Hey Dobbs.. How about the people STILL working here?

[TreasonousBastard]

This Tom Paine article is at

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10091

American Rights at Work is at (surprisingly enough):

http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/


Back To Basics-- Jonathan Tasini is the national director of American Rights At Work

Lou Dobbs has been getting a lot of press lately as a latter-day champion of the middle class. I give him his due—when a leading media voice, perhaps the leading voice when it comes to the business world, seemingly bites the hand that fed him, you have to take notice. For many months, for those who haven't tuned in to his CNN daily show, Dobbs has been excoriating the corporations who are "Exporting America"—the title of the Web site roll-call list of companies outsourcing work abroad. But Dobbs and other critics of outsourcing have missed a crucial point.

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But Dobbs, to the best of my knowledge, has never stood up to say: the best middle-class jobs program is to give workers the right to organize a union and have collective bargaining. To the best of my knowledge, I have yet to see Dobbs castigate corporate America for firing more than 20,000 workers a year who try to form unions. Dobbs has yet to call for a complete overhaul of the nation's pathetic labor laws to recapture the basic right to have a real choice, free from corporate intimidation, to choose a union.

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I would venture to guess that Dobbs has not criticized, if he even noticed, a stunning piece of recent economic news. Normally, at this stage of a declared economic recovery, there is a small spread between corporate profits and real wage compensation—in the past four recovery stages following a recession, real compensation rose 2.6 percent while corporate profits went up 9.8, according to the Economic Policy Institute. In the latest cycle, real compensation has declined 3.1 percent and corporate profits have risen 60.6 percent. In other words, while the trend of jobs moving abroad has launched a huge outcry, what also deserves front-page, daily headlines and condemnation is the battering of people's daily paychecks compared to what corporations are pocketing. With such profits, what justification is there for wage cuts and benefit cuts?