A Crisis in Public Management

What is the common thread between the US SARS-Cov2 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement? Dysfunctional public management.

It is curious how the George Floyd crisis came up during the Covid 19 pandemic. Were people a little stir-crazy? Perhaps. Were people fed up with the callous culture war being waged from the White House? Definitely. But I think there is more to connect these crises- deep problems in American public management. Our problem with the pandemic speaks for itself. While many other countries, large and small, have eradicated this virus and proceeded to re-open their economies, (Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Taiwan, to name a few), we obviously have not, and continue to lead the world in new cases, day in and day out. What is wrong?

I think the main thing that is wrong is that our public health officials do not know what they are doing, and do not even conceive of the problem correctly. Their ambition has been to flatten the curve to reduce hospital congestion. This sentences us to, at best, a continous slow burn of viral cases, spiraling up when people get too careless, and quieting down after lockdown rules are re-instituted. It is clear that public officials completely lacked the ambition to fully contain and eradicate the virus. Doing that would require mobilizing an army of contact tracing and containment deputies, and enforcing quarantines on traced contacts, possibly with phone-based apps. We in Northern California had an ideal opportunity during the April-May time frame to fully control the virus. But did we? Not at all. The public officials contented themselves with testing and publicizing the daily trickle of cases, and having the police close public parks and other venues of congregation. Never was eradication even in the conversation, nor the appropriate powers and staff contemplated, as far as I can tell. Then, when the economic cost of even these half-hearted lockdown and distancing measures became too much, we re-opened, with the natural result of a rising tide of cases.

By not even conceiving that they should and could mount a total eradication campaign, our officials, from the local to the national levels, gave up before the game even began. And why was there this complete lack of ambition? First, we have not been used to this kind of disciplined, society-wide activity. Our social, not to mention political, system, is so atomized and uncohesive, dedicated to individualism, that an actually effective Chinese-style lockdown seems to have been inconceivable. But still, Canada has managed it at least partially- our closest neighbors, geographically and culturally.

Another obvious issue is the lack of a coherent health care system. The public health portion of it is an atrophied vestige, devoted more to bureaucratic stasis and policy quibbling than to actual intervention, uncertain whether it is a safety net for the poor, or a guardian for everyone. Higher officials should have realized that the given infrastructure would be and remains completely unable to mount the effort needed- which is thorough testing, contact tracing, and enforced isolation of contacts. A new organizational infrastructure needed to be built immediately, which was done in other countries, but not here. This is an obvious failure of public management, both in imagination and in execution.

In China, green means go.

Just as the pandemic shines a ghastly light on our public health organizations, the death of George Floyd, and the many prior cases of brutality and murder shines a similar light on another sector of public management- the police. Most police do great work in difficult conditions. Problems arise from a (large) sub-culture of callous disregard, inherited from Jim Crow and other authoritarian elements, combined with weak public management. One issue is unionization. Public employee unions have been toying with the electoral system for decades, running influential campaign ads and altering local elections and public policy to suit their interests. No wonder that we now have a public pensions crisis, absurdly early retirements, double dipping, secrecy for key records, and a litany of other abuses of the public purse and trust. Policies that make it virtually impossible to fire public employees are only one part of the problem, but one that is most central to the George Floyd case. Unlike the situation in public health, the rogue policemen are overzealous, rather than under-zealous. But the management issue is similar- who runs these organizations, do they have the full public interest in mind, whom do they serve, and do they have effective control over their employees? Answers to these questions are not pretty.

We are faced with two brands of corruption when it comes to public management. One is the Republican brand, which hardly cares about the public interest at all, only private interests. Anything they can do to drown the govm'nt in the bathtub, and allow natural feudalism to reign, giving social and economic power to the powerful, is OK with them. This means supporting white power and a traditional racial hierarchy, attracts sympathetic authoritarian types to police forces, and then winks at their indiscretions in enforcing the "natural" order.

