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Get Busy Living, Or Get Busy
Dying
A speech entitled "Get Busy Living, Or Get Busy Dying" which was
delivered this past Friday evening by David Sirota,to the
Montana AFL-CIO convention in historic Butte - the site of some
of the labor movement's most important battles.
By David Sirota
05/22/07 "ICH"
-- -- -As I was writing this speech late a few nights ago,
the movie The Shawshank Redemption came on TV. Knee-deep in
economic data and stories about the recent legislative session,
I heard Morgan Freeman's distinct baritone voice utter that
haunting phrase: "Get busy living, or get busy dying."
I tried to keep focused on my work, but the phrase kept going
through my head. "Get busy living, or get busy dying." And I
finally realized why: Because it's not just some line in a
movie. It is a message for the middle class, the labor movement
and, really, the entire country precisely at this moment, and
our decision to either get busy living or get busy dying will be
looked back upon by generations to come.
We are, right now, in the middle of a class war--one that
threatens to destroy the social contract that has made this
country what it is today. The statistics are grim. Today,
American workers' take-home pay represents a smaller share of
the nation's total income than at any time in the last forty
years. At the same time, corporate profits as a share of
national income are at an all-time high. In all, the top 1
percent of Americans--those who make on average $1 million a
year or more--owns a larger percentage of the nation's wealth
than at any time since the Great Depression.
None of this, of course, happened by itself. These trends
occurred at precisely the same time our government threw its lot
in almost exclusively with those at the top. Consumer protection
and environmental laws have been decimated, as corporate
lobbying has become a multibillion-dollar industry. At a time of
war and deficit, we have upcoming federal tax cuts that will
hand roughly a half-trillion dollars to the wealthiest 1
percent--tax cuts for millionaires are larger than the annual
income of the average American household.
And labor laws have been weakened, creating in many cases the
modern-day version of the turn of the twentieth century, where
employers openly busted unions with brutal tactics. Whereas we
once experienced the brutal tactics of mine company owners at
Cripple Creek, Colorado, we now experience the brutal tactics of
Wal-Mart thugs at Loveland, Colorado, where they recently broke
the back of a fledgling organizing campaign. The Occupational
Safety and Health Administration--the government agency that
enforces workplace safety laws--has seen its budget slashed to
the point where it would take the agency 108 years to inspect
every work site under its jurisdiction. That has meant real
consequences in this region. As the Associated Press reported
last month, Wyoming and Montana had the worst records in the
nation for workplace safety in 2005. Nonetheless, the debate
over these issues continues to move to the right. It is now
considered "controversial" for lawmakers to even consider
pushing a law like the Employee Free Choice Act, which helps
guarantee workers the right to join a union without being
harassed and intimidated by employers.
Whereas the Pinkerton Agency fueled fear in the hearts of
workers during the first Gilded Age, in this second Gilded Age
we are living through, we have a cottage industry of
union-busting law firms and PR agencies that have undoubtedly
helped us reach a point where today more than 20,000 workers a
year are demoted or fired just because they try to organize a
union in their workplace. The only major difference between the
current era and the past is that today, this anti-union industry
is connected to many top politicians--not just of the Republican
Party, the traditional home of Big Business, but also of the
Democratic Party. As just one example, you may have read that
Hillary Clinton's chief campaign adviser moonlights as the head
of a PR company that specializes in helping companies manage
their anti-union campaigns.
So this is a class war, replete with its own casualties--whether
they be job losses, wage stagnation, destroyed communities or
death. Yes, you heard that right--death. Today, with unions
under attack and workplace protections often completely
eliminated, the government reports that roughly 5,500 people die
every year on the job--more deaths than 9/11 each and every
year.
The problem, of course, is that the term "class warfare" has
been used as an epithet by those actually waging this war. Flip
on C-SPAN when Congress is in session or the public access
channel when the legislature is in session, and you'll
inevitably hear a right-wing conservative berate as "class
warfare" any proposals to make sure the economic benefits that
this country generates are distributed more equally.
