Why Your Chipotle Burrito Costs More

Republicans have finally found an issue to run on in next year’s midterm elections. Apparently Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head weren’t gaining enough traction…

“Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill,” said an NRCC spokesman, Mike Berg.

You heard that right. They’re blaming Democrats for the rise in Chipotle burrito prices.

The GOP’s tortured logic is that the unemployment benefits in the American Rescue Plan have caused people to stay home rather than look for work, resulting in labor shortages that have forced employers like Chipotle to increase wages, which has required them to raise their prices.

Hence, Chipotle’s more expensive burrito.

This isn’t just loony economics. It’s dangerously loony economics because it might be believed, leading to all sorts of stupid public policies.

Start with the notion that $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits is keeping Americans from working.

Since very few jobless workers qualify for state unemployment benefits, the Republican claim is that legions of workers have chosen to become couch potatoes and collect $15,000 a year rather than get a job.

I challenge one Republican lawmaker to live on $15,000 a year.

In fact, the reason workers are holding back from reentering the job market is because they don’t have childcare or are still concerned about their health during the pandemic.

Besides, if employers want additional workers, they can do what they do for anything they want more of but can’t obtain at its current price — pay more. 

This is free-market capitalism at work…which Republicans claim to love.

When Chipotle wanted to attract more workers, it raised its average wage to $15 an hour. That comes to around $30,000 a year per worker — still too little to live on, but double the federal unemployment benefit.

Oh, and there’s no reason to suppose this wage hike forced Chipotle to raise the price of its burrito. The company had other options.

Chipotle’s executives are among the best paid in America. Its chief executive, Brian Niccol, raked in $38 million last year — which happens to be 2,898 times more than the typical Chipotle employee. All Chipotle’s top executives got massive pay increases. 

So it would have been possible for Chipotle to avoid raising its burrito prices by — dare I say? — paying its executives less. But Chipotle decided otherwise.

By the way, I keep hearing Republican lawmakers say the GOP is the “party of the working class.” Well if that’s the case, it ought to celebrate when hourly workers get a raise instead of howling about it.

Everyone ought to celebrate when those at the bottom get higher wages. 

The typical American worker hasn’t had a real raise in four decades. Income inequality is out of control. Wealth inequality is into the stratosphere (where Jeff Bezos is heading, apparently).

If wages at the bottom rise because employers need to pay more to get the workers they need, that’s not a problem. It’s a victory.

Instead of complaining about a so-called “labor shortage,” Republicans ought to be complaining about the shortage of jobs paying a living wage.

Don’t hold your breath. Or your guacamole.

Policymakers and the media are paying too much attention to how quickly the U.S. economy will emerge from the pandemic-induced recession, and not nearly enough to the nation’s deeper structural problem – the increasing imbalance of wealth that could enfeeble the economy for years.

Seventy percent of the US economy depends on consumer spending. But wealthy people, who now own more of the economy than at any time since the 1920s, spend only a small percentage of their incomes. Lower-income people, who were in trouble even before the pandemic, spend whatever they have – which has become very little.  

In a very practical sense, the U.S. economy depends on the spending of most Americans who don’t have much to spend. That spells trouble ahead.

It’s not simply a matter of an adequate “stimulus.” The $2,000 checks contained in the American Rescue Plan have already been distributed and extra unemployment benefits will soon expire. Consumer spending will be propped up as employers add to their payrolls. Biden’s spending plans, if enacted, will also help keep consumers afloat for a time.

But the underlying imbalance will remain. Most peoples’ wages will still be too low and too much of the economy’s gains will continue to accumulate at the top, for total consumer demand to be adequate.  

Years ago, Marriner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1934 to 1948, explained that the Great Depression occurred because the buying power of Americans fell far short of what the economy could produce. He blamed the increasing concentration of wealth at the top. In his words:

“A giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. As in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.”

The wealthy of the 1920s didn’t know what to do with all their money, while most Americans could maintain their standard of living only by going into debt. When that debt bubble burst, the economy sunk.

