EFCA had been the centerpiece of organized labor’s designs on the new Democratic president and Congress. The legislation was set to easily pass in the House of Representatives, and would certainly have garnered a majority of votes in the Senate, although not necessarily enough votes to defeat a filibuster.

The three key planks of the legislation were:

• A “card check” provision that would have allowed workers to form a union by a simple majority signing union cards. Card check is necessary because current labor law essentially forces workers to organize a union twice–once by signing cards and a second time in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election, often held months or even years later–all in the face of massive (and often illegal) employer intimidation.
• Binding arbitration on companies that refuse to sign an initial union contract. This measure is necessary because companies often refuse to bargain with newly formed unions, delaying negotiations until they can try to get the union decertified.
• Increased fines on companies that violate workers’ rights to organize. This is important because companies routinely break the law by firing union organizers to kill off organizing drives. While such employers may eventually have to pay fines for such actions, they view it as a worthwhile investment in what anti-labor lawyers call “union avoidance.”

Such legislation, even in its original form, wouldn’t have been a panacea to reverse labor’s decline. But it would have been an important tool for unions to organize the unorganized, and give workers confidence that federal law was on their side.

Now, however, a “compromise” in the Senate has jettisoned the card check provision–the most important part of the proposed legislation–from EFCA.

There are several suspects in connection to the murder of card check–and all of them are guilty, to one degree or another.

The first group in the lineup is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and corporate lobbyists, and their massive, multimillion-dollar K Street smear campaign. The next group includes, of course, congressional Republicans.

But with Senate Democrats now holding a 60-seat “filibuster proof” majority, EFCA’s killers needed the collusion of “moderate” and conservative Democratic senators–including Dianne Feinstein of California and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, the home state of anti-union behemoth Wal-Mart. Both reneged on earlier support for EFCA.
Behind this gang was a wider group of accessories–including other congressional Democrats and the White House, which failed to muster even a modest lobbying effort for EFCA.

Lastly, EFCA’s enemies needed a labor movement that pulled its punches to give Corporate America the political space it needed to finish off the pro-union legislation. Unfortunately, organized labor obliged.

How did things go so wrong?

First of all, labor misread the dynamics of the Democratic Party and its commitment to pass genuine pro-labor reform. While the Democrats put forward EFCA in the first place, they are at the end of the day a pro-corporate party. So predictably, they wavered on the legislation. The Senate hemmed and hawed for months, and the legislation remained in limbo.

Instead of disciplining conservative Democrats into supporting EFCA, the party leadership started the process of compromising on the content of the legislation. Ultimately, six Democratic Senators–Tom Harkin (Iowa), Arlen Specter (Pa.), Sherrod Brown (Ohio), Thomas Carper (Del.), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Charles Schumer (N.Y.)–met behind closed doors and came up with the “compromise” that removed card check.

As the Atlantic Monthly put it:

“The failure of card check, now known as “majority signup,” speaks as much to the political priorities of the Obama administration as it does the power of moderate Democrats, most of whom opposed card check for fear of alienating employers in their mostly non-union districts.
“As of a few months ago, labor strategists could accurately claim as many as 58 votes in the Senate, just two shy of the magic 60 needed to avoid a filibuster. But even as President Obama and Vice President Biden dutifully praised card check in speeches, the White House did not put any political muscle into passing it, and they very clearly indicated to Congressional leaders that its passage was less important than health care, its economic stimulus efforts, its financial industry regulation proposals… “

The loss of “card check” is a major blow. However, if the remaining version were passed, it would still be an improvement over current law.
The “compromise” EFCA would include a reduced period for union elections–from three months to 10 days after union cards are filed with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The new EFCA would retain binding arbitration on first union contracts and increased fines on companies that violate workers’ rights.

It may also include something called “injunctive relief,” which would force employers to immediately reinstate workers if the NLRB believed they had been fired for union activity. Another possible amendment would provide greater access to worksites for union organizers.
However, since Democrats already gave away card check without a fight, there is little reason to believe they will mount a vigorous defense of the compromised EFCA when the Republicans move in to destroy what remains.

Meanwhile, Corporate America shows no sign of scaling back its multimillion-dollar war against EFCA, continuing a take-no-prisoners approach to defeat the proposal to force binding arbitration on employers.

Tellingly, opponents are now calling the compromise EFCA “card-check Lite.” The Chamber of Commerce’s Randel Johnson told reporters that his organization will “remain adamantly opposed to the bill, regardless of whether card check provisions remain in or out…the arbitration provisions are completely unacceptable to us.”

Labor’s response, by contrast, has been that of a deer caught in the headlights. The end of card check was announced just days after President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met with 11 AFL-CIO and Change to Win union leaders to assure them that the White House remained committed to EFCA.

At the time, Communications Workers of America President Larry Cohen told reporters, “We believe [Obama's] commitment to [EFCA] is as strong now as it ever was…He said he will work with us to get this done.” Yet while the White House was promising action, the details of the killer “compromise” were being ironed out on Capitol Hill.

But labor leaders should not have been surprised. Several of them appear to have–at the very least–telegraphed their willingness to dump card check. According to the Chicago Tribune, “A Democratic official familiar with compromise talks on [the] bill…said union leaders are willing to drop the politically volatile card check plan to win over wavering Senate Democrats.”

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern, while publicly claiming absolute victory on EFCA was assured, were reportedly involved in ongoing “negotiations” on jettisoning card check.

Nevertheless, the official AFL-CIO blog had a “see no evil” take on the defeat: “Despite speculative news reports today, momentum for real labor law reform is still going strong, and we can still be optimistic that a bill will be signed into law this year giving workers–not their bosses–the choice about how to form a union.”

Stern echoed those sentiments–but went even farther in letting Congress off the hook:

As we have said from day one, majority signup is the best way for workers to have the right to choose a voice at their workplace. The Employee Free Choice Act is going through the usual legislative process, and we expect a vote on a majority signup provision in the final bill or by amendment in both houses of Congress. With Congress focusing on health reform legislation this summer, a vote on the EFCA is not expected until the fall at the earliest.

Stern also bears responsibility for the labor infighting that has made the fight for EFCA that much harder. Besides ordering the undemocratic takeover of the SEIU’s big West Coast health care local, Stern’s union has also absorbed a breakaway faction of the UNITE HERE union and launched raids on workplaces already organized by that union.

But many other labor leaders share the blame for the card check fiasco. Instead of harnessing the anger of union members to fight for what’s left of EFCA, some labor leaders appear to be lowering expectations. According to the New York Times:

One top union official, who insisted on anonymity because lawmakers and labor leaders have agreed not to discuss the status of the bill, said, “Even if card check is jettisoned to political realities, I don’t think people should be despondent over that because labor law reform can take different shapes.”

AFL-CIO spokesperson Eddie Vale also put a positive spin on the setback. “As Schoolhouse Rock taught us, this is the normal process of how a bill becomes a law,” he said, in a reference to the old educational cartoon for kids. “We are very optimistic about passing the strongest labor law reform since the Wagner Act,” a reference to the 1935 federal law that guaranteed workers the right to organize.
Vale’s optimism is almost certainly misplaced. And by focusing on the formal way “a bill becomes law,” labor leaders missed the real way pro-worker and pro-labor reforms like the Wagner Act were won–through struggle and grassroots mobilization.

In the case of EFCA, this would have meant protests, organizing drives, strikes and activating at least a fraction of the millions of union members in order to put pressure on ever-wavering Democrats.
A number of left-wing labor activists have argued for months that labor’s largely legislative strategy was putting the battle for EFCA at risk. While important local actions have been organized–most recently, a march of some 1,500 workers in Arkansas–they have been too few and far between to put enough pressure on the Senate and White House.

“Privately, union hands and progressives are sniping at what they view as a poorly handled legislative strategy,” wrote Sam Stein for the Huffington Post. “When Senate Democrats began airing their concerns with the bill, there was little pushback from the grassroots community. Instead, talk of compromise began almost immediately.”

This was true from the start–when unions pulled field organizers after the 2008 election rather than keep them in place to organize for EFCA, as originally planned.

It is time–once again–for organized labor to take stock of its serious and deteriorating situation. With wages declining and jobs continuing to melt away, unions are going to be necessary for millions to maintain their livelihoods–and even their lives. But to organize those workers we need a fighting labor movement, not one that compromises away its goals without any real battle at all, as it did with EFCA.

Union members and progressives are right to “snipe” about the failed strategy on EFCA. But criticism isn’t enough. We need to mobilize the union rank and file and unorganized workers to chart a new–and militant–course for organized labor based on class struggle and solidarity.

“Americans might get angry sometimes,” they wrote, “but we don’t hate the rich. We prefer to laugh at them.”

Newsweek couldn’t be more wrong. The 10 percent of Americans who rely on food stamps, the 25 percent of Ohioans who are waiting in lines at food banks, the 500,000 people who lost their jobs last month and the millions more who can’t find work–these people aren’t laughing.

And plenty of Americans–rightly–hate the rich. While our homes go into foreclosure, while our credit card rates go up, while our jobs disappear and college tuition shoots up, the well-heeled “masters of the universe” on Wall Street are still making out like bandits, but now with hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money, courtesy of the Obama administration.

A lot more people would be even angrier if the mainstream media reported the truth about the rich and powerful in America–who they are and how they “made it” to the top. Consider the 10 richest people in the country as of last September, according to the annual Forbes magazine list.

Number 10-9
The Koch Brothers
Charles Koch ($19 billion) and David Koch ($19 billion)

Studies show that the most likely job of any child is that of their parents. If your mom or dad is a janitor, you’re more likely to be a janitor than anything else, according to the statistics.

Charles and David Koch are no exception to the rule–only much luckier. Like their father, Fred Koch, they run the largest privately owned energy company in the U.S. Koch Industries–with annual revenues nearing $100 billion–is also one of the biggest polluters in history.

Fred founded Koch Industries in 1940, and during the Second World War, he made a bundle helping the USSR’s ruler Joseph Stalin build up an energy infrastructure in his country. After the war, however, Fred “saw the light” and became one of the founders of the right-wing anti-Communist John Birch Society, which helped whip up a hysteria during the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s.

When Charles and David took over the family business, they also took over dad’s right-wing political projects. The Koch Brothers fund a host of conservative groups through the Koch Family Foundations. They founded the pro-corporate libertarian Cato Institute, and David Koch was the vice-presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1980.

The brothers also provide money to Americans for Prosperity, the outfit that helped organize the right-wing “tea parties” earlier this year and that toured non-plumber Samuel Wurzelbacher (a.k.a. Joe the Plumber) through Pennsylvania to present a “working-class” speaker against the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that would make it easier for working people to organize unions.

Number 8
Michael Bloomberg
Net worth: $20 billion

Before more or less buying the New York City mayor’s office (so far, he’s spent just under $150 million on his mayoral campaigns), Michael Bloomberg accrued his fortune by wiring the country’s financial system through his software services company. Bloomberg LP’s “Market Master” terminals helped make possible the complex computerized trading that became commonplace before the 2008 financial crash.

But the recession has been good to Bloomberg, too. Since 2007, he went from “only” 147th on the list of richest Americans to eighth place.

Bloomberg tries to present the image of a philanthroper and down-to-earth businessman, but his reign has proved to be a disaster for poor and working-class New Yorkers.

He has given millions of dollars to charities in New York City, but the sum is paltry compared to his overall net worth–and his contributions have also tied up city nonprofits with the political interests of the billionaire mayor. Bloomberg likes to tout the fact that he doesn’t live in Gracie Mansion–the traditional home of New York City mayors–but aside from his apartment in Manhattan, he owns multiple homes in Britain and Bermuda.

