July 12, 2009
We’re back! Well almost. For the past few months GLS staff have been working on a project assessing US labor’s current and future role in efforts to address the climate change crisis. The fruits of our efforts will appear here and elsewhere in the future. But a tight deadline has meant that our posts have been few and far between. That will now change. Soon we’ll be posting again on our usual range of topics. The confluence of crises facing working people today—indeed, facing the entire planet—makes this a pivotal time in history. We look forward to making our small contribution to the search for solutions.
Despite happy talk about “green shoots” signaling the end of the crisis, for working people the economy is in a downward spiral with no end in sight. In June, 467,000 jobs were lost in the US, the number of long term unemployed has tripled since the beginning of the recession and the length of time that people are unemployed has doubled. Wage and hour reductions have become routine, even in unionized workplaces. No knowledgeable observer thinks that the employment picture will change in the immediate future no matter how other economic indicators improve, certainly not for a year or two. Many think it will be much longer.
The collateral damage to job and income loss is staggering, especially in the US with its already shredded social safety net: more people without health care, more foreclosures, more broken lives and broken communities.
What make this crisis so frightening is that we are in uncharted territory. This is the first major crisis in the era of globalization. And it is affecting people around the world in rich countries and poor countries alike. Many of the old tools to combat recession, developed in the era of national economies, are simply not appropriate in today’s world, and the institutional infrastructure to develop a coordinated state led global response is lacking. Unfortunately, labor and social movements have not yet developed the strength or the cohesion to mount a global response based on solidarity and social justice.
In this and a following post we are going shift the focus away from the macro level to take a look back at how people at the workplace and community level developed direct responses to meet their immediate needs in past crises and how some of these responses are being adapted to today’s realities. Indeed, in the age of globalization action at the grassroots level remains crucial, and there are many lessons from the past that we can still learn from today.-GLS
NORMAL TIMES AND HARD TIMES
We’re all struggling with how to think — and what to do — in the face of the “great recession.” An initial progressive response was to advocate better regulation; then Keynesian economic stimulus; now nationalization; perhaps in the future some kind of socialism.
One theme that has reverberated through periods of “hard times” in the past is the idea of “production for use.” It has appeared in the form of public works job creation; worker run enterprises; self-help mutual aid; and efforts to push the envelope on property rights that prevent people from using the resources that are available to meet their needs. Today production for use may find new applications – including working to save the planet from climate destruction.
What are recessions, depressions, and economic “hard times”?
According to conventional economics, markets guide companies and investors to bring together labor and means of production to produce the goods and services that people need. Notwithstanding numerous “market failures,” something like that happens in capitalist economies during normal times.
But in times of economic crisis, recession, and depression, it doesn’t work like that. Instead, people lose their livelihoods, homes, and healthcare and slash their budgets for food and other necessities – even while workers who want to work are unemployed and underemployed and offices, factories, and construction sites lie idle. As a result, people often begin thinking and doing things that they didn’t think and do before.
Since 1900, the US experienced depressions and recessions in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1914, 1921, the whole decade of the 1930s, 1949, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1970, 1982, 1990, and 2002.
We don’t know how severe current “great recession” will be. One thing we know from hard times past, however, is that they are almost always declared over when they have barely begun. Prosperity is always just around the corner. True to form, as early as April, headlines like “Top U.S. officials offered reassurances that the worst of the economic downturn is likely over,” began appearing in media outlets around the country. Maybe so. But what should we do if it is not?
PRODUCTION FOR USE
A reverberating theme that emerges in hard times is the idea of “production for use,” rather than production only if production is profitable in the market. This requires actions – whether by government or by ordinary community members — that attempt to meet needs directly, rather than through the failing process of production for the market.
Remarkably, President Obama laid out this precise this idea – rarely heard in public discourse in The United States since the 1930s – in advocating his economic stimulus legislation.
His plan, he said, recognizes:
both the paradox and the promise of this moment – the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work, even as, all around the country, there is so much work to be done. That’s why we’ll invest in priorities like energy and education; health care and a new infrastructure that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.
Such an approach has a long history.
In every major U.S. recession since 1808, unemployed people and allies have organized to demanded job creation through public works at local, state national and even international levels. (Franklin Folsom offers a history of these efforts in his book, “Impatient Armies of the Poor”.) And in an earlier post we described how the international labor movement proposed international public works as a way to overcome the mass unemployment of the Great Depression – and to combat the fascist movements it was engendering. This expressed an intuitive – and at times explicit — sense that if there are things that need to be done and people who need work, why shouldn’t those people be put to work doing what needs to be done?
New Deal public works programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed millions and substantially reduced unemployment until Roosevelt cut them back in the face of conservative hostility. The WPA was notable for its emphasis on putting people to work doing things that utilize their existing skills.
In 1973, in the midst of a deep recession, the Carter administration created the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act – CETA. It provided the unemployed, the poor, and high school students full-time jobs for one to two years in public agencies or private not for profit organizations. CETA provided 750,000 jobs at its peak in 1978. It, too, became a bete noire for those who saw it as government interference with the private labor market. But the idea has come back with Obama stimulus plan.
WORKER RUN ENTERPRISES
Another feature that often emerges is the combination of production for use with some kind of cooperative self-management. For example, in 1934 the Ohio State Relief Commission used relief funds to support a dozen factories in which unemployed men and women made clothing, furniture, and stoves for the unemployed. The Ohio Plan became a model for programs in several other states and was incorporated in the Federal relief agencies. It became the basis for Upton Sinclair’s sensational “end poverty in California ” (EPIC ) campaign for governor – and the bete noire of those who feared the U.S.was on the road to red revolution.
The massive deindustrialization of the 1980s led to the emergence of efforts throughout the “rustbelt” to save and create jobs through worker and community ownership. For example, the Ecumenical Coalition to Save the Mahoning Valley conducted a three-year campaign, ultimately defeated, to preserve Youngstown’s steel plants through labor and community ownership. Another such effort, the Naugatuck Valley Project in western Connecticut, helped workers buy and for seven years run a threatened brass mill dubbed Seymour Specialty Wire: An Employee-Owned Company and create an community-worker owned home healthcare cooperative.
These groups developed a strategy based on networks designed to give early warning of threatened plant closings, coordinated efforts to save threatened plants, employee buyouts, new cooperative enterprises, and other locally-initiated economic development. Fifteen of these organizations came together in 1988 to form the Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal.
SELF HELP MUTUAL AID
In the early years of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the unemployed in many cities tried to creed a counter-economy. A Seattle Unemployed Citizen’s League, for example, established 22 locals throughout the city, each with its own commissary at which donated food and firewood were exchanged for the services of barbers, seamstresses, carpenters, and doctors.By the end of 1932 there were 330 such self-help mutual aid organizations in 37 states with membership over 300,000. (For an account of this movement see Strike!
Unfortunately, commissaries needed food and carpenters required wood: when the materials that could be begged, borrowed, or stolen petered out, so did self-help mutual aid.
Much more sophisticated versions of such mutual aid self-help are being developed today. Much of it is occurring through bartering websites – Craiglist.org reports that traffic is up 100 percent in a year on its bartering boards. About a dozen communities have now established local currencies. The BerkShares currency in western Massachusetts can be used in 370 local businesses. These alternative systems of exchange all help bring resources together to do something useful that isn’t happening in the mainstream economy.
(End of part one)