History is repeating itself. The typical Americans’ wages have hardly increased for decades, adjusted for inflation. Most economic gains have gone to the top, just as Eccles’s “giant suction pump” drew an increasing portion of the nation’s wealth into a few hands before the Great Depression.

The result has been consumer spending financed by borrowing, creating chronic fragility. After the housing and financial bubbles burst in 2008, we avoided another Great Depression only because the government pumped enough money into the system to maintain demand, and the Fed kept interest rates near zero. Then came the pandemic.

The wealth imbalance is now more extreme than it’s been in over a century. There’s so much wealth at the top that the prices of luxury items of all kinds are soaring; so-called “non-fungible tokens,” ranging from art and music to tacos and toilet paper, are selling like 17th-century exotic Dutch tulips; cryptocurrencies have taken off; and stock market values have continued to rise even through the pandemic.  

Corporations don’t know what to do with all their cash. Trillions of dollars are sitting idle on their balance sheets. The biggest firms have been feasting off the Fed’s corporate welfare, as the central bank obligingly holds corporate bonds that the firms issued before the recession in order finance stock buybacks.

But most people have few if any assets. Even by 2018, when the economy appeared strong, 40% of Americans had negative net incomes and were borrowing money to pay for basic household needs.

The heart of the imbalance is America’s wealthy and the corporations they own have huge bargaining power – both market power in the form of monopolies, and political power in the form of lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Most workers have little or no bargaining power – neither inside their firms because of the near-disappearance of labor unions, nor in politics because political parties have devolved from giant membership organizations to fundraising machines.

Biden’s “stimulus” programs are fine but temporary. The most important economic reform would be to correct this structural imbalance by reducing monopoly power, strengthening unions, and getting big money out of politics.

Until the structural imbalance is remedied, the American economy will remain perilously fragile. It will also be vulnerable to the next demagogue wielding anger and resentment as substitutes for real reform.

China’s increasingly aggressive geopolitical and economic stance in the world is unleashing a fierce bipartisan backlash in America. That’s fine if it leads to more public investment in basic research, education, and infrastructure – as did the Sputnik shock of the late 1950s. But it poses dangers as well.

More than 60 years ago, the sudden and palpable fear that the Soviet Union was lurching ahead of us shook America out of a postwar complacency and caused the nation to do what it should have been doing for many years. Even though we did it under the pretext of national defense – we called it the National Defense Education Act and the National Defense Highway Act and relied on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration for basic research leading to semiconductors, satellite technology, and the Internet – the result was to boost US productivity and American wages for a generation.

When the Soviet Union began to implode, America found its next foil in Japan. Japanese-made cars were taking market share away from the Big Three automakers. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi bought a substantial interest in the Rockefeller Center, Sony purchased Columbia Pictures, and Nintendo considered buying the Seattle Mariners. By the late 1980s and start of the 1990s, countless congressional hearings were held on the Japanese “challenge” to American competitiveness and the Japanese “threat” to American jobs.

A tide of books demonized Japan – Pat Choate’s Agents of Influence alleged Tokyo’s alleged payoffs to influential Americans were designed to achieve “effective political domination over the United States.“ Clyde Prestowitz’s Trading Places argued that because of our failure to respond adequately to the Japanese challenge “the power of the United States and the quality of American life is diminishing rapidly in every respect.” William S Dietrich’s In the Shadow of the Rising Sun claimed Japan “threatens our way of life and ultimately our freedoms as much as past dangers from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.“

Robert Zielinski and Nigel Holloway’s Unequal Equities argued that Japan rigged its capital markets to undermine American corporations. Daniel Burstein’s Yen! Japan’s New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America asserted that Japan’s growing power put the United States at risk of falling prey to a “hostile Japanese … world order.”

And on it went: The Japanese Power Game,The Coming War with Japan, Zaibatsu America: How Japanese Firms are Colonizing Vital US Industries, The Silent War, Trade Wars.

But there was no vicious plot. We failed to notice that Japan had invested heavily in its own education and infrastructure – which enabled it to make high-quality products that American consumers wanted to buy. We didn’t see that our own financial system resembled a casino and demanded immediate profits. We overlooked that our educational system left almost 80% of our young people unable to comprehend a news magazine and many others unprepared for work. And our infrastructure of unsafe bridges and potholed roads were draining our productivity.