As mayor, he’s pushed through massive service cuts and layoffs in New York City (even before the onset of the current crisis), closing down day care centers, health clinics and worse. Now, claiming a $500 million budget shortfall–which he could easily cover himself and still be a multibillionaire–he plans more painful cuts.

In truth, Bloomberg isn’t the mayor of the majority of New Yorkers. He’s the mayor of moneyed Wall Street interests.

Number 7-4
The Waltons
Christy Walton ($23.2 billion), Alice Walton ($23.2 billion), Sam Robson Walton ($23.3 billion), Jim Walton ($23.4 billion)

The Waltons earned their money the old-fashioned way–they inherited it. They struck it rich when papa Sam Walton, founder of the low-wage union-busting Wal-Mart chain, kicked the bucket.

Wal-Mart is the largest corporation in the world–so Sam Walton’s heirs are some of the wealthiest people in the world. As labor author Nelson Lichtenstein described the company:

With sales approaching $300 billion a year, Wal-Mart has revenues larger than those of Switzerland. It operates more than 5,000 stores worldwide, more than 80 percent of them in the United States…It employs more than 1.5 million workers around the globe, making Wal-Mart the largest private employer in Mexico, Canada and the United States.

Wal-Mart became the behemoth it is today by driving down the wages of its own employees–and by using its weight in the market to pressure suppliers to drive down wages for their workers. Prior to Wal-Mart’s rise, labor comprised about 30 percent of total costs for an average retail company. Wal-Mart drove down labor’s share to 15 percent.

One important way Sam Walton did this was by fostering a corporate culture of messianic opposition to labor unions. Wal-Mart managers are under constant pressure to keep the union out. When unions do get a foothold–as they did recently in Quebec and Mexico, and 10 years ago with butchers at a Wal-Mart in Jacksonville, Texas–the company has closed down stores, or in the case of the butchers, simply abolished the department.

The impact on employees is obvious. Only a minority of “associates” is covered by the company health care plan, and Wal-Mart was publicly embarrassed by revelations that it encouraged workers to go on welfare to subsidize their meager wages and benefits.

In the 1950s–the era of the so-called “American Dream”–General Motors was the largest employer in the country. Strong unions helped GM workers win decent wages and good benefits.

The contrast with Wal-Mart couldn’t be greater. As Lichtenstein observes:

During its heyday, factory managers at GM–hard-driving men in charge of 2,000 to 3,000 workers–took home about five times as much as an ordinary production employee. At Wal-Mart, district store managers–in charge of about the same number of workers–earn more than 10 times that of the average full-time hourly employee…

In 1950, GM President Charles E. Wilson…earned about 140 times more than an assembly line worker, while H. Lee Scott, the Wal-Mart CEO in 2003, took home at least 1,500 times that of one of his full-time hourly employees.

Of course, the Walton kids–who are flush with cash and still own more than a third of the company–live the good life. Some enjoy their vast wealth full time, while others have roles in the low-wage retail empire. Sam Walton has been chairman of the company–and daughter Alice is the family’s political activist.

In 2004, Alice donated $2.6 million to the right-wing outfit Progress for America, which ran ads supporting the Iraq War and thanking George W. Bush for supposedly preventing another 9/11-style attack on American soil.

One of Alice’s hobbies is horses. Another is reckless driving. In 1996, she was fined $925 for a DUI. In 1989, she struck and killed a 50-year-old woman in Arkansas. No charges were filed.

Number 3
Larry Ellison
Net worth: $27 billion

It’s the mid-1970s. There was just a wave of wildcat strikes across the country–and memories of the 1960s are still fresh in everyone’s minds.

In San Francisco, Harvey Milk is leading protests for gay rights. Women have won abortion rights with the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. The CIA recently aided in overthrowing the government of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile–and bringing to power the military dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

What would you be doing if you were young back then? Protesting? Organizing a rank-and-file caucus in your union?

Not Larry Ellison. Ellison was networking CIA computer databases for the Ampex Corp.–under the codename “Oracle.” In 1977, Ellison formed his own company, and he named it, of all things, Oracle. His first clients were Wright Patterson Air Force Base and the CIA.

Aside from doing IT work for coup-plotters and assassins, Ellison struck it rich by profiting off other people’s ideas. The crucial innovation for networking computer databases was actually pioneered by scientists at IBM who couldn’t figure out how to make money off their research. Ellison could–and he’s been raking in the cash ever since.

But billions of dollars isn’t always enough for Larry Ellison’s extravagant lifestyle. According to leaked letters and documents from his lawyer, Ellison is regularly maxed out on his billion-dollar credit limit. This, seemingly, is due to his penchant for buying multiple homes and yachts–one yacht cost him $194 million.

Ellison spends upwards of $20 million a year on “miscellaneous lifestyle expenses,” according to those documents. He lives on a sprawling estate modeled on a traditional Japanese village. For good measure, he also owns an actual villa in Japan (cost: $25 million).

Not only did Ellison do computer work for the CIA, and not only does he live like a latter-day Nero, but he also might be a “common criminal.” In 2001, he was alleged to have dumped 29 million shares of Oracle stock on the basis of insider information–netting $900 million–just before the stock price fell.

Number 2
Warren Buffet
Net worth: $50 billion

Warren Buffet has a reputation–especially after his support for Barack Obama in last year’s presidential election–as a liberal billionaire. He’s pledged to give 85 percent of his wealth to charity–after he dies, of course. He supports taxes on inheritance and lives in the same Nebraska home he bought in 1958.

But Buffet–born into relative wealth and privilege–isn’t really very different from other billionaires.

He grew up the son of a stockbroker and U.S. congressman. By age 11, he was working at his father’s brokerage house. By 14, he owned 40 acres of land that he rented out to tenement farmers.

In the 1960s, Buffet bought a textile company–Berkshire Hathaway–and turned it into a holding company, based on the “concept” of buying undervalued stocks and selling them when their values increased. In other words, he built his fortune on speculation.

The company–now Buffet Associates Ltd.–stopped producing textiles long ago, instead investing in insurance outfits like GEICO and AIG, corporations like Coca Cola, and media outlets/military contractors like the Washington Post, ABC and General Electric (which owns NBC).

Buffet’s supposed “liberalism” has a lot of limits, both in business and politics. In 2003, he was an economic adviser to the budget-cutting candidate for governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Buffet once famously quipped, “I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty.”

His relatively Spartan lifestyle (for a billionaire, anyway) also has limits. In 1989, he bought a private jet for $10 million and christened it The Indefensible.

His attitude toward his wealth–for all his supposed philanthropy–is also indefensible:

I don’t have a problem with guilt about money. The way I see it is that my money represents an enormous number of claim checks on society. It’s like I have these little pieces of paper that I can turn into consumption. If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture everyday for the rest of my life.

Number 1
Bill Gates
Net worth: $52 billion

Bill Gates III is regularly held up as an example of a rich person who actually earned his wealth–the Horatio Alger of computer software. The co-founder of Microsoft, we’re told, made his way up from college dropout to running one the most successful corporations in history through hard work and intelligence. And he then retired to a life of magnanimous and progressive philanthropy.

The only problem with this story is that it’s just that–a story.

The modesty of Gates’ upbringing is greatly exaggerated. His father was a successful attorney, and his grandfather was the president of a national bank.

While Gates did drop out of Harvard to found Microsoft (thanks to a loan from his family), it wasn’t his skills for software development that made him rich, but his “genius” in taking other people’s ideas and marketing them. Since effectively cornering the market for PC operating systems, Microsoft’s primary goal has been to maintain its predominant position and drive potential competitors out of business.

The mythmaking continues when it comes to Gates’ philanthropy. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is widely cited as a symbol of Gates’ sense of social responsibility, funding projects to provide health care and AIDS treatment in places like Africa. But a Los Angeles Times investigation in 2007 showed the darker side of the fund.

“[A]t least $8.7 billion, or 41 percent of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities…have been in companies that countered the foundation’s charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy,” the Times reported.

For example, the foundation has stock from corporations “ranked among the worst U.S. and Canadian polluters, including ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical Co. and Tyco International Ltd,” wrote the Times. The Gates fund invests in “many of the world’s other major polluters, including companies that own an oil refinery and one that owns a paper mill, which a study shows sicken children [in a Nigerian town] while the foundation tries to save their parents from AIDS.” Then there’s the “pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat,” the Times reported.

Like most rich philanthropists, Gates gives with one hand–and takes far more with the other.

Even before the economic crisis began, inequality had already risen to levels not seen in the U.S. since the eve of the 1930s Great Depression. In the 2000s, family income declined for the first time in decades, while those at the very top became richer and richer.

Ultimately, this wealth came from squeezing it out of the vast majority of people in the U.S. and around the world. The rich became richer by making workers work harder for less.

Now that we’re in a severe recession, hourly wages are declining, unemployment is skyrocketing and, without a social safety net, workers are cutting back–not on luxuries like Warren Buffet’s private jet, or Larry Ellison’s personal armada, but on necessities like food, housing, education and health care.
What should make us most angry is that it doesn’t have to be this way. The immense wealth of society doesn’t have to be wasted on these parasites. It could be democratically controlled by the working-class people who produced it in the first place, and used to meet human needs.

The good news is that people’s attitudes are changing. In early April, for example, a CBS News/New York Times poll showed that 74 percent of Americans favor increasing taxes on the rich.

(Revolutionary socialists, of course, favor taxing the rich out of existence).

In the months and years to come, more and more people may be ready to head down to the town square after all–and protest a society of obscene inequality.

If passed in its current form, EFCA would make it easier to form unions by giving workers the option of gaining representation when a simple majority of employees signs union cards, a method often called “card check.” EFCA would also increase fines on employers for violating workers’ right to organize and make it harder for companies to weasel out of initial union contracts by imposing binding arbitration if negotiations stall.

Now, however, a rotten compromise on EFCA–if not its outright defeat–is looking more and more likely.

Back in November, it seemed as if there was a perfect storm to win the law. Barack Obama had won the White House, the Democrats increased their majority in Congress, and there was widespread anger over the financial meltdown and government bailout of the big banks.

But just seven months later, efforts to pass EFCA have faltered.

As expected, business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have been ferocious in their opposition to EFCA. But Democrats have been at best tepid in their support for safeguarding workers’ right to organize.

“They’re acting like they don’t understand how much power they have, and that the conservative movement is disorganized,” said James Thindwa, executive director of Chicago Jobs with Justice. “EFCA is a test of how committed the Democrats are to labor.”

Some are certainly failing the test. A few have turned outright against EFCA — like Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, which, of course, is the home state of the notoriously anti-union Wal-Mart.

Other Democrats seem willing to let EFCA die by a thousand cuts — Obama among them. In May, the president argued for compromise on EFCA, saying “I’m supportive of it, but there aren’t enough votes right now.”

Democratic senators are floating ideas for possible amendments that would defang the legislation. These include:

* Raising the threshold for unionization via card check from 50-percent-plus-one to 60-percent-plus-one;

* Dropping arbitration on first contracts;

* Replacing arbitration with non-binding mediation;

* Dropping card check in favor of “mail-in” secret ballots;

* Raising fines on unions, while watering down fines on employers.

When (and if) EFCA gets out of Congressional committees, even worse amendments will be proposed by Republicans.

How did this happen? Opinion polls show support for legislation that makes it easier to join unions is stronger than ever. That’s surely the result of the gut-level understanding among millions of people that corporations have been getting away with murder.

But because of the timidity of Democratic politicians and their backers in the union movement, big business has been able to project its case against EFCA.

The result is that an upside-down “bizarro” version of what workers actually face predominates in the mainstream discussion of the legislation.

Take, for example, Corporate America’s main red herring about EFCA — that it would allow unions to intimidate workers into signing up. During the 75 years since workers have had a legal right to organize a union, there is almost zero evidence of “union intimidation.” In fact, a new study by the University of Illinois shows there is evidence of the absence of union intimidation.

