Bal Harbour, FL
America needs a raise, in the worst kind of way. While productivity, profits, executive pay and the stock market keep going up, working family incomes keep going down, widening the gap between the rich and the rest of us and creating a dangerous atmosphere of social and economic conflict.
Since 1979, real earnings for workers have declined 12 percent. During that same period, 97 percent of the increase in household incomes has gone to the richest 20 percent of all households, with middle income families and the poor left to scramble over the remaining three percent.
During the same period, productivity went up 24 percent and American workers should have been able to enjoy a substantial increase in buying power. Instead, the productivity was converted into increases in corporate profits (64 percent between 1989 and 1995) and in executive compensation (up 360 percent since 1980).
The result is an alarming maldistribution of wealth. The top 20 percent of households in our country now get half of the nation's total income and control 85 percent of all wealth. The rest -- 80 percent of all households -- split the other half of total income and share 15 percent of the nation's wealth, mainly our mortgaged homes.
Workers are having to labor harder and longer just to keep even, and more and more family members are having to work in order to maintain living standards. Working families have little money to spend, they are loaded with debt and they have no time to spend with their children. Threatened by restructuring, downsizing, pension raids, privatization schemes and runaway plants, their anger is exceeded only by anxiety over keeping their jobs. They are disgusted with business and government and their disillusionment is straining the fabric of our society.
More than 12 million workers at the bottom of the wage structure have lost hope altogether, victims of a federal minimum wage that in real terms is now 25 percent below its 1981 level.
With workers and their families hurting as never before, the labor movement must respond as never before. We must create a new and powerful voice for America's working families. Then we must use that voice powerfully and persuasively to restore respect for workers and the work we do through increased wages, more secure jobs, affordable healthcare and improved retirement income.
The AFL-CIO will respond first by sponsoring a series of town hall meetings across the country where workers can speak out publicly about their lives and their jobs and offer guidance toward solutions.
We will use these forums to transform individual concerns into a compelling national cause, sensitizing politicians and policy-makers as we mount a massive educational campaign to motivate unrepresented as well as represented workers.
Working with our allies and supporters, we'll take what we've learned and raise the issue of income inequality to a new level, using "America Needs a Raise" to:
- Build a powerful grassroots movement against cuts in federal, state and local programs working families depend upon and to push for a quick, big increase in the federal minimum wage;
- Create a strategic campaign center to give maximum support to 16 million workers and their unions as they attempt to pry long-overdue compensation increases from the tightened fists of multi-billion-dollar corporate giants;
- Persuade employers to practice corporate responsibility for their employees and the communities they serve as well as for their stockholders and executives;
- Energize a nationwide organizing campaign to bring union wages and benefits to millions of workers who need and deserve them.
Finally, we will use "America Needs a Raise" to evaluate the political candidates who want our support this fall and to help them campaign aggressively on this most basic concern of working families.
We will seek out and support candidates who pledge themselves to:
- Restore respect for workers and just rewards for work;
- Defend programs working families depend on, from Medicare and Medicaid, to education, college loans and environmental protections;
- Stop tax giveaways to big business and reverse job- destroying trade policies that benefit only multinational corporations;
- Preserve worker health and safety protections, as well as wage standards guaranteed by Davis-Bacon and the Service Contract Act;
- Fight to raise the minimum wage and to guarantee affordable, high-quality health care for everyone;
- Stand up for policies that protect the rights of workers to freely organize and join unions;
- Insist on job-creating low-interest rate policies instead of job-destroying high-interest rate policies from the Federal Reserve.
"America Needs a Raise." And through a reinvigorated labor movement, the AFL-CIO accepts the responsibility for delivering it.