In the present case of China, the geopolitical rivalry is palpable. Yet at the same time, American corporations and investors are quietly making bundles by running low-wage factories there and selling technology to their Chinese “partners.” And American banks and venture capitalists are busily underwriting deals in China.

I don’t mean to downplay the challenge China represents to the United States. But throughout America’s postwar history it has been easier to blame others than to blame ourselves.

The greatest danger we face today is not coming from China. It is our drift toward proto-fascism. We must be careful not to demonize China so much that we encourage a new paranoia that further distorts our priorities, encourages nativism and xenophobia, and leads to larger military outlays rather than public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research on which America’s future prosperity and security critically depend.

The central question for America – an ever more diverse America, whose economy and culture are rapidly fusing with the economies and cultures of the rest of the globe – is whether it is possible to rediscover our identity and our mutual responsibility without creating another enemy.

House Republicans are blaming Democrats for the rise in Chipotle burrito prices.

You heard me right. The National Republican Congressional Committee  issued a statement last week claiming that Chipotle’s recent decision to raise prices on their burritos and other menu products by about 4 percent was caused by Democrats.

“Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill,” according to NRCC spokesperson Mike Berg.

Republicans have finally found an issue to run on in the 2022 midterm elections. Apparently, Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head weren’t getting enough traction.

The Republican’s tortured logic is that the unemployment benefits in the American Survival Act have caused workers to stay home rather than seek employment, resulting in labor shortages that have forced employers like Chipotle to increase wages, which has required them to raise their prices.

Hence, Chipotle’s more expensive burrito.

This isn’t just loony economics. It’s dangerously loony economics because it might be believed, leading to all sorts to stupid public policies.

Start with the notion that $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits is keeping Americans from working.

Since fewer than 30 percent of jobless workers qualify for state unemployment benefits, the claim is that legions of workers have chosen to become couch potatoes and collect $15,000 a year rather than get a job.

I challenge one Republican lawmaker to live on $15,000 a year.

In fact, evidence suggests that workers are holding back from reentering the job market because they don’t have childcare or are still concerned about their health during the pandemic.

Besides, if employers want additional workers, they can do what they necessarily do for anything they want more of but can’t obtain at its current price – pay more.

It’s called capitalism. Republicans should bone up on it.

When Chipotle wanted to attract more workers, it raised its average wage to $15 an hour. That comes to around $30,000 a year per worker – still too little to live on but double the federal unemployment benefit.

Oh, and there’s no reason to suppose this wage hike forced Chipotle to raise the prices of its borritos. The company had other options.  

Chipotle’s executives are among the best paid in America. Its CEO, Brian Niccol, raked in $38 million last year– which happens to be 2,898 times more than the typical Chipotle employee earned. All of Chipotle’s top executives got whopping pay increases.

So it would have been possible for Chipotle to avoid raising its burrito prices by – dare I say? – paying its executives less. But Chipotle decided otherwise.

By the way, I keep hearing Republican lawmakers say the GOP is the “party of the working class.” If that’s so, the Republican Party ought to celebrate when hourly workers get a raise instead of howling about it.

Everyone ought to celebrate when those at the bottom get higher wages.

The typical American worker hasn’t had a real raise in four decades. Income inequality is out of control. Wealth inequality is into the stratosphere (where Jeff Bezos is heading, apparently).

If wages at the bottom rise because employers need to pay more to get the workers they need, that’s not a problem. It’s a victory.

Instead of complaining about a so-called “labor shortage,” Republicans ought to be complaining about the shortage of jobs paying a living wage.

But don’t hold your breath, or your guacamole.

The Truth About the U.S. Border-Industrial Complex

A desperate combination of factors are driving migrants and asylum seekers to our southern border, from Central America in particular: deep economic inequality, corruption, and high rates of poverty — all worsened by COVID-19.

Many are also fleeing violence and instability, much of it tied to historic U.S. support for brutal authoritarian regimes, right-wing paramilitary groups, and corporate interests in Latin America. 