Standing here surrounded by the rich history of Butte, we know
that Montana has long been at the forefront of this class war.
And this state--perhaps more than any other in the country--is
now playing a critical role in fighting back.
In the legislature this year, we saw something truly
extraordinary. This state, thanks to its governor and its
Democratic legislators, decided to fight back on taxes--it
decided, in other words, to get busy living. Whereas Democrats
in many other states try to avoid the tax issue altogether,
Democrats here went on the offensive, proposing a
property-tax-cut package that targeted its benefits squarely at
the middle-class folks who live in this state, paid for by
strengthening tax enforcement on out-of-state corporations that
have been treating Montana as a subservient colony for the
better part of a century. This is especially true when it comes
to taxes: As Senator Jim Elliott discovered a few years back,
roughly half of the Fortune 500 companies doing business in
Montana pay less than $500 a year in taxes.
The beauty of the fight Democrats picked was that it exposed the
right-wingers for what they are: theocrats, whose religion is
the class war. Over the course of ninety days, and then another
six days, it became clear that beneath all the fights about
spending levels and budgets, Republicans were forcing government
to the brink of a crisis over the tax proposal. Not only did
they oppose tax cuts aimed at the middle class, not only did
they fight to kill the provisions closing tax loopholes for
out-of-state corporations, but they fought for large tax cuts
for wealthy out-of-state corporations. They were so committed to
their fight, they actually forced taxpayers to pay $38,000 a day
for the special legislative session to try to get their way--all
while claiming they were focused on saving taxpayer money.
While Democrats did not ultimately get everything they asked
for, their agenda merged from the contentious special session
largely unscathed, reported the Billings Gazette. Their victory,
of course, is more than just the middle-class tax cuts and new
investments in education they achieved for this state. As the
national conservative movement well knows, what happened in
Montana was groundbreaking. For the first time in ages, a
heartland state declared war on the class war.
This backlash has been building for some time. Mike Mansfield
and Pat Williams were great icons of the kind of populism this
region has long been known for. When I first came out to Montana
in 2000 to work for Brian Schweitzer, observers in Washington,
DC, were saying it was crazy to think a populist could make a
race out of a Senate contest in a Republican state like Montana.
And even though we came extremely close that year, many of the
same observers said the same thing when I came out here in 2004.
Now, with a Governor Brian Schweitzer and a Senator Jon Tester,
these armchair navel-gazers aren't saying such things anymore.
Moving forward from the legislature, those of us here in Montana
committed to the cause of working men and women in this country
have an incredible opportunity with our senior Senator Max
Baucus. He chairs the Senate Finance Committee--arguably the
most powerful committee when it comes to fighting or engaging in
the class war.
We now get to call Max "Mr. Chairman," as we should--but as Max
himself would probably agree, that chairmanship isn't his; it
belongs to the people of Montana--which means the 900,000 of us
who are privileged to live in this state and who employ Max as
our senator--who have arguably one of the most important seats
at the world's economic table.
We should feel fortunate that since being elevated to chairman
this January, Max has listened to the Montana State Senate,
which overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan resolution asking him
to reject President Bush's request to reauthorize fast-track
trade authority--the authority that Presidents have used to do
the bidding of K Street lobbyists and strip out all labor, wage,
environmental and human rights provisions from trade deals. To
date, Max has refused to move fast-track through his committee
and he should be congratulated for that. No version of
fast-track should be acceptable to any member of Congress.
To understand why fast-track and the trade issue in general are
so important to Montana, we have to think both of what we have
here in the state and what we could have. Trade policy that
forces Americans to compete with slave labor or with countries
that have no environmental protections or with nations that do
not allow unions forces us into a race to the bottom. It puts a
premium not on raising wages, bettering our environment or
strengthening worker rights but on slashing wages, gutting
environmental protections and busting unions. Workers know that
with a trade policy that has no protections, if they try to
fight for their share of economic benefits, companies can just
say "See you later." And Big Money interests know how to
leverage that fear. As Cornell University researchers
documented, immediately after NAFTA was passed, corporations
began loading equipment onto trucks marked "Mexico" outside of
factories whenever labor disputes sprang up.