The real balance of forces in the workplace is very different from the picture painted by business. Since 1970s, labor laws that favor unions have gone increasingly unenforced, while backwards anti-labor laws are used with impunity. As Teamsters Local 743 President Richard Berg put it:

“The laws are dramatically slanted towards management. There’s really no serious punishment for breaking the law. They’re able to fire union activists and delay elections for long periods of time, with virtually no punishment at all. There are millions of workers across the United States who want to be in unions, and the laws have been effective in preventing them from being able to do that.”

Chris Townsend, political action director of the United Electrical workers union (UE), agrees. “We have an often unrecognized, unchecked and unprosecuted corporate crime wave in the workplace,” Townsend says. “That is the primary reason [EFCA] should be passed — to protect workers from a lopsided war against them waged by their employer almost every day.”

The direct result of all this has been the undermining of union power. Even before the recession, organized labor represented less than 10 percent of private-sector workers — down from a post-Second World War high of 35 percent.

An entire way of life for millions of working-class people — made possible by unions — was destroyed. As Berg recalls, “When I was a kid, my dad was a truck driver, nearly every truck on the road was union. And now, when you drive down the road, even in cities like Chicago…only a fraction of the trucks are union.”

But unions didn’t take the opportunity of Obama’s election and the big Democratic win in 2008 to go on the offensive. As the Los Angeles Times explained:

“In 2007, [EFCA] passed the House and gained more than 40 cosponsors in the Senate. Now, with even more Democrats in the Senate and Obama in the White House, the unions saw the odds in their favor. Obama’s campaign stump speech last fall included strong support for the legislation.”

“But once he was elected, labor leaders made a fateful decision. Originally, they had planned to keep in place their extensive network of field organizers, who had just worked to elect Democratic candidates, and ask them to build pressure on lawmakers to vote for card check. Instead, they changed course. The labor groups scaled back, partly to give Obama time to get his bearings amid the deepening economic crisis.”

Townsend says EFCA supporters — including Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern — made the mistake of offering compromises at the outset:

“We did a bunch of lobby visits last week, and we had many offices tell us they were hearing 100 to 1 against EFCA. If you don’t have 60 [votes in the Senate], how do you make progress? Well, the only way is you start figuring out what Plan B is. What I think I’m angry about is that we have everybody from Andy Stern to [Senators] Tom Harkin to Arlen Specter (of course, Specter called himself a Republican up till last week)…negotiating against themselves…It’s like a one-sided auction.”

Things didn’t have to play out this way. Across the country, there are examples of workers and trade unionists doing the sorts of things that could tip the balance in labor’s favor if such tactics were pursued nationwide.

For example, the United Food and Commercial Workers union seized the moment to launch an organizing campaign at Wal-Mart. The union deployed 60 organizers to 100 stores across 15 different states. Business Management Daily reported:

“The organizers will be circulating union authorization cards bearing President Obama’s picture and a quote from a 2007 speech, in which he said, ‘I don’t mind standing up for workers and letting Wal-Mart know they need to pay a decent wage and let folks organize.’”

“The cards also symbolize the union’s push for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would allow workers to choose union representation by completing an authorization card rather than by secret ballot.”

One can imagine the impact if more unions had undertaken similar initiatives, connecting actual organizing with the struggle for EFCA.

There have been other positive examples. In Fontana, Calif., 200 workers picketed for EFCA in front of a Wal-Mart warehouse. Another 300 people protested in Lynn, Mass.

In Peoria, Ill., hundreds of unionists and workers protested former George W. Bush advisor Karl Rove, who was speaking at an anti-EFCA event. In the brouhaha that preceded Rove’s visit, the city’s Chamber of Commerce was pressured into withdrawing its endorsement of the event, and even issued a statement that it had no formal position on EFCA.

Unfortunately, mobilizations like these have been too few to have the same sort of impact nationally.

Of course, EFCA is not the end of the story. Even if EFCA is watered down or defeated, there are more fights to come. As the UE’s Townsend put it, “EFCA is not a magic wand or a cure-all. As fast as we pass this thing or something like it, we are going to have to go back again and face a whole front of other issues [that] will need to be fixed.”

Chief among these issues is organizing — with or without EFCA — a generation of workers now living on the economy’s edge.

His worry: workers might follow the example of Starbucks baristas and form their own unions without waiting for bigger “traditional” unions to organize them.

In the past five years, the Starbucks Workers Union (SWU)–a part of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)–has spread from one Manhattan store to win hundreds of members in New York City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Grand Rapids, Chicago and beyond.

The SWU has made inroads among a section of the workforce–low-wage retail workers–that many unions have written off as too difficult to organize. Indeed, organized labor represents just 5 percent of workers in retail.

Since its formation, the SWU has won a series of important National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) rulings and achieved gains for baristas on the job. Given the dire straits workers face today, if Corporate America is worried about the “Starbucks problem,” then union members and supporters should take a close look at the SWU.

Starbucks likes to present itself as a “socially responsible corporation.” In reality, Starbucks workers face the same problems that other retail workers face: unpredictable hours, inaccessible health care, low wages and lack of job security.

“The core of the problem boils down to this: Starbucks orders ‘labor’ the same way it orders coffee beans or paper cups,” said union organizer Erik Forman, who works in the Mall of America outside Minneapolis-St. Paul, and is with the campaign to organize Starbucks.

A major issue for Starbucks workers is the way the company organizes hours. If baristas want a “full-time” workweek of more than 32 hours, they must make themselves available for up to 70 hours a week. “Starbucks uses something known as ‘automated labor scheduling’ software to determine how workers will be scheduled,” Forman said. “If the system projects a slight downturn in business on a particular day or week, baristas lose work hours.”

The problems extend to wages and benefits. In the Minneapolis area, starting pay hovers just above Minnesota’s state minimum hourly wage of $6.15, ranging from $6.50 to $7.50 an hour. Raises generally lag behind increases in the cost of living. And while Starbucks widely promotes the fact that it offers health insurance, the company spends far less energy making sure employees are actually covered. Less than 42 percent of Starbucks employees are on the company’s health care plan–a lower rate than Wal-Mart.

“You have to work a minimum of 20 hours each week in order to qualify,” Forman said. “With wild fluctuations in the number of hours you are scheduled, workers and their families often lose their health care for six months at a time.”

Workers discontent over Starbucks’ pay and conditions set the stage for organizing. In May 2004, workers at a midtown Manhattan Starbucks launched the SWU.

From the beginning, the company went all out to bust the union. “We wanted to negotiate with Starbucks over our serious concerns,” Forman recalled. “But rather than sit down at a table with us, the bosses began writing checks to the union-busting consultants of Akin Gump and the PR flacks at Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm. They contracted Edelman to craft a facade of ’social responsibility.’”

At first, workers filed for a NLRB election to vote on union recognition. Starbucks responded by “using its political clout to gerrymander the bargaining unit from one pro-union store to every store in midtown and downtown Manhattan,” Foreman recalled.

The workers realized they couldn’t win, so they tried a different tack. Unable to go the traditional route to unionization via an NLRB election, they drew on more radical traditions–fighting back around wages, benefits and working conditions and recruiting baristas to the union without official NLRB recognition. As Forman says:

“We’ve decided to go back to the basics of the labor movement. Workers organized unions before 1935, before we had a ‘right’ to organize…In developing an organizing model that works in the service industry, we’ve gone back to the roots of unionism, opting for a strategy that puts ‘direct action’ at the center. We’ve been able to spread because we’ve done something that business unions would consider unthinkable–we’ve put our organization entirely in the hands of rank-and-file baristas.”

Forman said that the SWU emphasizes what it calls “solidarity unionism”–that is, the idea that “workers are most powerful where the bosses need us most: on the shop floor. Our power as workers comes from our ability to withhold our labor, or interfere with the production process in other ways.”

At the Mall of America last summer, workers confronted management about unbearable temperatures in the store. As Forman described it:

“We had been complaining about how hot it was for years, but management refused to buy a fan or install air conditioning because it was ‘too expensive.’ At the same time, our store was pulling in $30,000 a week.

“One morning, four of my co-workers walked into the back room of our store and gave the boss an ultimatum: ‘Will you buy the store a fan? Yes or no?’ He stalled….so my four coworkers walked off the job, got in a car and drove to Target, leaving the boss to cover the floor. He was livid.

“About 20 minutes later, my coworkers walked back in with a $14 box fan. They plugged it in, wrote ‘courtesy of the IWW,’ drew a small black ‘Sabotage cat’ [the IWW logo] on it, and enjoyed the breeze.

“This left management with a choice. They could either remove the fan, in which case they would look like jerks. Or they could leave it there, as a monument to their own negligence.

“To their credit, they did the right thing. Two days later, the district manager arrived with a $150 industrial floor fan. Two weeks later, they began installing air conditioning. This is the power of direct action. One week, $40 is too much to spend to bring the temperature in the store to within OSHA standards. The next week, management is spending $10,000 to keep the workers happy.”

Similarly, in August 2008, a union member and single mother from the Bronx, Anna Hurst, suffered heat stroke on the job at a New York Starbucks and was forced off the work schedule for two weeks. In response, a dozen baristas marched into the store during rush hours and demanded she be compensated.

Forman recalled another situation at the Mall of America where workers’ action on the job resulted in a quick victory:

“One of our coworkers had not been paid by Starbucks for almost a month because of a bureaucratic mistake…When we found out about this, the four of us who were working decided to stop work and demand that our coworker get her paycheck. For about 10 minutes, we told customers we were on strike, sending them elsewhere for their coffee. We called the district manager to complain. He came to the store later that afternoon and cut our coworker a check. We won.”

In addition to confronting management’s abuse of workers on the job, the SWU has organized pickets and rallies to draw attention to the union and workers’ fights against management.

“Since 2004, we have made real progress.” Forman said. “After months of pressure from the union, Starbucks conceded a wage increase for baristas in the New York City metro area in 2006. We have fought numerous battles over health and safety issues, discrimination, and unfair treatment by management in the workplace. Despite Starbucks nationally-coordinated anti-union campaign, the union continues to pick up steam.”

Government documents show that Starbucks has spied on union members (including after work hours) and transferred workers to keep down the ratio of pro-union workers. In New York City, the company was found guilty of nearly 30 violations of labor law–including interrogating employees and firing union members.

As Forman explained, the Starbucks Workers Union has “had to fight tooth and nail for our right to exist as a union at Starbucks.” Starbucks management has already been forced to agree to four settlements with the NLRB over the company’s violations of the workers’ right to organize.

As a result, Starbucks has been forced to reinstate employees, pay damages and make agreements with the union–for example, to allow baristas to wear union pins at work. The company also faces outstanding NLRB cases in New York, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Chicago, and Grand Rapids, Mich.

Erik Forman himself was terminated for union activity in July last year. The day after he was fired, workers at his store walked out in protest, and more than 50 baristas in the Twin Cities area signed a petition for his reinstatement. Within a month, he was rehired and paid back wages.

Nevertheless, management continues to target SWU activists. “Recently, Chicago IWW barista Joe Tessone attempted to confront CEO Howard Schultz about this treatment of baristas,” Forman said. “Two weeks later, he was fired on specious grounds.”

Faced with this level of harassment, Starbucks workers have put international solidarity at the center of their campaign, including a global day of action against Starbucks last July 5. That day, French workers staged a sit-in at a Paris Starbucks in solidarity with fired American baristas. As Forman said:

“Starbucks is a global company, so we have to be a global union. In addition to labor solidarity, we have made efforts to build ties to coffee farmers through our ‘Justice from Bean to Cup’ initiative. We sent Sarah Bender, a New York City barista, to Ethiopia to a meeting with coffee farmers there who were demanding a decent price for their beans from Starbucks.”

