Economic Democracy and the Struggle for Equity: A Populist Demand

by Bill Templer

The figures are not yet in for CEO salaries stateside in 2005. In 2004, CEOs of America’s 500 biggest companies got a whopping aggregate pay raise of 54 percent, with the average CEO of a major company receiving $9.84 million in total compensation. According to Forbes magazine, their total compensation as a super economic elite was US$5.1 billion, up wildly from 3.3 billion in fiscal 2003.

The remuneration pyramid is something working class people know is abominable. And apparently as ‘American’ today as apple pie. People are well aware: that pyramid, with most workers and families pretty much at the bottom, is getting higher and higher. In 1980, the average CEO in a major American firm was making about 42 times as much as non-supervisory workers at the bottom of the Great Pyramid. By the mid-90s, that had increased to a multiple of 160. Five years ago, the estimate is that CEOs were paid salaries on average 460 times (!) as much as the ordinary bottom rung of workers in their own firm. Meanwhile, the highest echelons of corporate America are awash with criminality and fraud. Hard to count the number of CEOs who have pillaged their companies while workers have paid the price. Most of the largest bankruptcies in American history have taken place since 2001.

And who is paying for executives’ errors? Right: the workers. As David Zweifel recently noted in The Progressive Populist:

Unionized workers at Delphi Corp. are being asked to take a two-thirds pay cut while the once-healthy auto parts maker deals with bankruptcy. GM workers have voted to pay at least a billion dollars more of the corporation’s health care costs. Indeed, companies across the land are asking for and receiving wage reductions from workers in every field from the airlines to the grocery business.
(Vol. 11(20), Nov. 15, 2005, http://www.populist.com/05.20.html )

Companies dare to claim these cutbacks are “essential to stay competitive” in a globalizing economy. Zweifel spotlights another facet in this bundle of contradictions:

Further, a new survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research and Educational Trust reveals that the percentage of businesses that offer health insurance to their workers has dropped to 60 percent, compared to 69 percent in 2000 and 66 percent in 2003. Heaven knows what it will be next year.

And he wonders: “It all seems backward, doesn’t it?”

Backward, yes. But none of this is a secret. Under the impress of our great Dream Machine, such knowledge often gets smothered by the incessant spin of the Spectacle, the mind-numbing inundation with images, the subtle kind of brainwash into conformity that is ‘hegemony.’ As linguist Julian Edge phrased its chemistry:

that we act in ways that reinforce the power structures that control us because, in the end, we see it as being in our interests to do so. We may do this consciously or unconsciously. … We have choices, albeit constrained by the over-arching systems and power structures of ‘the way things are.’
(http://www.developingteachers.com/articles_tchtraining/intlpolitics_julian.htm )

‘The way things are’: a handful of giant corporations own or control nearly all newspapers, TV networks, radio stations, sports teams, movie companies, book publishers, and other sources of information, ‘infotainment’ and distraction, engineering our vast depoliticization constructing and reproducing our alienation.

Yet ordinary working people can cut through the fog and doubletalk. They understand that this Great Pyramid of inequity in pay and possessions is the ugly face of their own exploitation. Maybe they don’t use that word, but call it unfair, unequal. The scales of pay in a populist economy will be a lot fairer, looking far more like the plains of Kansas than the slopes of Mt. McKinley.

America in 2006 is more polarized economically than maybe ever before. Though the contradictions may remind some of the 1880s and 1890s, when the first Populist movement emerged as a powerful force of protest, especially across the American Midwest. The gap today is pretty mind-boggling. And anything but democratic: the top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of total wealth in this country, and over 80 percent of assets like stocks and bonds. In 2002, the top tenth of 1 percent, the wealthiest 130,000 households, had some $505 billion in income, averaging a cool $4 million a piece. Meanwhile, some 25 percent of all wage workers earned less than the official minimum hourly wage.

Along with some nine million workers officially unemployed in the U.S., there are maybe another five million not counted, considered “discouraged” and hard-core unemployed, not looking for work anymore. Another 25 million are working part-time, most for low pay and few benefits. Median household income over the past few years has been falling, especially in the Midwest, due to job losses in manufacturing and the relentless dynamo of outsourcing. Real wages have generally stagnated or even declined since the mid-1970s, and American workers have been compelled to work longer and longer hours just to pay their bills.

Have working hours for the average full-time worker really increased over that same period? You bet they have: statistics indicate up from 1,720 a year in 1973 to about 1,900 hours a year in 1998. That’s a rise of nearly 180 hours, or the equivalent of more than four additional weeks (!) of work per year if you average it out. Universities and public schools today are full of a growing mass of ‘adjunct’ or ‘contingent’ teachers, with low pay and no job security.

In Europe, this ballooning phenomenon in the workplace in industry and the service sector is now known as ‘precarity’ in labor, and is spreading fast. The British call it ‘casualisation of the workforce’
(http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1828 ).

Everywhere it means massive new job insecurity under the impact of neo-liberal capitalist agendas. And people often holding down more than one ‘contingent’ job just to make ends meet. Working people, blue-collar and white-collar, know this. Many college graduates have joined that club.

Their anger is palpable, often expressed in a refusal to even bother to get involved in anything political, let alone vote — a vast sense of political impotence. And disempowerment in the workplace, no unions or totally co-opted ones, though the struggle for worker-controlled unions continues
(http://www.ainfos.ca/ainfos336/ainfos22174.html ).

The Populist Party has to speak to that gut awareness, that disaffection, and build on it, become a vehicle for its articulation, as its predecessor sought to become over a century ago. The July 1892 platform of the Populist Party stated it well:

The conditions which surround us best justify our cooperation; we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. … The people are demoralized … The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. … The fruits of the toil of millions are badly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.
(http://www.wwnorton.com/eamerica/media/ch22/resources/documents/populist.htm )

Sound familiar? The party needs to project an alternative vision of a democratic people’s economy beyond this exploitation, these steep Great Pyramid differentials in income and wealth – and voice. Populist proposals for greater self-determination have to be drafted. Workers need an economic bill of rights. In firms run by workers’ committees and not ridiculously overpaid CEOs. Some useful ideas on remuneration within a “participatory economic vision” can be found in Michael Albert’s Parecon: Life After Capitalism (Verso 2003). Pay scales are at the core of economic democracy: the “economic bill of rights” 2000 platform proposal from the Greens/GPUSA, the smaller and more radical, now almost defunct wing of the stateside Green movement, is worth discussing, reinventing (http://www.greenparty.org/program/econbor.html ). Populist economic thinking can tap past progressive imagination and analysis, while forging new conceptions that speak to people’s needs and dreams.

We would do well to remember the vision of the Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease, the ‘People’s Joan of Arc,’ speaking to women in Kansas in 1890, urging them to join the ‘Alliance.’ In the interim, less has changed than some think:

Let no one for a moment believe that this uprising and federation of the people is but a passing episode in politics. … We seek to enact justice and equity between man and man. We seek to bring the nation back to the constitutional liberties guaranteed us by our forefathers. … Crowns will fall, thrones will tremble, kingdoms will disappear, the divine right of kings and the divine right of capital will fade away like the mists of the morning when the Angel of Liberty shall kindle the fires of justice in the hearts of men. “Exact justice to all, special privileges to none.” No more millionaires, and no more paupers; no more gold kings, silver kings and oil kings, and no more little waifs of humanity starving for a crust of bread. No more gaunt faced, hollow-eyed girls in the factories, and no more little boys reared in poverty and crime for the penitentiaries and the gallows. … when we shall have not a government of the people by capitalists, but a government of the people, by the people.
(http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5303/)

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