We also know that our current trade policy prevents jobs that
don't yet exist from ever being created--our corporate leaders
all but admit this. Those of you who were at the recent economic
conference here in Butte may remember that when Bill Gates spoke
to the assembled crowd, I asked him why Montanans should be as
confident as he is that our current trade and economic policies
would help develop high-tech, good-paying jobs in a place like
Montana, when those policies reward countries that have
low-wage, nonunion labor. I asked him this question because his
local paper, the Seattle Times, had recently reported that
internal Microsoft documents showed that midlevel managers at
the company are being told to try to outsource as much work to
India as possible--a practice that our trade policies encourage.
Gates responded by admitting that Montana really shouldn't hold
out hope that it will ever become a hub for high-tech jobs.
Yet, incredibly, Congress and the Bush White House seem to be
moving forward with a package of new trade deals that once again
fail to include the basic labor and environmental protections
Democrats promised to fight for in the 2006 election--the
protections that would actually help build our domestic economy
and prevent our workers from having to compete in the race to
the bottom. This deal includes a trade pact rewarding the
Colombian government, a government that the Washington Post
reports actively colludes with paramilitary gangs to execute
union organizers.
Like NAFTA and China PNTR, this deal has been almost universally
trumpeted by reporters and pundits, even though the actual text
of the deal remains secret, even though rank-and-file Democratic
lawmakers have been kept in the dark about the deal--and even
though the deal has been roundly condemned not just by leaders
of organized labor but by a diverse coalition that includes
environmental groups like the Sierra Club, small business groups
like the US Business and Industry Council and agriculture
advocacy groups like R-CALF. Just like during NAFTA, we are
being told that workers shouldn't worry, and that this deal is
great for them--even though the people who made this deal are
refusing to release the actual legislative language of the deal.
Meanwhile, the Chamber of Commerce's top lobbyists are telling
Washington reporters that they have received "assurances" that
any labor provisions in the deal will be completely
unenforceable.
The lobbyists are probably correct, primarily because the deal
does not give unions the same basic rights as corporations
currently have. Right now, corporations can use trade deals to
sue in international court to overturn local, state and federal
consumer protection and environmental laws that they say cut
into their profits. Americans have been forced to pay almost $2
billion in "damages" because of these suits. But in this secret
trade deal announced last week--a deal that we are expected to
believe is good for workers--unions are prevented from having
the same rights to sue for the enforcement of labor laws. That
means the enforcement of any labor or environmental protections
will be left to the Bush Administration. That's exactly what
corporate America wants, because we all know trusting George
Bush to enforce protections for workers and the environment is
about as smart as trusting Tony Soprano when he asks you to take
a long boat ride.
If this all sounds familiar, that's because it is. As writer
Matt Stoller eloquently put it this week, "This is surely a
sequel from NAFTA: a slowing economy, a President named Bush, a
decimated labor force, a neoliberal group in Congress, strong
business coalitions, a Clinton running for the Democratic
nomination promising to be on the side of the people while
surrounding the campaign with corporate-allied operatives, a
country looking for change, and a secretive trade deal on the
table."
Both Max and Jon--like every other member of Congress--will be
under enormous pressure from lobbyists, the Washington pundit
class and corporate America to pass this new trade package and
sell out American workers. But unlike in previous years, we are
seeing an intense uprising. Rank-and-file lawmakers are joining
with a coalition of groups representing millions of Americans to
say that this deal is unacceptable. Just yesterday, five
senators held a press conference to introduce legislation saying
that if a proposed trade deal doesn't create jobs, raise wages
and improve market access for American small businesses, that
trade deal is terminated, end of story. In other words, a group
of leaders is putting their foot down for the first time, and
they are putting their foot down with the help of millions of
ordinary Americans.
For this movement to ultimately be successful not only on trade
but on all the other economic challenges we face both at the
federal level and here at home, we will be required to make a
choice: Will we get busy living, or get busy dying?