Even nthough Starbucks remains profitable, the company is using the economic crisis as a pretext to squeeze more out of workers. Management tactics include cutting hours and closing stores, without cutting back on workloads. In response, Starbucks workers have organized pickets against layoffs and store closings, the lack of severance pay and a speed-up in the pace of work.

“Naomi Klein’s recent book, The Shock Doctrine, comes to mind,” Forman said. “While Starbucks profits have dipped, it’s still an immensely profitable company, bringing in over $300 million in pure profit last year alone. And yet, Starbucks has used the language of ‘crisis’ to push through a string of anti-worker cutbacks.”

Forman says the company is squeezing workers hard:

“First, they haven’t increased the base wage in almost three years. Second, they’re making new demands on workers’ schedules through what management calls ‘optimal scheduling,’ laying off thousands of baristas while forcing the remaining skeleton crew to be available for up to 80 hours out of the week.

“On top of this, they have been running the stores at even lower levels of staffing than in the past, leaving us scrambling to get work done. And of course, since last summer, they’ve been shuttering stores, kicking workers to the curb who made the record profits of the last decade possible.”

Liberte Locke, a New York barista, made a similar point to The Epoch Times newspaper. “In my store, the layoffs have been targeted at workers who have been there the longest,” she said. “Employees were given no warning: they didn’t even let them finish their shifts, and they were given no severance pay.”

The company has the money to avoid these cuts. Thus, when Starbucks recently purchased a corporate jet for $45 million, the SWU pointed out that the money “could provide over 5 million additional work hours to employees in need or maintain its gutted 401k program for three years.”

Given the scale of Starbucks’ attacks, the SWU’s gains are all the more impressive. They point to how the sparks for a revitalized labor movement could come from outside traditional unions, just as employers fear. Other recent examples include the two-week strike by nonunion workers at the Cygnus soap factory in 2007 in Chicago and the Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation in the same city in December 2008, led by the independent United Electrical workers’ union.

For their part, SWU activists see themselves as part of the militant tradition of unionism that the IWW championed at its founding in 1905.

“There is a direct link between the revolutionary vision of the IWW and the day-to-day dynamics of solidarity unionism in the Starbucks campaign,” Forman said. “Our message for workers is that if we can do it at Starbucks, we can do it anywhere. It is possible to organize, even at Starbucks, even in the Mall of America.”

What you can do

If you work at Starbucks and you’re interested in joining the union, find out more at the Starbucks Workers Union and the Industrial Workers of the World Web sites. You can e-mail the union at starbucksunion@yahoo.com.

Union baristas in Minneapolis-St. Paul write for the Twin Cities Starbucks Workers Union Blog.

As Politico.com reported on March 26: “Key Democrats fled from the Employee Free Choice Act on Wednesday, saying they couldn’t support the bill unless significant modifications were made, including some ardently opposed by labor unions.”

The same day, Republican Sen. Arlen Spector, who was a co-sponsor of EFCA when it was first introduced in 2003, did an about-face and vowed to oppose the legislation. That means Senate Republicans will have the 40 members they need to use procedural moves to block votes on EFCA.

“The bill, as written,” the Politico article concluded, “appears to have a slim chance of moving forward, and labor union supporters now fear it may be on hold until after next year’s midterm elections.”

EFCA was the major political priority of the U.S. labor movement in the 2008 elections. The proposal would make it easier for workers to join unions by giving them the option of bypassing a drawn-out National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) supervised election–a process frequently abused by corporations to intimidate workers–in favor of a simple majority of workers signing union cards to achieve legal union recognition. EFCA would also increase fines on companies that violate workers’ rights and make it harder for employers to avoid signing initial contracts with newly unionized workers.

Needless to say, Corporate America didn’t take kindly to EFCA, and spent hundreds of millions, mobilizing all its forces to defeat the legislation.

The anti-EFCA war had its intended impact. In addition to Specter’s flip-flop, Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson has called for compromise that would gut the legislation. Even one of EFCA’s authors, Sen. Tom Harkin, has now said he would open up the bill to changes.

EFCA isn’t dead yet–but it is in danger. There’s still time to shift things, but that time is growing short.

Unfortunately, the blame for what’s happening to the legislation doesn’t lie solely with EFCA’s corporate enemies, but also with the strategy of its supporters.

The AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federations have been oriented on the Senate vote-count. Labor focused in on lobbying 10 key senators who wavered on the legislation, running pro-EFCA advertisements in their states.

There are a number of problems with this math-based approach.

First of all, in terms of lobbying and running advertisements, organized labor will always be outgunned by Corporate America. Lobbying is about access to the corridors of power. Running television, radio and newspaper ads takes money. Big business simply has more access and more money.

Secondly, organized labor approached individual senators as allies who just needed to hear good arguments in favor of the legislation and be shored up so they would do “the right thing”–instead of approaching the Senate as a collection of politicians worried about their own power.

And by focusing all their energy on lobbying “swing” votes in the Senate, the unions gave the most conservative Democrats the most attention in the political debate about EFCA. Thus, the entire media waited with bated breath for the opinions of two Arkansas senators who, though they are Democrats, are ultimately in the pocket of home-state union-buster Wal-Mart.

This was a lost opportunity. If the unions had launched a mass, grassroots and active campaign for EFCA, the media would be hearing arguments from workers about why labor law reform is needed.

EFCA’S setbacks are in part the result of labor’s misreading of the dynamics of the Democratic Party–again. While the Democrats have long counted the unions as part of their base and the party’s liberal politicians are adept at making pro-worker speeches, the Democrats are, in fact, a pro-business party. The party’s approach to EFCA reflects this contradiction.

On the one hand, the political shift that brought President Barack Obama into the White House and increased the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress has made it more possible to pass EFCA. But the dirty secret is that that this same Democratic Party is entirely capable of sabotaging its own legislation if Corporate America wants it to.

While Congressional Republicans–backed up by the corporate anti-EFCA blitzkrieg–were confidently denouncing the bill and planning for its defeat, Democratic leaders treated EFCA like a legislative stepchild, professing support, but not getting “too close.” No senior Senate or House leader–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid included–even showed up for the Capitol Hill press conference announcing the reintroduction of EFCA on March 10.

The White House also kept EFCA at arms’ length and avoided putting any pressure on members of congress to support the legislation. And when Vice President Joe Biden spoke to union leaders about EFCA, cameras weren’t allowed to cover the proceedings. Thus, when the bill was reintroduced on March 10, several former sponsors of the 2007 version of the legislation had already gone AWOL.

Why? Well, it’s one thing for the Democrats to vote for pro-union legislation when there’s no chance of it actually becoming law. It’s quite another to do so when it is possible.

In 2007, with George W. Bush in the White House and a bare Democratic majority in the Senate, there was simply no chance of EFCA becoming law. Democrats could vote for the legislation to be on record as fighting for workers, yet be assured that their actions would not actually infringe on the interests of big business.

Now that EFCA is possible, however, some party leaders have apparently concluded that the “best” outcome would be to allow a narrow defeat for EFCA in the Senate, or a compromise that guts the legislation, or indefinite postponement. This would allow the Democrats to defend corporate interests while appearing to be loyal to their pro-union working-class base.

In fact, Congress has been caught in a tug of war between its increasingly discredited corporate patrons and an increasingly angry working-class base. Members have been weighing which course of action–EFCA’s success or failure–poses the greatest risk.

Genuine grassroots pressure could tip the scales back in labor’s favor. Democratic-controlled Congresses have passed pro-union and pro-working-class legislation in the past–in the 1930s and the 1960s in particular–when there was sufficient pressure to force their hand.

But lobbying alone can’t produce that sort of pressure. Democrats who have turned on EFCA should not merely be challenged with words or targeted in the next election. Those politicians should be targeted with protests–now.

Another threat to EFCA comes from supposedly “progressive” companies that are proposing an alternative process to expedite union elections.

Some on the left see this is an advance. In a recent article, titled “Corporate United Front Against EFCA Cracking,” posted on the Web site of the magazine Political Affairs (published by the Communist Party USA), Joel Wendland cites two signs of a supposed corporate retreat–the so-called “compromise” proposal on labor law reform put forward by Costco, Starbucks and Whole Foods, and an admission in the Wall Street Journal that EFCA would not, contrary to the claims of its opponents, prevent the use of secret ballots in union elections if workers decide they want one.

Wendland argues that the Journal’s acknowledgement of the truth about EFCA opened up the potential for Republicans (!) to support EFCA. He adds:

It is likely that many Republicans, without reading the bill, simply accepted the word of anti-worker television entertainers like Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck, and a massive $200 million ad campaign by big business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers.

In fact, one day after Wendland’s article was posted, Specter publicly announced his opposition to the bill. So much for “Republicans for EFCA.”

What about the Costco, Starbucks and Whole Foods proposal? AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff described it this way:

[S]ections of Corporate America have smelled the coffee and are looking for compromise legislation…Though their compromise is totally inadequate, it does signal that the ranks of Corporate America have been broken, and that passage of the Employee Free Choice Act is increasingly inevitable.

Of course, the fact that Costco, Starbucks and Whole Foods felt compelled to break with the Chamber of Commerce’s strategy of total war is a sign of the times. Big business has been discredited by the crisis and by government bailouts for corporations. The overall terrain should be politically favorable to unions.

But labor needs to take stock of the balance of forces. There are more than 500 business organizations aligned with the Chamber’s hard-line “no-compromise” approach to EFCA. Steven Law, general counsel for the Chamber, made Corporate America’s position clear on March 10 while speaking to businessmen and Republican members of congress: “The only thing that stands between [EFCA] and your workplace is the filibuster. There is no compromise.”

It should be further emphasized that only three companies have “broken ranks”–and there is a reason why it was these three. Starbucks and Whole Foods in particular–despite (or because of) a long and sordid history of union-busting–have tried to present themselves as “socially responsible,” and are worried about their corporate images. Moreover, as most EFCA supporters have argued, including Wendland and Acuff, the “Third Way” proposal (as it has been dubbed) would gut EFCA.

The distressing reality is that things are going the wrong direction on EFCA. The proposal is losing support in the Senate, and Corporate America is increasingly confident that it will be defeated. There is no point in pretending otherwise.

The only way to revive chances of passing EFCA is through organization, activism and protest.

Some of this is already taking place. As Acuff wrote of labor’s pro-EFCA activism:

What grassroots movement can in the span of one week run 57 letters to the editor in newspapers across America, send 14,000 handwritten letters to 10 U.S. Senators and simultaneously plan 35 grassroots advocacy events with workers in 10 states?

America’s labor movement, the AFL-CIO can. Now that the Employee Free Choice Act has been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate, organized labor’s multi-state grassroots campaign is running at full throttle.

But is this really all organized labor can do?

Labor’s muscle–its membership–has not been flexed in the battle for EFCA, even though union members and many other workers are itching for a fight, and on exactly this issue. Union members could be mobilized to pressure senators who have dropped their support for EFCA, as well as to protest companies and CEOs involved in the anti-EFCA campaign.

In such an activist pro-EFCA campaign, organized labor could win the support of tens of millions of nonunion workers to back the legislation. For example, a Gallup poll released March 17 showed that a solid majority of 52 percent favored laws making it easier to join a union. Previous polls have shown even greater support.

More worrisome, however, was that the Gallup poll showed only 12 percent of Americans were following the debate around EFCA closely. Another recent poll found that only half of respondents were even clear as to what EFCA was.

Organized labor, by focusing on the Senate vote count at the expense of much else, has simply not done a good enough job educating the people about EFCA and the reasons why working people should pull out all the stops to support it.

