/111386/

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Needed: Metro Strategy and Policy

Obama, McCain
and Our Cities
and Suburbs

By Peter Dreier
Huffington Post

Barack Obama will be addressing the U.S. Conference of Mayors at the group's annual meeting on June 21 in Miami. John McCain is likely to be a no-show; he hasn't accepted the group's invitation.

On the face of it, it appears that the two presidential candidates recognize the reality that urban voters tend to vote for Democrats. For Obama to beat McCain, he not only needs to match or exceed John Kerry's 54% margin in cities in 2004, he also needs to increase the urban voter turnout, especially in key swing states. Equally important, he needs to improve on Kerry's 47% showing among suburban voters, who account for about half of all voters nationwide.

The changing economics and demographics of suburbia give Obama a good chance to win the swing suburban voters. That's because, increasingly, the challenges facing suburbs are the same ones facing cities. In this election year, suburban voters -- working class and middle-class residents of both older suburbs and outer exurbs -- are up for grabs.



Neither Democrats nor Republicans have a lock on suburbanites, in large part because they are now as economically, racially, and ideologically diverse as the rest of America.

In fact, as a report issued this week by the Brookings Institution, "MetroPolicy," explains, the fate of cities and suburbs are increasingly intertwined. The 1950s "Leave it to Beaver" stereotype of American suburbia -- the white middle class family with the working dad who commutes to and from the city, the stay-at-home mom, with two kids who attend well-funded schools -- is no longer true, if it ever was.

In the last two decades, the lines between cities and suburbs have blurred. The mayors and residents of many suburbs, like their city counterparts, are dealing with similar problems -- not only poverty, homelessness, crime, and underfunded schools, but also rising gas prices, traffic congestion and pollution, accelerating foreclosures and abandoned homes, crumbling infrastructure, widening wage inequality, escalating health care and food costs, a wave a new immigrants, and the export of jobs to China and Mexico.

Suburbanites are not immune to the mega-trends and policy disasters that challenge the country. We face a new Gilded Age -- a frenzy of corporate mergers, widening economic disparities, and deteriorating social conditions. America today has the biggest concentration of income and wealth since 1928. Meanwhile, the American Dream -- the ability to buy a home, pay for college tuition and health insurance, take a yearly vacation, and save for retirement-has become increasingly elusive. A growing number of working families are in debt, while the number facing foreclosure has spiraled. American workers face declining job security as companies downsize, move overseas, and shift more jobs to part-time workers. The cost of basic necessities is rising faster than incomes. These problems are certainly not confined to big cities.

But America has yet to come to grips with what the Brookings report calls MetroAmerica. More than 80% of all Americans live in metropolitan areas -- 65% in the largest 100 of them - which include central cities, older suburbs, and former small towns gobbled up by metro sprawl. These 100 metros account for two-thirds of the nation's jobs and three-quarters of its economic output. Most of the nation's major universities, medical centers, research enterprises, museums, and skilled workforce are located in these metro areas.

These metro areas are the engines of the nation's economic prosperity, but we treat them like used cars ready to be junked. As the Brookings report reveals, we have failed to re-tune the engine to address the nation's new challenges. Our federal policies are out of sync with the reality of MetroAmerica, ignoring its centrality to our national well-being. According to the report, "Washington is often absent when it should be present" and "Washington is too often present when it ought to be absent."

For example, alone among the world's major nations, the U.S. has no national energy policy to deal with the harmful consequences of global warning, our over-dependence on cars, our ridiculous low level of spending on public transit, and our failure to invest in research to develop more energy-efficient industries, jobs and housing. Led by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, more than 500 U.S. cities have signed an agreement to help reduce energy consumption, but they need leadership from Washington to truly address the problems of greenhouse gases, global warming, and the dangerous health consequences of pollution from cars, factories, and ports. The federal government must put resources behind what the Apollo Alliance (a coalition of business, labor, environmental, and community groups) is calling for -- significant investment to put put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of well-paid "green" jobs, and clean energy products and services, to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and cut the carbon emissions.

The U.S. also stands alone, and behind, other nations in our approach to education and job training. In most affluent countries, the national government provides most of the funding for schools and job training. In contrast, the U.S. forces local and state governments to address these problems. This results in wide disparities in per-student spending between wealthy states and suburbs and their poorer counterparts, which handicaps millions of young people from reaching their full potential. No wonder we're decades behind other nations in terms of training the 21st century workforce to compete the global economy.

Likewise, in other wealthy nations, national governments take major responsibility for funding public transportation, public safety, parks, housing, social services, and infrastructure, while encouraging localities to cooperate and innovate in administering these key functions of government.

