Don't Bail on EFCA

As rage against AIG, the recipient of $170 billion in bailout funds, roiled the nation, CEO Edward Liddy insisted that he simply cannot "retain the best and brightest" without paying $165 million in bonuses, many above $1 million, to employees in the company's financial products division. And what did this brain trust do to merit such perks? They helped wreck the global economy and destroyed prosperity for millions. Meanwhile, across the class gap, American workers who actually make real goods, provide real services and create real wealth continue to toil for declining wages, with little to no job security, health insurance or retirement benefits.

With such (perverse) incentives, it's no wonder that concentrations of wealth in America approach Gilded Age levels; nor is it any mystery why we're facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. America has become a nation of Wal-Mart wages for the many and private jets for the few. Wage stagnation has been so severe that working Americans extracted disastrous amounts of equity from their homes and ran up credit card bills just to maintain their standard of living. In large part, this untenable class gap widened because private sector unionization, now just 7.6 percent, was crushed as a counterforce to corporate greed.

Fortunately, Congress has a historic opportunity to address this root cause of the recession, not by clawing back AIG's bonuses (though that would be just) but by passing the Employee Free Choice Act. Reintroduced March 10, EFCA would make it far easier for workers to form a union and negotiate a contract, free of the worst forms of employer intimidation. But key senators have shrunk from their support for the bill, and the administration has yet to make a full-court press for EFCA.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.