While there have been some important rallies and protests called by local union federations, union locals and chapters of Jobs with Justice, more can and should be done.

Certainly, the moment is right to target big business. Today’s corporate giants have clay feet. After Citibank joined fellow ward of the state Bank of America in organizing anti-EFCA conference calls, unions sent a letter to the Treasury Department in protest. But this is a political crack that labor could drive every unionized truck in the country through–if it looked beyond the Beltway.

Some chapters of Jobs with Justice and student groups have organized protests at these banks. Unions and pro-worker groups everywhere should follow this example.

Industrial action could also have an impact. For example, what if Teamsters at UPS refused to deliver packages to Bank of America for just a single day? They would be heroes–and it could connect the struggle for EFCA to the fight against corporate greed in the public imagination.

As the great abolitionist Frederick Douglas famously said, “Without struggle, there is no progress.” At the end of the day, our fight isn’t about one piece of pro-labor legislation–however important it may be–but building a militant rank-and-file workers’ rebellion that can change the world.

EFCA is one battle in that war–and we could still win that battle. But only if we fight.

They were among the more than 1,000 people who lined up for nearly eight hours in downtown Chicago to apply for fewer than 300 entry-level jobs at the new Hotel Wit, set to open in May.

Once inside the nearby Oriental Theater, each person filled out the paperwork, and was told they had “two minutes” to “sell” themselves.

It was another sign of the times as the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression progressively strips away what little was left of the “American Dream.”

The jobless numbers are the clearest sign of how hard the crisis is hitting the working class at all levels — but not the only one. Access to health care and even food is declining. Retirement funds and family incomes are down. The housing crisis continues to claim victims among homeowners and renters alike.

The scene in Chicago dramatizes what is becoming clearer to people everywhere in the country: that more far-reaching changes are needed than any politician is willing to suggest today to present an alternative to a system built around the profit motive that doesn’t serve the interests of the vast majority.

Officially, the unemployment rate stands at 8.1 percent, representing 12.5 million people — the highest level since 1982. In Illinois, joblessness is even higher at 8.6 percent.

But these numbers underplay the true extent of the jobs crisis. The federal government’s more accurate government “U-6 measure of labor underutilization” — which takes into account “involuntary part-time workers” (people who want full-time work but have to take part-time jobs) and “marginally attached workers” (workers who have given up on an increasingly futile weekly job search) — puts the real national jobless at 14.8 percent in February, representing more than 20 million workers.

Among those in line at the Hotel Wit job fair were many who represented the holes in the official statistics.

For example, Amy, an African American woman in her late 20s, isn’t counted. She has been out of work for two years. Before that, she worked in retail. She went back to school for a degree, but that hasn’t helped so far. “I don’t think the government is helping enough,” Amy said. “It’s not looking good for anyone. Look at this line.”

The crisis isn’t confined to the retail sector, of course. Almost every section of the economy has been hit hard. Manufacturing, construction and retail have all lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. FIRE (Finance, insurance and real estate), which was supposed to provide a new employment base in de-industrialized urban areas, according to the old propaganda, continues to hemorrhage jobs. According to the U.S. Federal Reserve, demand is plummeting for business services, consultants and law firms (except for bankruptcy lawyers).

Brian Guzman was also waiting in line. He used to do seasonal work at the Chicago Botanic Gardens north of the city, and usually got rehired each March. But not this year. Brian has been out of work for nearly seven months.

“Some people are going to have to move in with relatives,” Brian said. “Some people move in with friends…They’ve got to do something for us. They need to make more jobs for people. Anything. People have kids, families, tuition for college.”

Brian is among those groups of workers — minorities and younger workers — who are already living through Great Depression-like conditions. According to the Center for American Progress (CAP), youth unemployment is 21.6 percent. Official unemployment for Latino workers of all ages is 10.9 percent, and 13.4 percent for Black workers. And according to the official numbers, 10.3 percent of “female heads of households” are without work.

Caroline Grey was working at a bank while studying accounting at Saint Xavier University. Last year, the bank fired her because, saying her hours couldn’t be scheduled around her classes. She earned her degree, but she’s been out of work since December. Now she’s waiting in line for an entry-level job at a hotel.

“I go to every job fair that I hear about,” Caroline said. “In the last two months, I’ve been to five fairs. I send out at least seven applications a week, cover letters, resumes. I do everything. I expected my job search to be a little bit better when I got out of college. I was an accounting major. But now they aren’t doing new hires.”

Then there’s Shataysha, who just graduated from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale with a bachelor’s degree in journalism — and $50,000 in student loans. She says her job hunt has been “very, very, very difficult. I’ve been networking with different newspapers, but haven’t received any phone calls. But in the meantime, I know I have to pay off my student loans, so I have to find work.”

As part of their recession survival strategy, companies are not only laying off workers, but cutting back hours (without decreasing workloads). The result is a crisis-based speed-up in productivity. Average weekly hours for production workers are just 33.3 hours — the lowest on record, and companies are using the threat of unemployment to bully their employees.

Daniel works for a chain of retail “tea houses” modeled on Starbucks. He’s looking for “anything” better — so he came out to wait in line at the hotel job fair.

“They seriously treat us like we’re their slaves,” Daniel said. “[They] have something like 15 locations in the city, and because they can’t hold onto people because they’re firing so many, they order me from store to store.

“They’re stretching it. So there’s literally two people to handle everything. I get huge crazy rushes. I can’t handle it with two people — only one person on the register and another making drinks. “They expect me to keep showing up on time, and never be mad about it. If I have an attitude I would be fired.

“I definitely would be all for unions — a union to fight the big bosses — because we have absolutely no say. We have no say about our uniforms, about how much we get paid.”

As wirkers are pushed out the labor force and hours taken from those who keep heir jobs, family incomes are declining. According to a recent CAP study, two-thirds of Americans say their family income doesn’t keep up.

In addition, whatever savings or wealth some workers had accumulated is being obliterated, primarily as a result of the plummeting value of homes and the effect of the falling stock market on retirement savings.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) says that people aged 45 to 54 have seen their net worth decline by 45 percent to a median of $94,2000, down from $172,400. Five years ago, the average household in this age group had enough retirement savings to generate $14,000 in annual interest at retirement. That figure is now less than $8,000.

So for tens of millions of workers, retirement now seems impossible — or at least more difficult and far less comfortable. “My entire family is moving to Southern Illinois because it’s cheap as hell — $400 rent for a three-bedroom house,” Daniel said. “A lot of families are getting torn apart. It’s hard–especially with the [Illinois state] minimum wage only being $7.75. I average about $400 every two weeks, and that’s if I work 35 hours every week.”

Meanwhile, one thing that sustained working-class households during a period of stagnating and declining wages in the previous period — access to credit — has dried up.

This is a direct result of a Wall Street bailout plan, initiated under George Bush and continued in almost exactly the same form by the new Obama administration–that has wasted hundreds of billions on banks rather than using the money to create jobs.

Now, the banks are tightening up on lending, squeezing workers with higher interest rates on credit cards–and lowering the boom when workers can’t keep up with their mortgages or other loans. Credit card defaults rose to 6.3 percent in the last quarter of 2008, another record high.

And as workers’ credit ratings suffer, there’s a further effect when it comes to finding a job. “At a lot of places, if you have bad credit, you can’t even get a job,” Amy observed. “That needs to change right now. If you have bad credit, and you can’t get a job because you have bad credit, then you can’t work to pay your bills. It’s kind of redundant.”

The mortgage crisis continues to undermine the most valuable property for most workers — their homes. The CEPR estimates that 30 percent of homeowners in the 45 5to 54 age group are “underwater” — that is, they owe more than their homes are even worth. One in nine mortgages is delinquent or in foreclosure.

As Amy says, “I think the money should go to the people — to the homeowners instead of the banks. It really needs to go to the people who need it to pay off some of the mortgages.” But under President Barack Obama’s plan for helping homeowners in trouble, Amy points out, “the money goes to the banks, and there’s a bracket you have to be in even to get help.”

“I don’t think the banks would be doing so bad if people could afford to pay their bills.” Amy said. “That’s the problem: people can’t pay their bills. The banks are getting the bailout, and we’re losing our houses.”

Rising unemployment, declining incomes and the housing crisis have conspired to create a national homelessness boom. Tent cities are spreading through the warmer areas of the country: Sacramento, Phoenix, Portland, Reno. Meanwhile, New York City reported a 40 percent increase in families seeking emergency shelter since the onset of the recession.

Homeless advocates expect things to get worse. The National Alliance to End Homelessness projects 3.4 million people will be homeless at some point in the coming year — an increase of 35 percent since December 2007. The National Center on Family Homelessness reports that 1 in 50 children are now homeless.

Then there are the times that this crisis calls into question life itself for millions who can’t afford to treat illnesses or put food on the table.

Employer-provided benefits had already decreased substantially before the crisis began, But the tattered patchwork of health care coverage associated with people’s jobs is being torn apart by the recession. Among all the people I talked to in line for the Hotel Wit job fair, almost nobody reported having health coverage.

According to a joint Gallup-Healthways poll, the percentage of people reporting difficulty paying for medicine and other health care costs increased from 18 to 21 percent over the course of the last year, and the number of workers with employer-provided health care has declined. Health care workers are reporting a fall in the number of patients seeking treatment–because increasing numbers can’t afford to “treat” themselves to medical care.

Just as millions have no health care, millions can’t afford to eat. This was true even before the crisis, but with the recession, the numbers of people who don’t get enough food each day are on the rise, including many who never thought they would have to rely on charity or the state for their daily bread. More than 1 in 10 people in the U.S. — 32 million — are part of the food stamp program.

The problem isn’t just declining incomes and joblessness, but also that the cost of food remains absurdly high. “[P]rices of such food commodities as maize, wheat and rice have fallen by 35-50 percent in the last year (although they are still 50 percent higher than in 2005, according to the International Monetary Fund),” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Oil prices have collapsed, too. Yet the price of food at the retail level around the world shows no sign of falling.”

Why? Farmers and agribusiness are cutting back on planting and production in order to keep prices–and therefore profits — high. The USDA projects the lowest level of meat production this year since 1973. In short, the epidemic of hunger that stalks U.S. workers (and workers around the world) is being organized in corporate boardrooms.

As Brian Guzman put it, “If everything had gone down [in price], that would have been a little different. But prices are going up and there’s less jobs.”

The question that is always asked these days on morning television news shows is some version of: “How can you survive the recession?”

Usually, what follows is a series of tips on job hunting and coupon clipping. John Challenger of the firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas suggests that the jobless consider “all options, including changing industries, taking a part-time job or relocating.”

But the people in the Chicago job fair line were already considering “all the options” — and they’re still falling behind. The scale and scope of the crisis rules out solutions at an individual level. People simply need more help. Far-reaching social solutions to unemployment, health care, housing and food access are necessary. As Brian Guzman suggested, “Maybe they should make up a plan for everything going on now.”

The $787 billion stimulus plan was designed to create or save 3.5 million jobs, according to Obama. But the crisis has already cost the economy 4.4 million jobs. And there’s worse still to come, according to economist Dean Baker, “The unemployment rate is likely to hit 8.5 percent by March and will almost certainly cross 9 percent by early summer. Without substantial additional stimulus, it could cross 10 percent by year-end.”

Obviously, a larger stimulus is needed to expand unemployment benefits and end time limits on receiving them — and to create more and more varied types of jobs. “I love Barack Obama to death,” Amy said, “but there’s only so many people qualified to build bridges and roads.”

But even more dramatic measures are needed. The banks that are sucking in bailout funds from the government could be nationalized outright, ordered to fund projects that benefit the majority in society, and required to cap credit card interest rates and stop foreclosures. A retirement system that depends far too much on personal wealth should be replaced by a government pension system. The same point can be said about health care and housing.

