In June 1996, 1400 elected delegates gathered in Cleveland, Ohio, to found the Labor Party. With this issue of the Press, we send out the call for the Labor Party's First Constitutional Convention.
In the intervening year and a half, Labor Party activists in unions and communities
have been working to 
build the party and to convince people that working class Americans need a
political alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. Politicians from the two parties
have made the job easier by continuing to do what they do so well: representing the
interests of corporations and the rich.
Below, a few of the new reasons we have to build the Labor Party as we head toward the November 1998 convention.
Photo: ©Bill Burke
Just two months after the Labor Party was founded, President Bill Clinton and legislators from both parties in government passed "welfare reform." Unfortunately, the so-called Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 did not actually provide any work opportunity -- except the unpaid kind. The Labor Party immediately issued a statement opposing the bill. We decried this rollback of the country's 60-year guarantee of support for families in need. We also predicted that it would drive wages down for the rest of us by creating a huge pool of people desperate enough to work for almost nothing.
In the months since, we have begun to see the results of Clinton's move to "end
welfare as we know it":
-- 1.4 million families have left the welfare rolls since peak enrollment in March 1994.
-- States are reporting that only about half those going off welfare have actually found a job. An Urban Institute study put the figure at 46%. New York City officials claimed that 18% of those in its "workfare" program went on to find jobs -- although they counted people who didn't show up for an appointment as having successfully found employment.
-- Tennessee surveyed former welfare recipients who had found employment. The average job was 33 hours per week at $5.82 an hour -- $9987 a year. A similar study in Maryland found that the average post-welfare job averaged $8300 a year.
-- This winter, New York City soup kitchens and food pantries report they don't have enough food to go around. Milwaukee homeless shelters see a 25% increase in population since last winter.
-- It's hard to say how much welfare reform has driven down wages. But it is striking that in this record-length economic "boom," real average weekly earnings are still 17.4% below what they were in 1972.
We are now well into the second term of the President who promised affordable
healthcare for all. But 
all we see is less access to poorer quality care. Some recent developments:
Photo: ©George Cohen
-- Healthcare costs are going up fast again. Experts predict a 5 to 10 percent rise in 1998.
-- Meanwhile, earnings of the nation's largest healthcare providers and manufacturers rose 20.4%, on average, in 1996.
-- HMOs continue to expand, despite horrifying reports of abuse and profiteering. Nine major HMO and hospital chain mergers and acquisitions were announced in the first two months of 1997 alone.
-- In the first six months of 1996, 44.8 million Americans were uninsured, reports Physicians for a National Health Program. And 87% of them came from households that had a working adult.
If his disastrous healthcare "reform" effort is Clinton's big embarrassment, his greatest pride is NAFTA, which he got through Congress -- with help from both parties -- in 1993. Fortunately, last fall, unions and environmentalists managed to stop Clinton from getting "fast track" authority to negotiate NAFTA agreements with other countries. But not before Clinton had dangled plums of every variety before legislators to seduce them to vote for fast track.
Many succumbed. Among the seducees: Matthew Martinez, the labor-backed California Democrat who is chief sponsor of the 1996 Martinez Jobs Bill. (Martinez's price: Clinton's support for extending the Long Beach freeway.) It goes to show that without a powerful party of working people to hold politicians accountable, they just can't be trusted.
Meanwhile, in the past year, we've seen more and more evidence that NAFTA is wreaking
havoc on workers in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada:
-- The Economic Policy Institute recently estimated that NAFTA has resulted in a net loss of 394,835 American jobs. Some 72% of those jobs were in manufacturing, and 23% of them paid $19.08 an hour or more. NAFTA has resulted in a big trade imbalance: Since it was passed, imports from Mexico have increased by 87%, while exports to Mexico increased by only 31%.
-- NAFTA hasn't been kind to Mexicans or Canadians either. Mexico has faced a peso crisis and the loss of some two million jobs; Canada has lost over 300,000 manufacturing jobs since NAFTA went into effect.