Some long-term consequences of this U.S. involvement have been the rise of violent transnational gangs and drug cartels, as well as the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. 

And thanks to lax U.S. gun laws and export rules, a flood of firearms that regularly flows south makes this violence even worse.

In other words, the United States is very much part of the root of this problem. 

Meanwhile, climate change-fueled natural disasters like droughts and hurricanes have led to widespread food insecurity in Central America, forcing thousands to migrate or risk starvation. 

Some politicians want you to believe the way to address this humanitarian tragedy is to double down on border security and build walls to deter people from coming. 

They’re wrong.

Several administrations have tried this approach. It’s failed every time. A recent study found that  increased prosecutions and incarceration did not deter migration, but instead clogged courts, shifted resources from more serious cases and stripped people of due process.  

The expansion of this militarized border apparatus and the increased criminalization of crossings has forced immigrants and asylum seekers to take riskier routes where they face extortion, assault, and even death.

The true beneficiaries have been the corporations who profited from the militarization of the border. 

Between 2008 and 2020, the federal government doled out an astounding $55 billion in contracts to this border-industrial complex. Billions have been spent on everything from Predator drones to intrusive biometric security systems. Immigration enforcement budgets have more than doubled in the last 13 years, and since 1980, have increased by more than 6,000%.

Let’s be clear: What’s really out of control at the border is our spending on the border-industrial complex, which has done nothing but increase human suffering without dealing with the root causes of migration.

So what can we do?

Begin by acknowledging the role U.S. policies have played, and build a positive, sustained relationship with our Mexican and Central American neighbors to reduce economic inequality, uplift the marginalized, and uphold democratic ideals.

Donald Trump’s abrupt and arbitrary cancelling of crucial aid to the Northern Triangle nations of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador is the opposite of what we should be doing.

We must also ensure that aid doesn’t benefit transnational corporations and local oligarchs. Our goals must instead be aligned with the calls of local labor unions, environmental defenders, and agricultural movements to improve conditions so people are not forced to migrate in the first place.

And we should seek to reverse the militarization of borders in Central America, and instead help build a system that respects the human rights of migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.

Here at home, this means shifting away from the wasteful and violent militarization of our own borders, and ending the corporate profiteering it enables. 

We need more asylum specialists, social workers, lawyers, and doctors at the border — not soldiers and walls.

And we must never again allow the inhumane and ineffective policies that resulted in the separation and detention of families and their children. 

We must embrace the values we claim as our own, and never again allow a presidential administration to arbitrarily shrink the number of refugees accepted into the U.S. each year to almost none. 

Congress should expand legal avenues of immigration, along with a roadmap to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here — a policy with broad public support.

It’s not enough to roll back the cruel and xenophobic policies of our past. Most of us now living in America are the descendants of refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants. This new generation should be treated in ways that are consistent with our most cherished ideals.

Now is the time to act.

7 Lessons We Need to Learn From Covid-19

Maybe it’s wishful thinking to declare the pandemic over in the US, and presumptuous to conclude what lessons we’ve learned. So consider this a first draft.

1. Workers are always essential

We couldn’t have survived without millions of warehouse, delivery, grocery and hospital workers literally risking their lives. Yet most of these workers are paid squat. Amazon touts its $15 minimum wage but it totals only about $30,000 a year. Many essential workers don’t have health insurance or paid leave.
Lesson: Essential workers deserve far better.

2. Healthcare is a basic right

You know how you got your vaccine without paying a dime? That’s how all healthcare could be. Yet too many Americans who contracted Covid-19 got walloped with humongous hospital bills. People with chronic disease, Black Americans and low-income children were most likely to have delayed or foregone care during the pandemic.Lesson: The U.S. must join the rest of the industrialized world and provide universal health coverage.

3. Conspiracy theories can be deadly

Last June, about one in four Americans believed the pandemic was “definitely” or “probably” created intentionally. Other conspiracy theories have caused some people to avoid wearing masks or getting vaccinated, resulting in unnecessary illness or death. Lesson: An informed public is essential. Some of the responsibility falls on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that allowed misinformation to flourish — and on the government for enabling them.

