WaPo writer calls for “New Deal Feminism” today

Dorothy Sue Cobble, a professor of history and labor studies at Rutgers and author of The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America and The Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor, has written an interesting piece for tomorrow’s Washington Post, “It’s time for New Deal feminism.”

In it, Cobble asks women’s rights advocates to

concentrate on the economy and the workplace — and on the huge transformations that are needed there to get greater equality and security. These are issues that can unite women across class and culture and allow feminism to speak to the fears and concerns of everyone.

She compares this focus to the attention paid to abortion rights, and states

The next women’s movement should look a lot more like the one in the 1930s than the one in the late 1960s.

Citing women leaders such as Esther Peterson, Addie Wyatt, Caroline Dawson Davis, and of course, Frances Perkins, Cobble says this:

They wanted neither the dole nor make-work. Rather, they wanted more good jobs. Good jobs meant, first and foremost, higher pay. What better way to prime the economic pump than to put money in the pockets of workers, who after all are consumers? Female workers in particular needed a raise. They too supported families, they too provided essential services, even if the results were more intangible than in traditional men’s work: a child who could read, a sick patient comforted…

You can read her thought-provoking piece and then participate in an online discussion with her on Monday at 11:00 am.

Phantom Menace and this “turkey of an economy”

Teresa Ghilarducci, who spoke at our May conference, had a great post, “The Second Thanksgiving of the Great Recession,” in the Brainstorm blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education web site. In it, she points to the fact that people seem more worried about the deficit than about the fact that a huge number of people are currently unemployed.

But at least in my admittedly unscientific sample, people’s legitimate anxieties about losing their homes, or jobs, or retirement savings were focused in the wrong place. Instead of calls for continued job creation, I’m hearing a lot of misplaced fear about inflation and the growing federal debt — what Paul Krugman correctly calls the phantom menace.

So, in the spirit of having vigorous family discussions, if your Aunt Teresa the economist had been at your dinner table, here’s what I would have said.
Shouldn’t the Government balance its budget? Sure, over the long term, but no, not now. If the economy was booming, the government should be shrinking  the debt. That is what the Clinton Administration did during its eight years in office, cutting it to zero, and actually leaving a surplus.  And that is what George W. Bush didn’t do, increasing spending on prescription drugs, wars, and unnecessary tax cuts for the wealthy, while not paying for any of it.

Paul Krugman, as Teresa mentions, has also been bemoaning this focus on the deficit in his blog:

When I was on This Week yesterday, George Will tried his hand at the debt scare thing, saying that we’re in terrible shape because by 2019 the interest on the debt will be SEVEN HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS. (That should be read in the voice of Dr. Evil). I get that a lot — people who talk about the big numbers which are supposed to imply that things are terrible, impossible, we’re doomed, etc.

The point, of course, is that everything about the United States is big. So you have to interpret numbers accordingly. As the graphic above shows — it’s taken from an article that managed to maintain a grim tone while reporting numbers that actually weren’t all that grim — what we’re talking about is a debt-service burden roughly comparable to that under the first President Bush. How many of the people now warning about the impossible burden of currently projected debt were issuing similar warnings back in 1992? Not many, I’d guess.

How cynical are you? Do you believe that this focus on the BIG BAD DEFICIT might serve those who’d like to cut Social Security and Medicare? Need I remind you that fear worked very well in the recent past, when politicians wanted the American public to swallow something they otherwise would have rejected (9/11, 9/11, 9/11; weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction, weapons of mass destruction).

Don’t let the fear-mongerers win again.

This is a good time to remember Frances Perkins’s words from 1935:

We must devise plans that will not merely alleviate the ills of today, but will prevent their recurrence in the future. The task of recovery is inseparable from the fundamental task of social reconstruction.

I’ll end with another quote from Teresa’s post:

Aunt Teresa reminds you that economic policy makers respond to particular historical and economic situations. Inflexible theology does not help. Our situation now calls for continued government deficit spending, keeping interest rates virtually at zero, and doing everything possible to create jobs. When the economy begins to recover, then we should fight inflation.

When an overweight patient with high blood pressure and high cholesterol has a heart attack, there are lots of things that should be done over time to make the patient healthy — better diet, exercise, proper medication. But first you have to save their life and deal with the heart attack. That’s our economy now — we need to save the patient, and then do the long-term rehab (deficit reduction, stricter regulation of the financial sector, stronger government guarantees for retirement savings) to stave off future crises.

I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving weekend, and that this turkey of an economy is better by next year.

“You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement.”

President Obama made the above statement today as he signed a series of executive orders in the White House that are meant to “level the playing field” for labor unions.

According to the New York Times report of the meeting:

The orders he signed, which union officials say will undo Bush administration policies that tilted toward employers, would require federal contractors to offer jobs to current workers when contracts change, and would make it more difficult for federal contractors to discourage union activities.

The president also announced a new task force on the problems of middle-class Americans, and he named Vice President Joe Biden to chair it. Jared Bernstein, a liberal economist, has been tapped to lead the task force. More information can be found at AStrongMiddleClass.gov.

President Obama and VP Biden at White House ceremony (Stephen Crowley/The New York Times)

More from the Times:

The president and vice president did not define the “middle class” precisely in terms of income or standard of living, but it seemed clear that they were not speaking of Wall Street people.

“These are the men and the women who form the backbone of our economy, the most productive workers in the world,” Mr. Obama said.

Employment is really tanking

Robert Reich explains the free fall:

“Consumers have gone on strike”

Robert Reich, on his blog yesterday, made the above statement. And he went on to say:

Consumers have gone on strike because their earnings haven’t kept up. The recovery that officially ended December, 2007 (the National Bureau of Economic Research now tells us) was the first on record in which median earnings declined, adjusted for inflation. Since then, many people have also lost their jobs or are working part time when they’d rather be working full time, or else know they’re in danger of losing their jobs.

We are pleased to name Professor Reich as one of the advisors for the Frances Perkins Center. As a former secretary of labor himself (1993 – 1997), he honors the work of Frances Perkins and shares her passion for social justice.

Here’s his official portrait from the Department of Labor:

The official portrait of former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich.