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May 30, 2005
Memorial Day
Posted by Jim at 03:04 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2005
Religious investors ask Wal-Mart to review social, economic policies
By Tracy Early
Catholic News Service
NEW YORK (CNS) -- A group of religious orders and other investors is asking the retail giant Wal-Mart to assess the company's policies and practices in light of their "social, environmental and economic sustainability."
A resolution filed for shareholder action said Wal-Mart, which will hold its annual stockholder meeting June 3 in Fayetteville, Ark., is facing widespread "negative public perceptions" about its operations.
"Wal-Mart's business success is dependent on its domestic and global workers receiving a sustainable living wage to meet their basic needs, and the environmental viability of the communities in which the company operates," the resolution added.
The Shareholder Association for Research and Education, an agency based in Vancouver, British Columbia, said in a report earlier this month that Wal-Mart activity had drawn concern in Canada as well as the United States. The agency helps pension funds build sound investment practices that protect beneficiaries but also contribute to a "just and healthy society."
In reaction to union organizing efforts, Wal-Mart closed a store in Quebec after "a short round of negotiations" with "the chain's first North American unionized bargaining unit," the report said.
"The danger for shareholders is that some cost controls could undermine key relationships with employees, customers, suppliers and communities," according to the agency's director, Peter Chapman.
For the Wal-Mart resolution, the lead filer is the United Methodist Board of Pension & Health Benefits, and co-filers include the Dominican Sisters of Adrian, Mich., the School Sisters of Notre Dame, Sisters of Charity, Benedictine Sisters, Congregation of the Holy Cross, Presbyterian Church, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and a Vancouver agency, Ethical Funds.
According to the Shareholder agency, Wal-Mart has asked shareholders to vote against the resolution. The company said it plans to prepare a report like the one requested but wants to do it "only in the form and at the time that is in the best interests of the company and its associates and the communities and customers we serve."
Religious investors also filed resolutions with Wal-Mart this year on equal employment and on the sale of violent video games to children.
Wal-Mart is not alone in drawing the attention of the church-related investors, but is only one of dozens of companies that are being challenged in stockholder resolutions.
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Posted by Melissa at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2005
Paul Krugman: America Wants Security
It was a carefully staged Norman Rockwell scene. The street was lined with American flags; a high school band played "God Bless America."
Then, under the watchful gaze of Wal-Mart's chief operating officer, Maryland's governor vetoed a bill that would have obliged large businesses to spend more on employee health care.
The news here isn't that some politicians wrap their deference to corporate interests in the flag. The news, instead, is that Maryland's State Legislature passed a pro-worker bill in the first place. In fact, the bill passed by a veto-proof majority in the Maryland Senate, and fell just short of that margin in the House.
After November's election, the victors claimed a mandate to unravel the welfare state. But the national election was about who would best defend us from gay married terrorists. At the state level, where elections were fought on bread-and-butter issues, voters sent a message that they wanted a stronger, not weaker, social safety net.
I'm not just talking about the shift in partisan alignment, in which Democrats made modest gains in state legislatures, and achieved a few startling successes. I'm also talking about specific issues, like the lopsided votes in both Florida and Nevada for constitutional amendments raising the minimum wage.
Since the election, high-profile right-wing initiatives, at both the federal and state level, have run into a stone wall of public disapproval. President Bush's privatization road show seems increasingly pathetic. In California, the conservative agenda of Arnold Schwarzenegger, including an attempt to partially privatize state pensions, has led to demonstrations by nurses, teachers, police officers and firefighters - and to a crash in his approval ratings.
There's a very good reason voters, when given a chance to make a clear choice, increasingly support a stronger, not a weaker, social safety net: they need that net more than ever. Over the past 25 years the lives of working Americans have become ever less secure. Jobs come without health insurance; 401(k)'s vanish; corporations default on their pension obligations; workers lose their jobs more often, and unemployment lasts much longer than it used to.
The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed what the pollsters called an "angry electorate." By huge margins, voters think that politicians are paying too little attention to their concerns, especially health care, jobs and gas prices.
At the state level, many, though by no means all, politicians are responding to those concerns. The push to raise the minimum wage is a useful political barometer: seven states have raised the minimum in just the last two years.
True, there are limits on what state governments can do: they fear that if they do too much for workers, they'll drive business and jobs away. I'd argue that the fear is often exaggerated. For example, Wal-Mart may avoid states that force it to provide health insurance, but given the hidden subsidies the company receives - one way or another, taxpayers end up paying a lot for uninsured workers - this may not be such a bad thing. Still, any major strengthening of the safety net will have to come at the federal level.
Why, then, is Washington so out of touch?
At a gala dinner in his honor, Tom DeLay cited his party's recent achievements: "bankruptcy reform, class-action reform, energy, border security, repealing the death tax." All of these measures are either irrelevant to or actively hostile to the economic security of working Americans.
Yet as Mr. DeLay boasted, many Democratic members of Congress also voted in support of these measures. In so doing, they undermined their party's ability to claim that it stands for something different.
So where will change come from?
Everyone loves historical analogies. Here's my thought: maybe 2004 was 1928. During the 1920's, the national government followed doctrinaire conservative policies, but reformist policies that presaged the New Deal were already bubbling up in the states, especially in New York.
In 1928 Al Smith, the governor of New York, was defeated in an ugly presidential campaign in which Protestant preachers warned their flocks that a vote for the Catholic Smith was a vote for the devil. But four years later F.D.R. took office, and the New Deal began.
Of course, the coming of the New Deal was hastened by a severe national depression. Strange to say, we may be working on that, too.
Posted by Jim at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2005
The Working Poor
WAMU featured a series on the working poor back in March. Given the previous blog entry with FDR's Second Bill of Rights, I thought these broadcasts were appropriate. The first discusses health insurance and the second discusses problems faced by low wage workers, who are often new immigrants.
Posted by Melissa at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
May 09, 2005
The Second Bill of Rights
Proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, January 11, 1944
Every American Is Entitled To:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries of shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
Posted by Jim at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)
May 08, 2005
Roses and Thorns
Just in time for Mother's Day, President Bush announces a Social Security plan that's terrible for women.
By Amy Chasanov
American Prospect
Web Exclusive: 05.06.05
President Bush wants to give American women a Mother's Day present we'd be better off without: He's cutting our Social Security benefits when he promises not to, and making us repay more than our fair share if we choose to open a private account.
The president's plan for Social Security, which combines privatization with changes in the way future benefits are calculated, would cut promised benefits substantially.
Wait a minute, you're thinking: Didn't the president say that current benefit levels would be protected for low-wage earners? And wouldn't women's lower wages actually protect more of them from benefit cuts? Not really. Here's the problem. Yes, the president said that benefits would stay the same for workers who currently earn $20,000 a year or less, and that only the top 70 percent of earners would face cuts. But that's not exactly true.
Working women are more likely to be in the lowest 30 percent of the career earnings distribution. Despite their increasing presence in the labor force, they are still paid less than men for identical work; they are more likely to work in low-wage, pink-collar jobs; and they are more likely to work part time or spend time out of the labor force to raise children or care for elderly family members. And, because many women's Social Security checks are based on their husbands' earnings, not their own, they wouldn’t be insulated from the president's benefit cuts. So much for protecting low-wage women.
Meanwhile, for the woman "lucky" enough to fall in the top 70 percent of earners, whether by virtue of her own earnings or her spouse's, the cuts would be progressively deeper over time. Eventually all workers would end up receiving about the same benefit, essentially transforming Social Security from its role today as a dependable, guaranteed retirement benefit into a bare-bones safety-net program.
For the American middle class, this plan means big cuts over time; an average earner born today would have her benefits cut nearly 30 percent. Middle-income workers can't afford it, as two-thirds of all retirees now get more than half of their income from Social Security. With employers offering fewer and leaner private pensions, future retirees will have even less income outside of Social Security.
When a worker no longer brings home the bacon due to retirement, disability, or death, Social Security provides baseline income security for not only the worker but also that worker's family. Wives (or husbands) of retired or disabled workers can receive 50 percent of their spouses' Social Security benefit if it's higher than the benefit they qualify for on their own. Because a wife's lifetime earnings rarely exceed her husband's, women are much more likely to receive spousal benefits as wives or widows.
In 2001, more than 6 million women had earned Social Security as workers but received higher benefits as a widow or wife. Their husbands are likely to be in the top 70 percent of the career earnings distribution. Not only would the husbands have their benefits reduced under partial price indexing, the 50-percent spousal benefit received by wives and widows (and children) also would be cut. That's why many women in the bottom 30 percent who are being promised that their benefits will not be cut are in for a nasty shock. This problem gets worse over time. The number of working women entitled to a higher benefit based on their husband's earnings is expected to grow from 28 percent of all women in 2000 to 38 percent in 2040.
That's not the only thorn on this rose. Private accounts would hurt women, too. Anyone who opens a private account would actually be borrowing money from the government. The government would keep lending you money to put into your account each year, and would keep track, just like a bank. At retirement, you'd have to pay back what you borrowed plus 3-percent interest and inflation compounded each year, leaving you with whatever -- if anything -- you'd been able to make above that.
Yale University financial economist Robert Shiller finds that, under a realistic rate of return, the life-cycle portfolio loses money 71 percent of the time. In other words, most folks lose the gamble and would have been better off never opening an account. But let's assume you're one of the lucky ones who made money. The government would convert your debt into a monthly repayment and subtract what you owe from the (already reduced, in most cases) Social Security check you get each month.
Workers who die sooner after retirement (read: men) wouldn’t have time to repay all they've borrowed from the government. Instead, workers who live longer after retirement (read: women) would pay the government back more than their fair share of what was borrowed.
I'm not sure how the lawmakers who are pushing indexing changes and privatization are explaining this to the mothers in their lives this weekend. I'd bet they're just sending roses.
Amy Chasanov is deputy policy director of the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Amy Chasanov, "Roses and Thorns", The American Prospect Online, May 6, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
For additional information , please see American Prospect's Special Edition on Social Security.
Posted by Melissa at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)