4. Wages are too low to get by on

Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. So once the pandemic hit, many didn’t have any savings to fall back on. Conservative lawmakers complain that the extra $300 a week unemployment benefit Congress enacted in March discourages people from working. What’s really discouraging them is lack of childcare and lousy wages. Lesson: Raise the minimum wage, provide universal childcare, strengthen labor unions and push companies to share profits with their workers.

5. Remote work is now baked into the economy

The percentage of workers punching in from home hit a high of 70% in April 2020. A majority still work remotely. Some 40% want to continue working from home. Two lessons: Companies will have to adjust. And much commercial real estate will remain vacant. Why not convert it into affordable housing?

6. It’s past time for a wealth tax.

The combined wealth of America’s 657 billionaires grew by $1.3 trillion – or 44.6% – during the pandemic. Yet billionaires’ taxes are lower than ever. Wealthy Americans today pay one-sixth the rate of taxes their counterparts paid in 1953. Lesson: To afford everything the nation needs, raise taxes at the top.

7. Government can be the solution

Ronald Reagan’s famous quip – “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem” – can now officially be retired. Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” succeeded in readying vaccines faster than most experts thought possible. Biden got them into more arms more quickly than any vaccination program in history.

Furthermore, the $1.9 trillion Democrats pushed through in March will help the US achieve something it failed to achieve after the 2008-09 recession: a robust recovery. Lesson: The federal government did not just help beat the pandemic. It also did more to keep the nation afloat than in any previous recession. It must be prepared to do so again.

ProPublica’s bombshell report on America’s super-wealthy paying little or nothing in taxes reveals not only their humongous wealth but also how they’ve parlayed that wealth into political power to shrink their taxes to almost nothing.

Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, reportedly paid no federal income taxes in 2007 and 2011. Elon Musk, the second richest, paid no taxes in 2018. Warren Buffett, often ranking number 3, paid a tax rate of 0.1 percent between 2014 and 2018.

The real scandal is it’s legal.

Wealth and power are inextricably connected. The super-rich have bought armies of lobbyists to keep their taxes miniscule and to create and maintain tax loopholes large enough to drive their Lamborghini’s through.

The loopholes are tougher than kryptonite. Remember the notorious “carried interest” loophole that almost every presidential candidate over the last five elections has promised to close? It’s still there.

The armies of the wealthy also prevent any major changes in the system that might threaten their wealth, such as a wealth tax, stronger unions, or tougher antitrust.

American democracy is being attacked from two directions right now – from the white supremacist followers of Donald Trump who are suppressing votes, and from the wealth supremacists who are bribing lawmakers with campaign contributions.

Some of the wealth supremacists are quietly bankrolling the white supremacists (see: Koch network, US Chamber of Commerce, Trump and his business boosters), because their mutual enemy is democracy.

A few weeks ago, hundreds of US corporations and CEOs lent their names to a two-page ad in the New York Times and Washington Post in support of voting rights.

It turns out many of these companies and CEOS are also members of the US Chamber of Commerce, the powerful Washington business lobby that recently put out a “key vote alert” against the For the People Act – designed to protect voting rights from state laws suppressing votes as well as the from the moneyed interests buying votes.

The hypocrisy is running thicker than ever. Corporate public relations departments put out noble statements while corporate legislative departments continue to put out legislative bribes. Billionaires like Warren Buffett publicly advocate higher taxes while privately paying almost zilch.  

The For the People Act targets both white supremacists and wealth supremacists, which is why it’s hugely popular with the public but is running into roadblocks even among Senate Democrats.

This is the fight of our time.

On Sunday, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced in an oped in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he opposes the For the People Act. He also opposes ending the filibuster.

An oped in the most prominent state newspaper is as non-negotiable a position as a politician can assert.

It was a direct thumb-in-your-eye response to President Biden’s thinly-veiled criticism of Manchin last Tuesday in Tulsa, where Biden explained why he was having difficulty getting passage of what was supposed to be his highest priority – new voting rights legislation that would supersede a raft of new laws in Republican-dominated states designed to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters, using Trump’s baseless claim of voter fraud as pretext.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” Biden asked rhetorically in Tulsa. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But we’re not giving up.”

Everyone who paid any attention to Senate politics knew he was referring to Manchin, as well as to Arizona Senator Kirsten Cinema, another Democratic holdout.

Manchin’s very public repudiation of Biden on Sunday could mean the end of the For the People Act. That opens the way for Republican states to continue their shameless campaign of voter suppression – very possibly giving Republicans a victory in the 2022 midterm elections and entrenching Republican rule for a generation.

As it is, registered Republicans make up only about 25 percent of the American electorate, and the percentage appears to be shrinking in the wake of Trump’s horrendous exit.

But because rural Republican states like Wyoming (with 574,000 inhabitants) get two senators just as do urban ones like California (with nearly 40 million), and because Republican states have gerrymandered districts that elect House members to give them an estimated 19 extra seats over what they’d have without gerrymandering, the scales were already tipped.

Then came the post-Trump deluge of state laws making it harder for likely Democrats to vote, and easier for Republican state legislatures to manipulate voting tallies.

Manchin says he supports extending the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to all fifty states. But that’s small comfort.

The original 1965 Voting Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013, on the dubious logic that it was no longer needed because states with a history of suppressing Black votes no longer did so. (Note that within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law, and Mississippi and Alabama soon followed.)

The efficacy of a new national Voting Rights Act would depend on an activist Justice Department willing to block state changes in voting laws that suppress votes and on an activist Supreme Court willing to uphold such Justice Department decisions. Don’t bet on either. We know what happened to the Justice Department under Trump, and we know what’s happened to the Supreme Court.

Besides, a new Voting Rights Act wouldn’t be able to roll back the most recent round of voter suppression laws from Republican states.

Without Manchin, then, the For the People Act is probably dead, unless Biden can convince one Republican senator to join senate Democrats in supporting it – like, say, Utah’s Mitt Romney, who has publicly rebuked Trump for lying about the 2020 election and has something of a reputation for being an institutionalist who cares about American democracy.

Yet given Trump’s continuing hold over the shrinking Republican Party, any Republican senator who joined with the Democrats in supporting the For the People Act would probably be ending their political career. Profiles in courage make good copy for political obituaries and memorials.

I’m afraid history will show that, in this shameful era, Republican senators were more united in their opposition to voting rights than Democratic senators were in their support for them.

The future of American democracy needs better odds.

Something I’ve just learned about Amazon – one of America’s most profitable and fastest-growing corporations, headed by the richest man in the world: 

According to the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Amazon warehouse workers sustained nearly double the rate of serious injury incidents last year as did workers in non-Amazon warehouses. 

In addition, largely because Amazon failed to provide its workers adequate protective equipment during the pandemic, the corporation admits that nearly 20,000 employees were presumed positive for the coronavirus.

Workers who spoke out about these unsafe workplace conditions were fired.

Amazon boasts of paying its workers at least $15 an hour. But that comes to about $30,000 a year, hardly enough for a family to get by on.

The explosive growth of Amazon’s army of poorly-paid and ill-treated hourly workers is emblematic of the long-term decline of America’s middle class and levels of economic inequality America hasn’t seen since the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age. 

This has strained the social fabric of the nation – fueling anger and frustration, a rising tide of drug overdoses and deaths of despair, even tempting some working-class people to embrace Trumpism and white nationalism. 

The success of Amazon’s “shock and awe” campaign against workers who dared try to bring a union to their Bessemer, Alabama warehouse exemplifies the immense political power the architects of this growing inequality now wield. 

It’s an alarming omen of the future. 

In Amazon warehouses like Bessemer, workers are treated like robots. Algorithms relentlessly impose dangerous production quotas. They get two 30-minute breaks each ten-hour day. Every movement is monitored. 

Amazon delivery drivers report being instructed to turn off their safety apps so they can meet their quotas. 

Others report having to urinate into bottles because of delivery timing pressures. 

Even though public support for unions is as high as it’s been in 50 years – 60 million American workers would join a union today if they could – Bessemer workers were outgunned by a behemoth whose market capitalization exceeds Australia’s GDP.   