The other is the Democratic brand, which cares so much about public service that it gladly ties itself up in knots of bureaucracy and procedure (and pensions, and consultants, and politically correct meetings, due process, and translators, and environmental review, and...) ending up incapable of accomplishing anything, or holding anyone to account. The Democratic brand is also pro-union, adding a whole other level of dysfunction and mismanagement to an already difficult situation. To bring in yet another example, the California high speed rail project is an object lesson in this style. Tens of billions of dollars have been poured down a bureaucracy dedicated to good pensions, due process, poor land acquisition practices, and continual underestimation of the fiasco they are participating in. The expected path of this train now looks more like an amusement park ride than a bullet train, and will only go from Los Angeles to somewhere in the central valley. As a citizen, it is incredibly frustrating to watch this waste and ineffectiveness.

The countries that have been most successful against Covid-19 have been the most cohesive societies, either by nature or by authoritarian force. Cohesiveness correlates with good public management, since it represents shared objectives and understandings about values and ways of doing things. Cohesiveness helps smooth the way between ideals and implementation. The US stands, clearly, as one of the least cohesive societies in the world, particularly after the trauma of the current administration. Is there strength in diversity? Up to a point. But there is more strength in unity.

• We are not good at collective action, at least these days.
• Public health.. what is that? Is it safety net care for the poor, or is it health for everyone?
• Thoughts on building better public institutions.
• Happy thoughts on the current administration.

Breaking Secrets

A small way to increase labor power.

Why is inflation so persistently low? Even when the government is on a spending and tax-forgiveness binge, and interest rates have been rock-bottom for a decade? I have been spending some time with a left-inflected economics textbook from the 80's by Samuel Bowles et al., which gives a view of our situation that contrasts significantly from the mainstream free-market, neoliberal economics we have been fed for the last few decades. Perhaps its basic point is that capitalism only works when labor is exploited, yielding a surplus product. No profits = no capitalism. Thus the overarching aim of capitalists is to extract excess value from labor, over what is being paid out.

This extraction process has many dimensions, but a few of the salient ones deal with a odd role of markets in capitalism. Most people working in the capitalist system are not working in markets. They are employees, whose work is not bid on an hourly basis, who do not personally sell what they personally make, in a market. They exist in a command economy, quite divorced from this fantasm called "the free market". If they do not get along with their boss, they are fired. They are evaluated, not by market outcomes, but by subjective opinions of others around them, and are subject to a complex bureaucracy of control by the firm they are employed by. While the firm has market interactions with the outside, on the inside it is hardly different from a communist enterprise, indeed a good deal more heartless. Much of what corporations and the capitalist class lobbies for is not freer markets (heaven forbid!), but more ways to control workers, whether that is by right-to-work, weakening unions, keeping disputes out of open court, colluding with each other to not poach workers, staging "team-building" activities, stealing worker pay, reducing safety net programs, etc. So, contrary to the right-wing ideology of freedom, one of the main tasks of capitalists and their political servants is to reduce the freedom of workers.

The principal sword dangling over the employee is unemployment. That is the ultimate sanction, and is essential to the functioning of the whole system. Unlike other markets for goods, the labor market never clears, or settles on the stable demand/supply point. As the book comments, employers do not need to have a line of unemployed machines standing outside the gates to encourage the machines inside the factory to work harder. But they do need unemployement, both to support the command economy inside the firm, and also to keep the wages paid below the actual value given by labor. This connects additionally to one of the reasons for the business cycle- to raise unemployment and thereby "discipline" worker demands, in addition to moderating input prices and clearing out inefficient firms. It turns out that the full business cycle, including recessions, is as central to capitalism as capital itself. We can not have only good times, if corporations are going to clear profits by exploiting workers.

Which ultimately brings us back to inflation. We had a "great" recession in 2008, which led to very high unemployment and durably reduced output. Workers were very well disciplined, to the point that large numbers left the work force entirely. One consequence of all this discipline and lowered expectation has been that employers could get away with not raising pay. The trend of economic growth/benefits going entirely to the capitalists and rich, and none to workers, has continued at an accelerated pace through the period. A side effect of all this low pay is low inflation. This is in dramatic contrast to the late 1960's and 1970's, when worker power was high, unionization was high, and demands for pay were high. Workers expected not just cost of living raises, but seniority and productivity raises as well. Incidentally, the public sector, which is highly unionized and in a special position with political power over its employers, is a relic of that outdated world, resulting in bloated pay and pensions, which are now unheard of in the trenches of the real economy.

