Labor Party Shorts

The Labor Party -- including national organizer Tony Mazzocchi (the banner bearer at right) and East Bay Chapter members Stephen Mitchell and Gail Bateson -- joined the national march in solidarity with strawberry workers on April 13 in Watsonville, California.

About 20,000 people participated in the march, which was called by the United Farm Workers and the AFL-CIO to support the strawberry workers' hard fought organizing drive.

Later this year, minimum wage workers will see their hourly pay increased to $5.15 an hour, thanks to the bill Congress finally passed last year. The new minimum wage may sag well below the value it had in earlier decades, but the increase will bring some relief to about 10 million workers. Too bad it didn't come sooner -- like back in 1992, when Clinton was first elected, along with a Democrat-controlled Congress.

Clinton and congressional Democrats have been bragging about the minimum wage bill ever since they passed it. What they don't talk about are the compromises they made along the way. As retired businessman and Tufts University professor Jerome Grossman points out in The Wellesley Townsman, this bill didn't come cheap.

Remember how Congressional Republicans were at first so adamantly opposed to the bill? House Majority Leader Dick Armey said he would "fight the minimum wage increase with every fiber of my being." So what happened to change their minds? Well, Democrats consented to add a few things to the bill. Namely, tax breaks for corporations, large and small.

In his piece, Grossman does the math: the bill Congress passed last year will put some $6.8 billion in the pockets of minimum-wage workers over the next five years. But during the same period, it will give over $10 billion in tax breaks to corporations. And that's how business made a $3.3 billion profit on the minimum wage bill.

That's not our headline, it's on the cover of Business Week's April 21 issue. In 1996, the magazine reports, the average chief executive got a 54% raise, to $5,781, 300. And that, Business Week points out, was on top of the 40% raise they got last year. Meanwhile, factory workers got a 3% increase last year, and white collar workers got 3.2%. The average CEO compensation is now 209 times that of a factory employee.

Lawrence Coss	Green Tree Financial	$102,449,000
Andrew Grove	Intel	$97,590,000
Sanford Weill	Travelers Group	$94,157,000
Theodore Waitt	Gateway 2000	$81,326,000
Anthony O'Reilly	H.J. Heinz	$64,236,000
Sterling Williams	Sterling Software	$58,249,000
John Reed	Citicorp	$43,610,000
Stephen Hilbert	Conseco	$37,412,000
Casey Cowell	U.S. Robotics	$33,952,000
James Moffett	Freeport-McMoran C&G	$33,732,000

P.S. Business Week isn't the only source of information on scandalous corporate pay. If you're on the internet, scope out the AFL-CIO's Executive Pay Watch site (http://www.paywatch.org) or United for a Fair Economy's site (http://www.stw.org).

Bad Attitude

Some 50,182 people got laid off in March 1997 -- a 15-month high. Isn't it great, the Clinton recovery?

Cartoon by ©Michael Kaufman from 10 newsclips from late Apritl through mid-May 1997

Some business analysts are beginning to scratch their heads over employers' continuing drive to "downsize" -- especially given the toll it's taking on employee morale. Basically, we're developing a big attitude problem. In a recent survey of 62 major U.S. companies, 70% complained their workers had low morale and mistrusted management as a result of all the "restructuring." And an American Management Association survey of 262 companies found that companies that had "downsized" since 1990 had a greater rise in disability claims than those that hadn't laid people off.

The constant layoffs and resulting job fear are also affecting wages. Workers are too nervous about being laid off to demand raises or organize. They're also being conservative about moving to better-paying jobs. Even Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admits it: The reason wages are flat, he told a Senate committee, "appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity."

Days before he announced a budget deal that will hit poor people hard and give the rich yet another tax break, President Clinton joined an array of Democrats, Republicans, and corporate sponsors for a 3-day tribute to volunteerism in Philadelphia in late April. Unfortunately, volunteerism won't make up for the massive cuts in basic services Clinton and friends have instituted. Activists who know this -- including the Labor Party, the National Union of Hospital and Healthcare Employees, and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union -- took part in a "People's Summit" in Philadelphia to provide an alternative view to the official "Volunteer Summit."
Photo by ©Harvey Finkle, Impact Visuals

1. As late as 1985, U.S. CEOs and factory workers both took home the world's highest paychecks. American CEOs are still the world's highest paid, but U.S. workers' wages and benefits now rate:

2. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates' new $40 million, 35,000 square foot lakeside home is 16 times larger than the average American home because:

1. c. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, we average $17.01 in hourly wages and benefits, which is barely over half of what German workers make. We're also behind the Swiss, Belgians, Austrians, Finns, Norwegians, Danes, Dutch, Japanese, Swedes, French and Luxembourgers.

Courtesy of "Too Much," a newsletter produced by the Council on International and Public Affairs and United for a Fair Economy