These kinds of solutions would get at the root of the problem — an economy run off the rails because it was (and still is) based on corporate greed.

Millions of people are gravitating toward more social and collective ideas when it comes to the economy. A 2009 CAP study on the “State of American Political Ideology” showed that six in ten people surveyed believe “government should do more to promote the common good.” A majority agreed with the statement “freedom requires economic opportunity and minimum measures of security, such as food, housing, medical care and old-age protection.”

But to achieve these things, workers — with and without jobs — are going to have to fight.

The potential is there for building such struggles. The calm on the surface of society conceals a rage building underneath. Thus, at the Wit Hotel job fair, when the managers suddenly cut off the line, leaving out hundreds of applicants, people were furious. Several threatened to “riot” if their applications weren’t taken.

The question is how this anger can be channeled into struggles of all kinds that can achieve the social solutions necessary to solve the crisis in favor of working people.

Corporations have declared war on EFCA because of both its specific provisions and the symbolic role it could play in revitalizing the labor movement.

If EFCA passes, union recognition by employers would be automatic whenever 50 percent plus one of workers in a given workplace sign union cards, which is why the process is often referred to as “card check.” The legislation would also provide for greater penalties for companies that violate workers’ right to organize. President Barack Obama has said he would sign EFCA into law.

The legislation could play a role similar to Section 7(a) of President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act, which enshrined into federal law the right to organize and buoyed the formation of mass industrial unions. Labor organizers seized the moment to argue that, “the president wants you to join the union.”

The class-conscious members of America’s corporate elite have no intention of repeating this experience.

“[EFCA] is the demise of civilization,” Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus said. “This is how a civilization disappears.” During the 2008 elections, Marcus declared that corporate executives “should be shot” if they didn’t do their part to re-elect at-risk Republican senators who could filibuster and prevent EFCA’s passage.

While no corporate executives appear to have been shot as of yet, EFCA’s enemies have marshaled a war chest of at least $100 million, according to union estimates. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has already spent $10 million on its fierce anti-EFCA campaign.

Companies are using every means at their disposal to build opposition. For example, McDonald’s publicly directed all franchise owners to lobby Congress against EFCA.

Predictably, Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the US, has also joined the battle. In August, Federal Election Commission complaints were filed, alleging the company illegally instructed employees to vote Republican and against Barack Obama in order to stop EFCA.

On Christmas Eve, the “Beast of Bentonville” even announced it was suddenly settling 63 lawsuits brought by current and former employees–to the tune of $640 million. Why? The Wall Street Journal reported that Wal-Mart decided to pay out in order to improve its image before the battle against EFCA.

Meanwhile, Republican mouthpieces in Congress are mindlessly repeating talking points created by anti-union think tanks and “advocacy” organizations. The lies of “shadowy front groups” — as David Moberg describes them in In These Times — have wormed their way through the mainstream media and begun to shape the debate around EFCA, even though the political terrain should overwhelmingly favor EFCA’s supporters.

The names of these employer groups are perfect examples of Orwellian doublespeak: Americans for Job Security, the Employee Freedom Action Committee, and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace. The longer-standing anti-labor Center for Union Facts is also waging a full frontal attack against EFCA.

Union Facts is headed by D.C. lobbyist Richard Berman (who also heads up the Employee Freedom Action Committee). The CBS news program 60 Minutes once called Berman “Doctor Evil” for his efforts on behalf of the alcohol, fast food and tobacco industries.

In just one week in June 2007, Union Facts spent $500,000 against EFCA. For its part, the Employee Freedom Action Committee has announced a $30 million anti-EFCA campaign.

One of the biggest fronts, the so-called Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, claims to be a “coalition of workers, employers, associations and organizations” opposed to EFCA. In reality, it includes 500 employer and business organizations such as the American Beverage Association, National Association of Manufacturers, US Chamber of Commerce, American Meat Institute and Mississippi Manufacturers Association.

As Bill Samuel, the director of political affairs for the AFL-CIO, wrote in the Washington newsletter The Hill:

[W]hat should we make of a group that calls itself the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace? That sounds like something I might be in favor of. Are these people really trying to give workers more say in the workplace? Heck, that’s what unions do.

Actually, that is most definitely NOT what the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace tries to accomplish. Just look at who its members are. The coalition is made up of groups such as the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), whose biggest member is the notoriously anti-union Wal-Mart; the Associated Builders and Contractors, an association of anti-union contractors; the National Association of Manufacturers; and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

These groups do have a track record on issues that involve giving workers more say in the workplace. Not surprisingly, they’re not for that.

Unfortunately, EFCA’s enemies have had an impact on the debate, despite the growing support for unions — and the growing disrepute of corporations like Bank of America. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Colorado Media Matters have documented significant disinformation percolating through the mainstream media.

The anti-EFCA head-fixing industry has been based on four key lies. But union members and supporters can demolish their arguments once they have the facts in hand.

Lie Number 1: A majority of workers oppose EFCA.

The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace has released a “poll” claiming that 73 percent of Obama voters (!) oppose EFCA. However, the poll was carefully — and unscientifically — worded in order to insure a negative result. In fact, the poll contradicts a mountain of evidence, including more professionally worded surveys, which show widespread support for unions.

For example, a Hart Research Associates survey found that 78 percent of Americans would favor legislation making it easier for employees to bargain with employers over wages, working conditions and benefits (in other words, the things a union does).

In other surveys, nearly three-quarters of respondents have favored allowing workers to form unions if a majority sign union cards — a central provision of EFCA. And several polls have shown a majority of non-union workers would join a union if they had the chance.

Polls even show that around three-quarters of people support EFCA itself when the key provisions of the legislation are explained.

Lie Number 2: EFCA would abolish workers’ right to a secret ballot in forming a union.

EFCA in no way prohibits the use of ballots in forming a union.

The fact is that the 1935 Wagner Act provided for two primary methods for organizing unions: “card check” and the NLRB election process. “Card check” allows for a union to be brought into a workplace when a majority of employees sign union cards. The NLRB election process is a government-supervised election in a particular bargaining unit, held after a certain number of employees sign union cards.

From the 1930s into the 1970s, the majority of unions were organized through the card-check process. But since the onset of the employers’ offensive in the late 1970s, companies realized they could force workers to use the NLRB election process in order to draw out organization drives, intimidate workers and peel off union support.

This has been a successful strategy for Corporate America. One academic study of union elections from 1999 to 2004 showed that in cases where a majority of workers supported unions and signed union cards, they were only able to win NLRB elections 20 percent of the time. In truth, the current set-up forces workers — in the face of the bosses’ opposition and intimidation — to organize a union twice.

Further, EFCA does not abolish employees’ rights to a secret ballot in the NLRB election process. Instead, it gives the choice of card-check or the election process to workers instead of the bosses.

Nevertheless, this lie has spread unchecked throughout sections of the mass media. For example, CNN’s Lou Dobbs recently asserted that card-check would “end the secret ballot” in union elections and that the “so-called Employee Free Choice Act” is a “bold threat.”

This should prove that Lou Dobbs — for all his talk about defending “hard-working Americans” — is not only a racist immigrant basher, but anti-labor, period.

Lie Number 3: EFCA will expose workers to intimidation by unions.

In December, USA Today wrote, “It is hard to see how ending the secret ballot will do much besides initiating campaigns of subtle, and not-so-subtle, intimidation, as workers contemplate their decision.”

This media regurgitation of Coalition for Democratic Workplace talking points turns reality on its head. It’s bosses who use intimidation during union organizing campaigns.

A 2007 Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) study found one in five workers were illegally terminated when they attempted to organize a union at their workplace.

The House Committee on Education and Labor reported that in 2005 alone, more than 30,000 workers were receiving back pay from employers that had illegally persecuted them for union activity. This undoubtedly understates the scale of the problem, since proving employer violations is a difficult and time-consuming process.

Even serious business studies have shown that cases of so-called “union intimidation” are miniscule in number.

Lie Number 4: EFCA is, in the words of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a “job killer.”

The idea that EFCA would further strangle an already hard-hit job market flies in the face of economic reality and even the opinion of countless mainstream economists, such as New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.

One of the factors in the deepening economic crisis is a sharp decline in consumer demand. While the credit crunch is causing companies to scale back investments, economically wounded consumers can’t afford to buy goods and services, leading businesses to scale back more or move toward bankruptcy, shedding workers and creating more unemployment, which further curtails demand.

Washington’s roughly $800 billion stimulus package was supposed to put a check on this vicious cycle.

As Krugman has argued, since unionized workers tend to have greater job security and receive greater wages and benefits, unions are essentially a “stimulus package” that costs taxpayers nothing. A 2007 CEPR study showed this clearly. Median weekly earnings for union members were $886 (prior to the crisis), but just $691 for non-union workers.

Employer opposition to EFCA isn’t about the health of the economy or stemming job loss, even though declining demand means they are increasingly unable to sell goods and services.

In truth, companies are caught in an economic “Catch 22.” Under capitalist competition, every employer is compelled to extract as much surplus value as possible out of their workers. Failure to do so means that rival companies will benefit at their expense. As a result, corporate executives must try to maintain dictatorial control over production and exploit labor as they see fit. For that reason, unions are anathema to them.

Capital is right to be worried. The “pull-yourself-up by the bootstraps” ideology of the past three decades was dealt a blow by the ongoing federal bailout of the financial system — and the economic crisis makes a rise in class struggle increasingly certain.

Significantly, 2008 saw a second straight year of modest, but definite, union growth in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported union density grew from 12.1 percent of the workforce to 12.4 percent — an increase of 428,000 workers for a total of 16.1 million union members.

However, labor and the left can’t be complacent. The up-tick in union membership, while real, is still far below the historic high of about 35 percent in the 1950s, when labor was able to set industry standards for workers’ wages and benefits. Since then, unions have been in a steep decline, not only because of economic restructuring that has cost union jobs, but because labor failed to follow production into the South, where most former slave states are virtually union-free.

Now, the prolonged economic crisis has put hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of union jobs on the chopping block. Hundreds of thousands more unionized manufacturing jobs are likely to be lost. Furthermore, public sector unions — where organized labor had its greatest success in recent decades — will be increasingly hit by budget cuts and job losses as tax revenues plummet at the state and local level.

Despite the pressures of a terrible economy, advocates of EFCA have political momentum. The mainstream political shift towards liberalism has opened up new space for labor and for pro-union legislation like EFCA. Much of the Democratic-controlled Congress is on record of supporting EFCA, and President Barack Obama has probably issued more pro-union statements than Roosevelt. All this makes passage of EFCA possible.

But as the debate around the stimulus package showed, we can’t risk allowing the Republicans and the right wing to shape the political debate about EFCA — and there is already plenty of cause for concern.

For example, “realistic” politicians are wavering in their support of Obama’s pick for Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, because of her past support for EFCA.

Some “progressive” journalists have even suggested dumping the more “controversial” parts of EFCA, like card check, in order to win passage of the legislation. This would needlessly concede the terms of the debate to the likes of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace.

Most worrisome, it’s entirely unclear whether the two labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, are willing or able to mobilize the sort of grassroots struggle needed to shift the debate around EFCA and put real pressure on the politicians.

The potential is clearly there for a mass movement for EFCA. A February 17 meeting called by the Chicago Federal of Labor in support of the legislation build drew so many people that hundreds had to be turned away from a union hall that normally seats 1,000.

At the same time, however, the willingness of the United Auto Workers — once the standard-bearer of the US labor movement — to give up its right to strike in support of the government auto bailout, could be a harbinger of even worse “compromises” to come.

