National Nurses United

Back to Full Employment By Robert Pollin; Boston Review, 2012 O pen almost any newspaper, click on almost any news website and the sobering data comes pouring out. An exploding chasm in income inequality, 40-year stagnation in compensation for U.S. workers, a shocking surge in the number of children living in poverty, record numbers of Americans going bankrupt because of medical bills or just skipping needed care because of the unfathomable out-of-pocket costs. It���s the rare economist who can stare at these dry statistics and find a moral dimension, much less propose commonsense humane solutions in easy-to-read text. But Robert Pollin, professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst is no ordinary economist. Pollin is that rare policy wonk who combines stellar analysis with activism for social change. He���s animated by the same ethical imperative that has inspired so many nurses who, heartsick over patients with suffering caused by economic pain, have taken to the streets and demanded real reform. So too is Pollin unwilling ethically to accept the status quo or political norms of high unemployment, with his analysis and prescription for action on full display in a concise new volume titled Back to Full Employment. ���Without full employment,��� he writes, ���the fundamental notion of equal rights for everyone���faces insurmountable obstacles.��� Without jobs, the unemployed ���are not able to participate on a solid footing in the life of their community.��� Further, ���a high employment economy is the single best tool for fighting poverty��� as well as directly confronting the shocking rise in income inequality in the U.S. the past 30 years.��� With those themes as the scaffolding of his short, 161-page book, Pollin completes his work with ample supporting materials. While labor productivity has risen 111 percent since the early 1970s, total compensation in wages and health and other benefits has stagnated. If workers are not receiving the fruits of this increased productivity, the benefits must be ���flowing elsewhere������ specifically upwards, Pollin notes. Thus, the huge leap in disparity of wealth and income and attendant jump in poverty in the United States. The current economic collapse, caused by the banks and other financial institutions��� gambling with people���s homes and retirement savings, Pollin emphasizes, has long roots that go back well beyond the 2008 crash. Pollin defines the source as ���neo-liberal��� policies���an economic agenda that emphasizes, in particular, privatization of public programs and deregulation of markets, such as the finance sector deregulation that spurred the 2008 meltdown or, for that matter, that have created so much inequity, price gouging, and declining access in the healthcare industry. Wall Street has been a principle beneficiary, says Pollin, noting throughout history, ���unregulated financial markets have persistently produced instability and crises.��� 16 N AT I O N A L N U R S E Even today, after running the U.S. and global economy off a cliff, commercial banks sit on ���an unprecedented $1.6 trillion in cash reserves.��� And the jury remains out on whether the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform can control ���the hyper-speculative practices that produced the near-total global financial collapse of 2008-2009��� and the mass unemployment that followed. The solution to the present economic morass, Pollin says, is not blaming immigrants, whose work increases consumer demand and whose spending boosts the economy, harsh austerity measures that accelerate economic suffering for the 99 percent, or the obsession of too many politicians with deficit reduction. Rather than paring government down to extinction, we need more government intervention, says Pollin. Government programs in the United States have produced, among other things, outstanding public universities and a Social Security system that has succeeded in reducing poverty among the aged and the disabled. Coming out of the present recession requires a ���serious alternative to what increasingly appears the prevailing approach, which is to patch up and restart the failed neo-liberal model.��� That means a genuine ���new, workable full employment policy framework,��� and not just any, lowwage jobs. Full employment, says Pollin, means jobs at living wages that enable workers the ability to support their families and participate fully in the civic life of the nation, safe and healthy workplaces, and strong unions. How do we redress the present economic crisis as well as the four-decade decline prompted by ���the dominance of neo-liberal policies?��� By ���building a sustainable full employment economy,��� says Pollin, outlining several key steps. They include: 1. Dramatic investment in clean energy and education. Spending in education creates more than five times, and clean energy over four times, as many jobs as does the equivalent spending on fossil fuels. A substantial shift in spending in this direction alone could cut the jobless rate by a third, Pollin argues. 2. Industrial policies that develop and strengthen clean energy transformation and revive our manufacturing sector. 3. Tougher financial regulation of Wall Street. 4. Controlling skyrocketing healthcare costs���to which Pollin notes the huge contrast with other highly developed nations that have national healthcare systems that deliver universal coverage and generally more healthy populations. 5. Taxing Wall Street. Pollin praises the Robin Hood movement for a tax on financial speculation, noting in particular the broad organizing efforts of NNU. Achieving these ends means not relying on markets or governments, Pollin concludes���but instead ���an engaged citizenry,��� (what W W W. 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