The National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal for employers to fire workers for trying to organize a union. But the penalties for violating the Act  are so laughably small (rehiring the worker and providing back pay) that employers like Amazon routinely do it anyway.

Amazon may be the future of the American economy, but if that future is to have room for the kind of prosperous working families that fifty years ago defined American capitalism, unions are critical. 

In March, the House of Representatives passed legislation designed to level the field. It’s called the Protect the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). The Senate version has 47 Democratic co-sponsors. It needs three more to give the PRO Act a fighting chance of getting to Joe Biden’s desk. 

The PRO Act would end many of the practices Amazon used to defeat the union effort in Bessemer. Real penalties would be imposed on companies and corporate officers who retaliate against union advocates or otherwise violate the National Labor Relations Act.

The PRO Act would make it easier for workers to form a union, with the aim of protecting them from unfair working conditions.

The PRO Act alone won’t end economic inequality or return prosperity and opportunity to America’s working families. But passage of the PRO Act would help. 

It would also send a clear signal that ours is truly a government “of the people” – such as the million people who work for Amazon today, not the one multi-billionaire at the top, and of the vast majority of Americans who are working harder than ever today and getting nowhere, in America’s Second Gilded Age. 

The Unchecked Power of Police Unions

Police unions abuse collective bargaining to shield their members from accountability for the killings of unarmed Black people and other heinous misconduct. No progress can be made without reining in the unchecked power of police unions.

Look, I was Secretary of Labor. I’m in favor of unions. But police unionizing can have deadly consequences.

One study found that extending collective bargaining rights to Florida sheriffs’ offices led to an estimated 40 percent increase in violent police misconduct. 

Another study found that the protections built into the police union contracts in America’s 100 largest cities were significantly correlated with the killing of unarmed civilians. 

Another study suggests that the increase in police unionization from the 1950s through the 1980s resulted in “about 60 to 70” additional civilians killed by police each year — the majority of whom were people of color.

Experts believe the protections in police union contracts give too many officers the sense they can abuse their power. 

Police contracts often have provisions allowing departments to erase disciplinary records within a few years, enabling officers with histories of misconduct to clear their records. 

Others allow accused officers to access their investigative files before being questioned, letting them manipulate their story. Others set strict time limits for citizens to file complaints about officers; some prevent anonymous complaints from being investigated at all. 

All these provisions allow officers with histories of misconduct to stay on the force. 

Derek Chauvin, for instance, had at least 17 complaints lodged against him, and never faced any discipline beyond two letters of reprimand. Needless to say, other public sector employees are not afforded these extraordinary protections.

Even if an officer is fired, there’s an extensive appeals process that usually works out in their favor. 

In Philadelphia, 62 percent of officers fired from 2006 to 2017 were reinstated. In San Antonio, 70 percent were. When New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo was finally fired, five years after choking Eric Garner to death, the NYPD’s largest union responded by threatening a work slowdown.

Police unions fight cities that enact even mild reforms, like establishing civilian review boards. The result? Review boards are notoriously ineffective by design. 

Some police union contracts with cities forbid them even creating a review board. In the tragic case of Breonna Taylor, Louisville’s review board could not start an investigation, take complaints from citizens, or recommend discipline for the officers. All it could do was make recommendations for policy or training changes. 

It’s the same in other cities: oversight boards have no investigative power, no subpoena power, and no discipline power. 

Police unions also wield enormous political clout. A Guardian investigation found police unions spent about $87 million influencing state and local legislation over the past two decades, and at least $47.3 million on campaign contributions and lobbying at the federal level. In 2017, police unions spent $2 million to influence legislation in California alone.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Stopping the abuses of police unions must not become a stalking horse for attacking public sector unions generally. But the unchecked powers of police unions urgently need to be addressed. 

To start, lawmakers must change state labor laws to restrict the subjects police unions can bargain over. 

They should limit negotiations to pay and benefits, not how police do their jobs, how and when they use force, and how and when they are disciplined.

For decades, police unions have shielded officers from accountability, bullied cities into doing their bidding, and attacked lawmakers who took them on. It’s past time to ensure they can no longer block accountability under the guise of collective bargaining.