JOHNSTOWN — It should be evident by now that Republicans want average and poor Americans to pay for the country’s financial crisis. Too many Democrats, supposedly the party of the average, are going along with the cuts in pay and jobs, and even acceding to huge federal income tax cuts for the top 2 percent and inheritance tax cuts for billionaires and multimillionaires in the top 1 percent of earners.

Without these tax cuts, in both Washington and in many states, which benefit  the wealthy, there isn’t much of a crisis or need to cut back on the average person. Moreover, this combination of the loss of revenue from the tax cuts and the cuts in spending by both national and local governments will probably deepen our recession, causing people in and out of government to lose jobs and spending power.

It’s the Herbert Hoover blunder into further depression. For their part, corporations have already been cutting jobs, switching to less adequate 401(k) pensions, and shifting health-care costs onto employees.

There was a long struggle in America to obtain better pay, working conditions (8-hour day), and benefits.

Workers didn’t win the right to organize unions and to achieve middle-class wage levels until the late 1930s, along with disability and retirement guarantees (i.e., Social Security), unemployment compensation, minimum wages, etc.

Banking regulations (overturned in the 1990s) were instituted to protect against another depression.

Previous efforts to win these advances were often violently and viciously suppressed in America, including in Johnstown.

The New Deal’s Social Security program, an insurance that includes disability and survivor benefits, illustrates the progress, decreasing senior poverty rates from close to 50 percent to the present 9 percent.

Let’s remember that this crisis was created by the insolvencies of the big banks, which speculated wildly with unreliable or even fraudulent securities. Only government rescue kept them out of bankruptcy. Now they not only go unpunished but reap record high incomes for their traders.  

Corporate profits are back up. Oil corporations are making tens of billions each, and still claiming a government subsidy. Stocks have mainly recovered. American wealth has concentrated at the top.  

Back in 1974, the top 1 percent had only 8 percent of the national income. By 2007, it had 24 percent of all income.

Those dependent on ordinary work, however, are being squeezed. The New York Times cited labor department statistics showing that the “wages of nonmanagement employees are now 10 percent below their level in the early 1970s.” And crises such as this are used to reduce wages.  

Both General Motors and Ford have cut wages for new hires in half (from $28 to $14 an hour). Yet in the face of these trends, Republicans are giving big tax cuts to the very wealthy. And they are trying to curtail unions and make villains of moderately compensated government workers, most of whom are merely middle class.

Historically, unionized workers were able to get better wages for themselves and create a higher wage standard for all. However, bad labor laws have since seriously  weakened union efforts.

By making it difficult to form unions in the private sector, threatening or firing workers who try, shipping jobs to low-wage countries, or using anti-union law firms, employers have cut unions down to 7 percent of the private work force. On the other hand, because the government couldn’t use ruthless means to curtail unions, more public sector employees are organized. And due to this, they haven’t lost the guaranteed pensions that private sector workers used to have.

That, for Republicans, is a reason to blame them for the current crisis. Republicans want to distract us from their  own big tax cuts for the wealthiest earners.

According to economist Dean Baker, the average public employee pension was $22,000 in 2007.

And federal and many state workers don’t get Social Security benefits. Pension costs have ballooned in New Jersey and Pennsylvania because the state and local governments have failed to contribute their shares for years, hoping that the funds’ investments would make up for this.

But, investments crashed.

Pennsylvania teachers and state workers, though, kept contributing 7 percent or so of their pay during that time.  

But now they are being blamed.

Surveys show that over half of American workers want to belong to a union. Without a union, workers are powerless.   

Only through unions do workers get any voice, not only in pay and benefits but as a protection against arbitrary firings.

Should we also bring down public workers and their pensions where they are better than those of the weakened private sphere? Should we do this in the face of the large federal and state tax cuts for the wealthy and businesses that we have seen recently?



Jim Scofield of Richland Township is a professor emeritus of English at Pitt-Johnstown.