The U.S. does it backwards. Washington typically requires cities to deal with issues such as homeland security, clean air and water, and schools, without providing the necessary funding. (The No Child Left Behind act, which requires local school districts to raise student test scores but doesn't provide the funding needed to hire more teachers, is an obvious example). Cities have to tax residents and businesses to raise the billions of dollars a year to comply with these unfunded mandates. Not surprisingly, our bridges, water systems, dams, and highways, as well as many school buildings, are crumbling, symbolized by the levies in New Orleans that left the city defenseless in the wake of Katrina, and the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed last August, killing 13 people.

Similarly, immigration policy is supposed to be a federal responsibility. But because immigrants wind up living in America's cities and suburbs, it is local governments that are compelled to deal with housing and educating them. Washington provides no "help" except to send federal agents to workplaces looking for illegal immigrants.

Federal tax and highway policies promote costly, energy-wasteful sprawl, which encourages developers and companies to invest in the urban fringes while allowing existing buildings and infrastructure in cities and older suburbs to deteriorate. Federal transportation policy is mostly about building, and repairing, highways, rather than funding public transit and requiring automakers to make energy-efficient cars. Making matters worse, American cities and suburbs are forced to compete against each other for private investment and jobs, from shopping malls and office parks, to Wal-Marts, and sports franchises, which undermines the fiscal health of cities and suburbs alike.

Equally absurd, the U.S. has the most fragmented crazy-quilt of local governments. Within just the 100 largest metropolitan areas, there are 9,000 layers of government -- municipalities, school districts, counties, water districts, park districts, and others -- making it almost impossible to coordinate.

Unlike other major countries, we have no federal policies that encourage, must less require, regional planning. We permit private industry and local governments to determine where housing will be built, and where jobs will be located, without thinking about how people will get to and from where they live, work, attend school, and shop. As gasoline approaches $5 per gallon, we can't continue to operate this way.

No other major industrial nation has allowed the level of sheer destitution that we have in the United States. We accept as "normal" levels of poverty, hunger, crime and homelessness that would cause national alarm in Canada, Western Europe or Australia.

The U.S. has many serious problems that are disproportionately located in cities and older suburbs, these are national problems. A good example is the current mortgage meltdown -- caused by the greedy practices of banks and mortgage companies and the failure of the federal government to regulate the financial services industry. According to a report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the weak housing market, and the large inventory of unsold homes, will reduce home values by $1.2 trillion in 2008 alone. About half of that decline is attributable to the sharp increase in foreclosures. In January, the city of Baltimore sued Wells Fargo Bank for targeting minority neighborhoods for predatory loans leading to high foreclosure rates, costing the city millions of dollars in lost tax revenues, added fire and police costs, court administrative costs, and social programs to maintain healthy neighborhoods.

But Baltimore, nor any of the many other cities and suburbs facing a wave of foreclosures and abandoned homes, can't fix these problems on its own. This is why we have a federal government. But a few weeks ago, most of the Republicans in Congress voted against a bill, sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, to strengthen regulations on banks and brokers and to provide relief to families at risk of losing their homes. Obama endorsed the Democrats' proposal, while McCain remained conspicuously silent.

The Brookings report reveals that metro areas differ in terms of their productivity, wage inequality, and carbon emissions, but these differences are due to factors mostly outside the control of local governments. To guarantee that metro areas are profit centers for the U.S. economy, we need the federal government - including our candidates for president and Congress -- to make a commitment to be their partner. The federal government needs to invest in the metro-based industries, research centers, universities, and workforce that are the engines of prosperity. Washington also needs to provide more funding for public transit, mixed-income housing, public schools, universal health care, child care, and cleaning up urban brownfields and reducing urban pollution that results in high rates of asthma and other diseases, especially among children.

A good example is the earned-income tax credit (EITC), a wage supplement for the working poor. It effectively lifts millions of families out of poverty, with slightly more living in inner-ring suburbs than in cities. The additional income to these low-wage families helps improve local economic conditions, since the poor spend almost all of their money on necessities in local private businesses. Washington could also reward cities and suburbs that work cooperatively to promote job growth, mixed-income housing, and sensible transportation policies on a regional basis rather than competing with each other.

For years, the symbol of America's attitude toward cities has been the tin cup. We viewed cities like beggars -- hungry, homeless, and broke -- and considered "urban policy" a form of charity. But, based on the Brookings report findings, perhaps the new symbol should be a boat, sailing on the dangerous waters of the 21st century global economy. It doesn't matter if you're sitting in the urban or the suburban section of the vessel; if it springs a leak, everyone will drown. But if they work together to fix it, all the passengers will not only survive, but thrive.

[Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century.]

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