Workers have not gained from productivity increases for forty years.

So things are, from a long-term perspective, unbalanced. And what did voters in their wisdom do about it in 2016? They elected a hypercapitalist, who conned them into thinking that he wanted to do something for workers. Ha! Obviously, the progressive agenda is far more pertinent to workers, seeking to reduce instead of increase capitalist power. Progressives seek to increase worker power in a myriad of ways- regulation, a higher minimum wage, better safety net, more public services, higher wealth and income taxes. The strongest proposals so far aim at the lowest end of the scale- setting a living minimum wage, and also establishing the principle of jobs for all- a job guarantee that would set an even more robust floor for the job market and seriously impair the fear that unemployment inspires. Will capitalism survive? I think so- the Scandinavian countries have far more civilized regimes of public goods and worker protection, and seem to do OK.

But what about the bulk of workers in the middle rungs of the economy? Some additional thinking needs to be done to bolster their prospects in the fight with capitalists. While unions are highly beneficial for their members, their benefits are intrinsically balkanized and can be highly damaging to their industries- think of the car industry. A better way is to institutionalize broadly some of the benefits that unions have pioneered, such as the weekend, regulatory worker protections, and rights of political and economic organization.

One idea that I think would be very useful would be to break the secrecy on salary. One of the principal benefits of union membership is the transparency that it provides to workers- knowlege of what everyone is being paid, as a step to negotiating contracts. One of the greatest powers that corporations have, to steal pay and discriminate against classes of employees, is to keep pay secret, as though it were some kind of sacred trust. But many workplaces have transparent pay structures, such as union shops, boardrooms, and professional sports teams, and the sky has not fallen. What average workers need is government mandated transparency on pay in every workplace, so that everyone can see how they and others are being treated. Few measures would as effectively show injustice, generate fairer treatment, and give workers a more realistic picture of their prospects at a current or a future employer.

Would we get more inflation? Perhaps. But there are many ways to skin that cat, with credit, monetary and fiscal policy, rather than worker suppression. It is time for a little capitalist suppression- to right an economy, and a society, far out of kilter.

• How best to raise taxes?
• Stiglitz on the thorough-going corruption of the Trump administration.
• Lying without shame.. will it win the next election too?

Inequality- are unions the answer?

What role do unions play in addressing inequality? Relatively little, compared with public policy.

Are unions the answer to the current tide of inequality? I don't think so, either practically or ideally. One enormous fact about unions is that they are incredibly unfair. If you are in one, then great, you may strike it rich, so to speak. If you are in a good one that knows its business, you may be able to capture much of that business's profits. But if your union is ineffective, or non-existent, tough luck. Unions don't do you any good, other than their general political activities, which can be beneficial to the working class. Or not...

The conflict can be even more pointed. Government employee unions, like the local police and firefighters, use their political influence and concentrated money to capture resources that local politicians don't care that much about or regard as their own.. taxpayer dollars. The current public pension debacle is a long story of spineless politicians bought and paid for by unions that attack the public interest for private gain.

Unions also create a great deal of strife, usually for good causes, but not always. They are structured as adversarial institutions with a very narrow scope. When sufficiently successful, they can bring an entire industry to its knees, as the US car industry learned to its dismay. They have a far less complex job than their adversary does, which has to run the complete business.

Unfortunately, in the absence of unions, corporations are happy to capture all the productivity gains of their workers for 1) their management, and 2) their shareholders, leading directly to the inequality that has been culturally and economically so damaging in the US and elsewhere. The labor market is a disaster- for many reasons, it is not efficient or fair in valuing work, let alone lives.

So what is needed? The touchstones for any solution are fairness and effectiveness. One example is raising the minimum wage. This is a no-brainer that lifts all workers at or near the minimum wage level to a more livable level. The minimum wage should be set at least at the poverty level, which currently 23,000 per year, or $11.08 per hour. I would support a wage higher than that, to 1.5 times poverty level, with perpetual indexing in the future. That might actually reduce poverty in the US.