Will we as a movement say "enough is enough" and get busy
helping our leaders stand up to Big Money interests and
represent the middle class? Will we demand that our legislature
continue to fight off the right-wing class warriors who dare to
sacrifice middle-class tax relief and healthcare programs on the
altar of tax breaks for out-of-state corporations? Will we make
Denny Rehberg regret his vote against the Employee Free Choice
Act, which allows unions to organize without the threat of
corporate intimidation? Will we help Jon Tester fight off
inevitable right-wing attacks when he works to make taxes more
fair? And will we use every tool we have at our disposal to
insist that Senator Baucus use the chairmanship we put him in to
finally change our trade and economic policies to work for
ordinary Montanans?
Or will we slink back in a corner? Will we be too afraid to make
enemies? Will we try to avoid having our supposed "friends" get
mad at us? Will we, in other words, get busy dying?
I'm sure many of you have read the book Labor's Untold Story. It
is the story of a movement whose greatest moments were those
where people joined together to get busy living, regardless of
which politicians were made uncomfortable, regardless of the
intimidation tactics of whichever Big Money interest happened to
be abusing its power. This is a story that is gut-wrenching at
times, tragic at others--but always inspiring and ultimately a
critical part of what has made this nation so great.
This country needs a labor movement that continues to be
unafraid to fight back, one that jealously guards the interests
of those it represents, even if it makes people in power
uncomfortable. Because here's the thing: Labor doesn't just
represent its members, it represents the middle class, and we
cannot afford to let etiquette or personal friendships get in
the way of fighting back. To do so would be to disrespect the
generations that came before us--the workers who every day went
down those mine shafts outside this hall so that they could put
food on their families' table and build this country from
scratch.
I am optimistic that we are about to see a major resurgence of
organized labor, and thus a reversal of the hostile takeover of
our government. As I travel the country meeting with union
organizers and union leaders, I see all sorts of signs that the
labor movement is experiencing a resurgence. And the powers that
be are taking note. As just one example, my good friend Leo
Gerard, president of the Steelworkers, was featured on the front
page of the Wall Street Journal in a story about how the
Steelworkers are shrewdly leveraging their power to make sure
the middle class doesn't get trampled in Wall Street's merger
stampede.
But make no mistake about it, the decision about whether to get
busy living or get busy dying is one fraught with peril. Even a
cursory look at our country's history shows that you can't make
real change without making real enemies--whether they are
lobbyists, executives, legislators, congressmen or senators. But
we also know that the path of least resistance that may be lined
with happy smiles and big campaign contributions and pats on the
back by those in power is the way to get busy dying--the way to
perpetuate what has become an intolerable status quo for
millions of Americans.
I've struggled with the question of whether to get busy living
or get busy dying in my own career, and in taking the path I
have taken, I've certainly made some enemies, and have been far
from perfect. But as I get older, I constantly catch myself
thinking about what I will regret and not regret at the end of
my life--and it haunts me to think I may regret not pursuing the
cause of economic justice because I was too afraid to make
enemies.
Such thoughts may be morbid, but they are necessary. And so I
conclude by asking again: Will we get busy living, or get busy
dying?
During that critical vote in the next legislature, will we
pressure that key Democrat even though we were drinking buddies?
When the new Congress begins pushing yet another NAFTA, will we
demand in no uncertain terms that Montana's Congressional
delegation stand up for our state even if they and their staffs
get angry at us? When the power players in the nation's capital
shove more tax breaks for millionaires, budget cuts to
healthcare and eliminations of labor laws down our throats, will
we make them feel pain on election day, even if it offends
Democratic Party elders in Washington?
Will we, in other words, go all the way?
The answer has to be yes, and it has to be yes because as I said
to start off, the stakes at this point are too high. It's time
to stand up, it's time to make our voices heard, it's time to
walk in the footsteps of past generations who refused to be
intimidated in the face of the class war that is now upon us.
It's time, in short, to get busy living--because America will
cease to be the great country it is if we get busy dying.
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