-- As we've reported, NAFTA has been a handy tool for employers who want to use the threat of layoff to keep people from organizing unions. A study released last year by Cornell University researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner found that fully half of the employers surveyed threatened to close the plant if workers organized. And many of them explicitly threatened to go to Mexico.
-- Now the world's business interests want to establish a kind of NAFTA for investment. The idea behind the Multilateral Agreement on Investment is to allow the free flow of capital across borders. Unfortunately for working people, the proposed agreement would endanger our efforts to put conditions on corporate investments, even domestically (like requiring companies that get local tax breaks create a certain number of jobs). The agreement is expected to be completed this May, and will then be presented to Congress.
Most Americans didn't get the real news about the so-called balanced budget package
Congress passed last year. In reality, the budget's deficit-reduction measures were
relatively insignificant, since the deficit had already become virtually negligible. The
most important thing about the bill was that it gave the richest one percent of Americans
a $16,000 annual tax break. The bill included:
-- A dramatic cut in the taxes people pay on profits from stocks, bonds and real estate. Even Business Week acknowledged that this gift to rich people is a throwaway that won't result in any significant new investment that could create or save jobs.
-- A much higher ceiling on paying estate taxes. Now the wealthy don't have to pay any taxes on inheritances under $1.3 million.
-- Virtual elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which had helped insure that most large corporations pay at least some federal income tax.
It's always been pretty clear who owned the Democrats and Republicans, but this last election cycle it was more stark than usual:
-- The Democratic and Republican parties took in more than $260 million in soft money contributions in the 1995-96 election cycle -- more than three times the amount raised in the last presidential campaign. Some top Republican givers: Amway, Philip Morris, RJR Reynolds, Pfizer, Disney. Top Democratic contributors included: Connell Rice & Sugar, Philip Morris, Boeing, and the Atlantic Richfield Co.
-- Much was made of labor's effort to bolster Democrats in the last election. But labor, as always, was vastly outspent by the corporations, by a margin of 7-1. Some say more.
-- These people are all friends! Last summer, Clinton spent his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, hanging out with top executives of Lazard Frere, Xerox, Dow Jones, GE, and a bunch of other rich and powerful people who are benefitting from the policies of the two parties.
In the past 18 months, our Democratic president and Democrats in Congress still haven't taken the lead in ensuring that workers have a right organize, bargain and strike. And Clinton can't just blame it on a Republican Congress. In the two years when Clinton had a Congress controlled by Democrats, he decided to throw the "labor law reform" issue to a toothless panel made up of corporate and government muckety-mucks, with a couple labor people thrown in for flavor. That panel (the Dunlop Commission) went nowhere, and we are still stuck with a legal system that favors the employer and makes union activity very difficult. And so long as we're kept from building big, powerful unions, Americans will probably continue to have some of the poorest wages and benefits in the industrialized world.
To its credit, the AFL-CIO has dramatically increased its commitment to organizing, and is encouraging all its constituent unions to do likewise. The federation itself now spends 30% of its budget on organizing, up from 5% a few years ago.
But with the law still against us, it's hard to win.
-- In 1996, the number of union elections increased 3.7% over the year before. But we won fewer of them. In 1996, unions won 47.7% of elections, down from 49.2% in 1994. No wonder, when employers can intimidate, manipulate, and procrastinate with impunity. It takes years to prove they broke the rules, and by then, the struggle has often already been lost.
-- Even workers who manage to win the union election have to fight like hell to actually get a first contract. According to an AFL-CIO analyst, only about half those who win an NLRB election ever get a first contract. A study by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service found that of 1279 employee groups who voted for a union in 1995, only 25% actually got a first contract negotiated within 12 months. Employers stall and intimidate, and the law lets them.
The only way to change the rules and to strip away the power of corporations and the wealthy is to build a party of our own to fight for us. If you are a member of the Labor Party, get a co-worker, a friend or family member to join. And if you haven't joined...do!
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