The enemies of EFCA are take-no-prisoners CEOs. As they spend millions of dollars and marshal all their resources to defeat card check, it should be clear that they aren’t going to go quietly into that long night. So for labor, lobbying and fine words simply won’t be enough. It will take protests and pickets that tap into the growing public energy in support of EFCA.

In fact, the way to win EFCA is being shown by our side’s most class-conscious fighters.

For example, Republic Windows & Doors workers. represented by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), are building support for EFCA as they tour the country to spread the lessons of their successful factory occupation last December.

As UE organizer Leah Fried remarked at one such event, “If Republic workers hadn’t had a union, nothing would have happened . . . Laws like EFCA are imperative at a time where corporations are cutting jobs and laying off thousands.”

Dart announced October 8 that his office would no longer forcibly remove residents from foreclosed properties, essentially imposing a moratorium on any mortgage-related evictions in the third-largest city in the U.S. and a surrounding county, with a total population of 5.3 million people.

Foreclosures are expected to reach a record high of 43,000 in Cook County this year, and the sheriff’s department was expected to conduct 4,500 foreclosure-related evictions. Two thousand people are evicted from their homes every month in Cook County–as many as 500 as a result of a foreclosure.

The Cook County moratorium applies to foreclosed homes, condominiums and apartment buildings. Renters will still be evicted for reasons not related to foreclosures. Still, this is the first moratorium on such evictions in a major urban area–at least in living memory.

Dart cited the cases of renters unjustly thrown out of their apartments as a result of the mortgage crisis–at least a third of such foreclosure evictions affect renters, he said. “These mortgage companies only see pieces of paper, not people, and don’t care who’s in the building,” Dart said.

“Just in the past month,” he continued, “about a third of the people we were asked to evict were under very questionable circumstances. It got to the point that enough was enough.”

Dart is demanding that banks and mortgage lenders send representatives to notify residents of impending foreclosures at least 120 days in advance.

While renters and homeowners will sigh with relief at the moratorium, the bankers are hopping mad. The Chicago Tribune, acting as a mouthpiece for its friends in the city’s business establishment, called the moratorium “curious” and claimed that it might be “confusing” for both homeowners and banks.

The Illinois Bankers Association charged the sheriff with breaking the law and “vigilantism,” and insisted that the moratorium “should not be tolerated.”

But it is the banks that have repeatedly broken the law. Chicago recently passed an ordinance that gives renters at least 90 days’ notice of an impending foreclosure-related eviction. But lenders haven’t been following the rule.

The Tribune reported that “some mortgage experts” have “suggested” the moratorium on evictions “could compound problems by making lenders reluctant to extend credit at a time when loans are already hard to get.” The president of the Illinois Mortgage Bankers Association agreed, telling reporters the moratorium “would have a significant impact, because obviously lenders would be hesitant to lend if they knew if someone defaulted, they wouldn’t be able to take the property back.”

Setting aside the question of why anyone, in the face of the current crisis, should trust anything a mortgage banker says, this argument is absurd on its face.

There is an international credit crunch underway, with banks refusing to lend to other banks and businesses, but this is because of the mountains of bad debts these banks have run up over years, mostly on immense speculative investments in obscure financial markets. The idea that a few thousand people getting to stay in their homes would make a dent in this crisis is ridiculous.

More to the point, these banks just got an immense bailout for the crisis they created in the first place. Why should there be no break at all for working-class homeowners and renters?

Dart’s office may be found in contempt of court if it refuses to carry out court orders to evict. The banks are likely to pursue this in court.

Dart acknowledged that he may be breaking the law, but said his department “will no longer be party to something that’s so unjust.”

Other sheriffs around Chicago have less problem being “party to something that’s so unjust.” A spokesperson for Will County Sheriff Paul Kaupas said, “If we disregard the law, what kind of message are we sending?”

Nobody should be under the illusion that Dart is a latter-day Sid Hatfield–the turn-of-the-last-century police chief of Matewan, W. Va., who sided with workers against company thugs in the coalfield wars. Dart’s office has done despicable things, especially to Black and Latino workers and poor youth.

But Dart is a politician, and he’s feeling pressure from below. In particular, activists in the northwest side neighborhood of Albany Park aggressively pursued the sheriff’s office after they were nearly evicted from their apartments.

As Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown reported, “Albany Park Community Council and the neighbors it represents…brought to Dart’s attention the insane way banks were being allowed to evict innocent tenants whose landlords had lost their properties through mortgage foreclosure proceedings–even when the tenants had paid their rent and knew nothing of the problems.”

The people in Albany Park started fighting back after one of their neighbors was bullied by a real estate agent trying to get them to move. They then discovered they were victims of a real estate scam when deputies were called to their suddenly foreclosed apartment building to evict them, even though they were all paid up on the rent.

As Dart put it, “The people in Albany Park opened a lot of people’s eyes in a hurry.” Their example shows the importance of people standing together in struggle.

The real conspiracy was a plot by 30 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to repress dissent and protests under the rubric of “national security” and the “war on terror.”

The repression caught in its wake antiwar protesters, environmentalists, pacifists, anarchists, socialists and reporters–in short, anyone who might show (or report on) signs of dissent against a government waging two barbaric wars while it can’t even provide health care to its own people.

As of the late afternoon before John McCain’s convention speech September 4, at least 320 people had been arrested in the previous five days–on the street or in police raids. At least 16 of them faced felony charges, and 47 others faced serious “gross misdemeanor” charges. Other reports put the number of felony arrests as high as 120–at least five of them involving minors.

As of September 3, many of those arrested remained in jail, held illegally beyond Minnesota’s 36-hour limit on detention without formal charges. Reportedly, many prisoners hadn’t been allowed to meet with lawyers or make phone calls–and some prisoners were said to be holding a hunger strike in protest.

Outrageously, eight people have been charged with “second-degree furtherance of terrorism,” “conspiracy to riot” and “commit civil disorder.” Not one of them was charged with any actual act of violence or property damage.

Government documents show that their organization, the RNC “Welcoming Committee,” along with other activist groups, had been investigated–and infiltrated–over at least the past year, with the help of the FBI and FBI-led Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force.

As Indymedia observed: “Based on past abuses of such informants by law enforcement, the National Lawyers Guild is concerned that such police informants have incentives to lie and exaggerate threats of violence, and to also act as provocateurs in raising, and urging support for, acts of violence.”

Despite flimsy or nonexistent evidence, over the Labor Day weekend, several homes and activist meeting centers were raided. Computers, cell-phones, e-mails, political pamphlets and protest plans seized, and dozens of people were arrested.

These first raids occurred before any protests had even been held in the Twin Cities. As Glenn Greenwald observed on Salon.com:

Just review what happened yesterday and today. Homes of college-age protesters were raided by rifle-wielding police forces. Journalists were forcibly detained at gunpoint. Lawyers on the scene to represent the detainees were handcuffed. Computers, laptops, journals, diaries, and political pamphlets were seized from people’s homes. And all of this occurred against U.S. citizens without a single act of violence having taken place, and nothing more than traffic blockage even alleged by authorities to have been planned.

Bruce Nestor of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild noted that “conspiracy to riot was the charge used against the Chicago Eight in 1968 as part of a politically motivated prosecution…These charges are an effort to equate publicly stated plans to blockade traffic and disrupt the RNC as being the same as acts of terrorism. This both trivializes real violence and attempts to place the stated political views of the defendants on trial.”

The red herring of “terrorism” was used as a cover for rampant violations of activists’ civil liberties–beginning with the “pre-emptive” arrests, raids and harassment prior to the protests.

For example, police in the Twin Cities impounded a bus owned by the family of Delyla and Stan Wilson for “safety violations” after pulling them over on Interstate 94–prior to the large Labor Day march on the Xcel Center, the site of the convention.

Police began tailing the Wilson family–who were leading a demonstration in favor of sustainable gardening, recycling and water conservation–after deciding that their gardening and environmental tools could be used as weapons. Responding to accusations that the police took the Wilsons’ bus to stifle dissent, police Sgt. William Palmer said the family was “free to go to the protests,” but they “just can’t drive this bus to get there.”

Another group of activists from the organization Earth Justice were detained on their way to the protests, and their bus seized by police. And on August 31, police tailed and then detained activists who had been attending the Veterans for Peace (VFP) conference at the Ramada Inn in Bloomington, just outside the Twin Cities.

Law enforcement personnel also surrounded a house where members of Eyewitness–a group that had successfully fought unjust arrests from the Republican convention in New York City in 2004–were staying.

Police escalated their tactics from harassment to outright brutality during largely nonviolent direct action protests on Labor Day.

When protesters tried to block traffic leading into the Xcel Center, the cops attacked protesters with chemicals and projectiles. According to the Coldsnap Legal Collective, “With no provocation, police have indiscriminately used rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and chemical irritants to disperse crowds and incapacitate protesters.”

A Coldsnap spokesperson told reporters that prisoners were denied medical treatment as punishment, including one arrestee with hemophilia, another with asthma and yet another with a broken finger.

According to the Wall Street Journal, police responded to protests with “pepper spray, tear gas, smoke canisters and what they call ‘distraction devices’ that give a loud bang and a flash of light…” A member of Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) who witnessed some of the violent police attacks told reporters that police were “treating [U.S.] civilians like you would Iraqis.”

Parts of the city did seem to be occupied by an army. According to the New York Times, as “the protests grew, scores of National Guard troops in riot gear and gas masks fanned out around” the Xcel Center, while “[p]olice helicopters buzzed over St. Paul…Humvees painted in fatigue green ferried water to police officers…and city dump trucks were used to block traffic on some streets.”

The Times reported that Jerah Plucker, a documentary filmmaker, was swept up by police–along with several others–while listening to music in a park along the Mississippi River. “Over the loudspeaker [the police] are saying, ‘You are being arrested.’” Plucker told reporters. “They’re telling us, ‘Sit down, put your hands on your head.”

Many others–both protesters and bystanders–had similar experiences. A 17-year-old youth was arrested trying to get into a concert on Monday on Harriet Island. He was soon released, but not before his photo was broadcast on television identifying him as an “anarchist” bent on “disrupting the convention.”

Dylan Asplen was charged with “felony riot”–and spoke to his mother on the phone from jail. His mother, Annette told reporters that they “arrested him for walking down the street. He said he didn’t do anything. I am so mad, you have no idea…It’s a police state.”

Keith Smith, a teenager from Menomonie, Wis., told reporters he was beaten by police and then released without any medical treatment. Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) reported that, “sitting in his home in Menomonie, he lifted his shirt and displayed what appears to be a boot print on his right shoulder… He also has scrapes on his arms, chest and hip.”

Anita Betancourt, speaking outside the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center days after Monday’s arrests, told MPR she was waiting for her 19-year old daughter, who had been in the Twin Cities to protest the war and convention because her brother was serving in Iraq.

As MPR reported, Betancourt’s daughter told her mother in a phone call that “the police just shot her and arrested her, and she was just standing there. She told Betancourt that everything–all of a sudden–was just chaos all around her. They started pushing and shooting people, and the gas and pepper spray and all that stuff.”

Attorney Matthew Ludt–who has represented some of arrestees–told MPR that “not only were they trying to keep demonstrators, protesters, people who want to get their message across off the streets…they swept up everybody else, which was bystanders as well as journalists.”

Reporters appear to have been systematically targeted by law enforcement during the protests. Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was arrested and physically assaulted September 1 and charged with obstruction of a peace officer, as were DN! producers Sharif Kouddous and Nicole Salazar.

Kouddous and Salazar were reporting on one of the protests against the convention. Goodman was then arrested for the “crime” of asking after her wrongfully arrested colleagues. According to an emergency alert from DN!:

During the demonstration in which the Democracy Now! team was arrested, law enforcement officers used pepper spray, rubber bullets, concussion grenades and excessive force against protesters and journalists. Several demonstrators were arrested during this action, as was a photographer from the Associated Press.

Other independent journalists were also arrested, including Chicago-based freelance reporter Nathan Weber, who was thrown to the ground and received blows to the back of his head. Four journalists from a student newspaper in Kentucky were detained as well. The student-journalists were charged with rioting while covering Monday’s protests. Like Weber and the DN! producers, the Kentucky students showed their media credentials–but were arrested anyway. One was still in jail as of September 3.

The escalating repression and arrests continued for the rest of the week. This included hundreds of riot cops in full gear lining the streets of the permitted Poor People’s March September 2 to try to intimidate the marchers.

On September 3, following a Rage Against the Machine concert at the Target Center, 102 people were arrested for the “crime” of marching through the streets and chanting about “democracy.” According to reports, police fired “two rounds from what appeared to be either a beanbag or a pellet gun” and pepper-sprayed people as they left the concert.

Even before the concert began–at around 7 p.m.–an activist campaigning for presidential candidate Ralph Nader was arrested outside the Target Center. His crime? Informing people about an upcoming Nader campaign rally.

The point of the raids–and the repression since–is clearly to intimidate radicals and progressives. But the issues that led thousands to protest the Republican convention in the Twin Cities–as well as the Democratic National Convention in Denver–aren’t going away. Nor are the growing expectations that something must be done to address these injustices.

If we are to continue organizing and speaking out, we must stand behind all the victims of this police conspiracy to stifle dissent.

For decades, an army of pundits and academics argued that the majority of people in the United States comprised an expanding, satiated and upwardly mobile middle class–and that the very idea of a working class belonged to an industrial past long ago. The word “working class” went down the memory hole, and couldn’t be brought out–even in roundabout ways–without invoking the specter of “class war” in mainstream politics.

As University of Illinois-Chicago Professor Leon Fink wrote in the Chicago Tribune:

When Al Gore unveiled a modest appeal to “working families” at the 2000 Democratic National Convention… [h]is Republican opponent, George W. Bush, immediately counterattacked, accusing Gore of unleashing “class war” on the country. The preferred term of address had long been “middle class”; even the AFL-CIO avoided the shoals of class rhetoric to try to co-opt the conservative family-values agenda.

Yet, today, virtually every commentator, from William Kristol to Paul Krugman, unblinkingly invokes the once-dreaded terminology in suggesting that Sen. Barack Obama cannot, as the director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute put it, “penetrate working-class voters.”

If “working class” has become common parlance again, it may be because there is a crisis facing the working-class majority in the U.S.–those who work for wages. Hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have fallen over the past three decades, while the size of the gross domestic product (GDP) almost tripled–a growth of riches that has accrued almost solely to big business.

But if the “working class”–and its much debated “bitterness” and grievances–is at the forefront of the 2008 presidential election, this “rediscovery” has brought along with it the reprise of longstanding myths–that the working class is, generally speaking, flag-waving, conservative, church-obsessed, tradition-oriented and mostly white.

As Fink continued in his article:

Today, “working class” has been effectively defanged of any radical, let alone subversive, intent. In fact, today’s working class looks less the modernist, rationalizing force that Marx projected than a bastion of tradition–that unmoving “sack of potatoes” he identified with the peasantry.

Whether explicit or not, today’s invocation of the working class is preceded by the word “white.” And the resulting construct–white men and women who have not gone to college–are regularly presented as a mostly conservative bloc… [T]he working class that Obama can’t reach looks to be populated by Archie Bunker and his like-minded descendants.

This is a stereotype, of course, and one with a long history. Fink invokes a distorted view of the working class–”Archie Bunker and his like-minded descendants”–that was an invention of the ruling class and mass media when it arose in the 1960s as part of an ideological counter to the growing influence of the 1960s social movements.

As International Socialist Review contributor Joe Allen has written, “In the late 1960s, the U.S. media and political establishment ‘rediscovered’ the working class, though not the real working class–which was white, Black, Latino and increasingly made up of women… The working class that they claim to have discovered was really a middle-class stereotype that portrayed the working class as white men who were in rebellion against the civil rights and antiwar movements and liberalism in general.”

Images of workers in hard hats attacking activists were broadcast to in an attempt to show that “hard-working” Americans rejected “ungrateful” and “privileged” antiwar students. But surveys in the late 1960s and early 1970s showed that manual workers opposed the Vietnam War in similar numbers to the youths who made up the student antiwar movement and the GI resistance.

In the working-class city of Dearborn, Mich., for example, a 1968 referendum calling for immediate withdrawal passed with 57 percent of the vote. By 1971, union households along with minority households (which overlapped greatly) were among the most consistent opponents of the war in national polls.

Although racism continued to pervade every aspect of U.S. life–as was famously demonstrated when a white mob attacked Martin Luther King Jr. when he attempted to take the civil rights struggle north to Chicago–working-class and poor whites generally tended to be more sympathetic to Black workers than the “more well to do.” One 1966 study showed that “the higher one’s class or origin of class or class destination, the more likely that one prefers to exclude Negroes from one’s neighborhood.”

As a result of the continual impact of the Black liberation struggle on consciousness, by 1970, a majority of white Americans favored affirmative action, including quotas, to redress the impact of current and past racist injustices.

This isn’t to say that racism didn’t influence white workers. It did, as evidenced by some working-class support–including in the north–for George Wallace’s 1968 “state’s rights” presidential campaign, and in the busing struggles that continued throughout the 1970s.

However, the working class was not, as many depict it today, a homogenous bastion of racism and reaction.

Today, the working-class that the mainstream media have “rediscovered” may include women, but it is still viewed as white and presented as holding generally conservative views.

As in the 1960s, this picture has little connection to reality. Most polls show that the U.S. population as a whole–and the working class in particular–has become more progressive on most social and economic issues.

Nowhere is this clearer than on the question of racism. In 1954, only 4 percent of those surveyed responded that they approved of marriage between “white and colored people.” In 2007, 79 percent told a Gallup poll that they approved of interracial marriages.

In fact, unlike much of the media establishment, most people think racism is a problem in the here and now, not a thing of the past. A majority in a CNN/Essence magazine poll–including whites–said they believed racism to be a “serious problem.” Eighty-five percent of Americans said they are “completely comfortable” voting for a Black presidential candidate.

To be clear, there are still large numbers of people who have racist ideas–who aren’t “comfortable” voting for a Black candidate, who disapprove of interracial marriage and who don’t think racism is a problem. And there are also contradictions in people’s thinking about the pervasiveness and effects of racism. For example, the CNN/Essence poll found that a majority of both whites and Blacks said they didn’t think racial discrimination was the reason why Blacks tend to have lower incomes and worse housing.

However, it can be said, in contrast to the media stereotype, that the working class–which, for the record, includes tens of millions of Blacks and Latinos, as well as whites, and tens of millions of people who did go to college–tends toward more progressive ideas on a whole series of political questions than the rich and the middle class.

Current polls show, for example, that 51 percent of Americans–the highest number since the 1930s Great Depression–support the longstanding socialist demand of taxing the rich specifically to redistribute wealth. A 2006 poll showed that 59 percent of people support trade unions–with support jumping to 68 percent among those who earn less than $30,000 a year.

But this isn’t merely a question of economic issues.

A majority of citizens and permanent residents responded in a 2006 survey that they believed immigration to be “a good thing.” Nearly 90 percent of Americans said they thought gays and lesbians should have equal rights at work. Support for gay marriage has grown by 19 percent since 1996, and opposition has declined by 15 percent. Even on abortion–one of the few areas where the right wing has gained ground ideologically–a majority of people still holds a favorable view of Roe v. Wade itself.

Also, in contrast to the picture of a fundamentalist hinterland existing between the coasts, polls also show that Americans are becoming less religious, that the religious are less consistent in attending church, and even that the younger generation of fundamentalist Christians are somewhat more left wing on some social justice issues.

So why does the mythology of the reactionary working class persist? There are two inter-related reasons.

For one, this idea is useful in helping to divide and conquer workers on religious, racial, gender, national and sexual orientation lines–by presenting such divisions as unchanging and insurmountable. Secondly, the political weaknesses of the left and the labor movement in the U.S. mean that the logic of class struggle and solidarity has no echo in mainstream politics.

Take the example of the so-called “Reagan Democrats.” The term has been resurrected in relationship to the 2008 election, but it was originally coined by the media to identify working-class voters who switched from their traditional loyalty to the Democrats to vote for the Republicans in the 1980s.

The backdrop to this was the late 1960s and early 1970s wave of militant strikes in transit, auto, textiles, the mines, the postal service and other industries. A number of these walkouts were wildcat strikes without official union sanction–and led by both Black and white radicals.

These struggles pointed to the potential for a reinvigorated and multiracial labor movement growing out of the social movements of the 1960s.

However, by the late 1970s, the ruling class had turned toward neoliberalism and began a counter-attack against labor and the left. It pushed for concessionary contracts with unions, two-tier wage scales, privatization, deregulation and slashing benefits.

This employers’ offensive began under Democrat Jimmy Carter and was pushed further under Reagan. Instead of opposing this attack on workers, the party that supposedly represented working people–the Democrats–pushed through the first cuts. By 1984, a layer of loyal Democrats ended up voting for Reagan–the so-called “Reagan Democrats.”

The Republicans pulled this off by appealing on a host of conservative “wedge issues”–stoking racism, calling for wars on crime and drugs, attacking women’s rights. But the other element involved in this political shift was the failure of the Democrats to offer any challenge to the shift to the right. On the contrary, the Democrats concluded that they needed to follow the Republicans to the right to recapture the “swing voters.”

Even after the Reagan Revolution began to peter out by the start of the 1990s, the Democrats remained in this conservative mode–symbolized, for example, by the “triangulating” of the Clinton presidency. Thus, for the past 15 years–with the exception of the period after the September 11, 2001 attacks–the U.S. working class has tended to be more progressive and left wing than the official, two-party political system.

This shows why it is wrong to assume that the situation described by author Thomas Frank in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?–that some workers vote against their economic interests for the Republicans because they have been won away from the Democrats on social issues–is permanent.

Instead, there is a problem of organizing the sentiment of large sections of workers around both economic and social issues into a political force that can have an impact.

As the 2008 elections have progressed, we’ve seen “class” take center stage, with Hillary Clinton–of all people–positioning herself, in the words of the New York Times, as a “working-class hero,” ready to fight around all manner of “injustices,” from high oil prices to mortgage foreclosures.

How is it possible that Clinton–a senator and former first lady who, with her husband, is worth more than $100 million–has been able to present herself as the working class’ favorite daughter?

One reason is the gullible media that repeated her campaign’s spin. Another is racism. The media brouhaha around Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright–pushed by both John McCain and Hillary Clinton’s campaign–undermined Obama’s “post-racial” campaign strategy (though it should be pointed out that millions of working-class white people have voted for Obama).

But it also must be said that Clinton and the media were able to paint Obama as “elitist” because he let them do it.

If he wanted, Obama could rally workers–Black, white and Latino–around a campaign that spoke to their concerns, with strong proposals to help working-class people deal with the consequences of being hammered by recession.

But Obama doesn’t want to campaign on this basis. He wants to assure Wall Street and Corporate America, which have shifted sharply away from the Republicans to supporting the Democrats, that he is not a real threat. And so Obama tilts to the right–in a very similar manner to Bill Clinton’s triangulation–to try to win over “swing voters.”

The kernel of solidarity exists in every workplace and in every working-class community around the country. Organizing this kernel into movements to challenge racism, sexism, nationalism, homophobia and corporate rule can force “official” politics left and extract real concessions.

At the end of the day, it is a truly reactionary ruling class that spreads the myth of the reactionary working class.