A second element would be a guaranteed minimum wage job, provided by the government, if no others are available, so that all able people can get work and serve others for a decent wage. As previously described, such work is plentiful in principle, and much of the funding would come from lowering the cost of existing safety net programs.

A third element would be universal equity in pensions and workplace benefits. The idea that youngsters contemplating their career paths can make a rational decision at a young age to evaluate prospective professions based on their ultimate pension payouts is insane. That outcomes vary so dramatically is grossly unfair. All workers should get the same treatment, which in an ideal world would involve a beefed up Social Security system, raised to 1.5 or 2 times its current level, and cancellation of the 401K non-system, which just bleeds money to Wall Street. Beyond that, whatever workers save on their own should be their own business, and get special tax treatment at only nominal levels, if at all. Mitt Romney's $100 Million gold-plated 401K is an appalling abuse and must never be allowed to happen. Similarly, health insurance needs to be removed from the workplace, completing the Obamacare trajectory, so that the employer-employee relationship is not clouded with ancillary issues and even more power asymmetries than are necessary.

A fourth element, which goes without saying, is strong Keynesian policy at the federal level. We need a couple trillion more stimulus to resolve the current recession in a timely manner, and a government that actually cared about its people would provide it. The only way a labor market works for workers is if unemployment is low. Then we can worry about inflation, for which there are plenty of other tools.

A fifth element would be to return to the union issue. With a higher minimum wage, and guaranteed work, and strong Keynesian (even MMT) policies on the federal level that keep employment high and the labor market favorable to workers, there would be less need for collective bargaining. Indeed, I would end collective bargaining for pay and benefits. Benefits would be nationalized or standardized, and pay would fall to the labor market and to individual bargaining. Workers could not be fired without cause after working for some probationary time, say a year. Basic protections like that should be standardized, not left up to individual negotiations.

Unions would still allowed, indeed they would be mandatory for all workplaces, but only to negotiate miscellaneous work conditions and manage individual employee negotiations. Every company would be met with an equal sized union composed of its workers, organized automatically, just as the shareholders are organized. And they would be empowered to have a vote on the board of the company, to bargain about most non-monetary conditions. Unions would also be the main employment agent for each worker, bargaining individually for pay, and matching the employee with external jobs and employers as part of the negotiation process.

Any industry-wide corporate grouping would be complemented by a worker group of equivalent size, insuring that worker interests are counted at the table at all levels. Both corporations and unions would be under much greater restrictions against any kind of spending on individual political campaigns and lobbying. There would be no more organizing fights, etc. Insuring the proposed separation between pay and conditions negotiation may well be unrealistic, however. There are many overlaps, such as seniority systems and time off allowances, etc. But in principle, this would be a way to reconcile the true need for unions in countering employer power with a need for a labor market that is effective, fair, and transparent.

One way to make the labor compensation market more effective is to make it transparent. Employers today benefit from the "privacy" of salary data, hiding what they pay employees. The Lilly Ledbetter case would never have happened if such secrecy were not routine, and routinely damaging. It is a huge power assymetry, benefitting employers. Yet public salary and wage data in many other fields, such as professional athletics and boardrooms, doesn't make the sky fall down. James Surowiecki had an interesting article recently on the perverse effect of public CEO pay disclosure, to whit that boards typically want to believe that they have above-average CEOs, so mandated transparency tends to increase CEO pay, not decrease it. The same mechanism is needed in the trenches. Everyone needs to know what everyone else is being paid.

Beyond that, with contemporary technology, the labor market could be much more effective, putting workers and employers into a perpetual market that evaluates talents and needs with great specificity. Each worker could have a personal profile perpetually active that all employers (and anyone else) can see. And vice versa with job positions. The matchmaking could be highly automated and continuous. It would be like having an agent working on your behalf, whether entirely technological, or aided by the worker's union.

The erosion of the middle class may be a natural consequence of laissez faire. But it is not something we have to accept. With a modicum of public management of the system, we can have one that grows the middle class and makes us a more civilized nation.

• Plight of unions, cont...
• Excess CEO pay, funded by you and me.
• Our climate.. apathy running rampant.
• Community for the godless.
• The terrible economy, yes, it is crushing the youth.
• Immunity for financial crimes? They need to be sent to jail, not to GO.
• Personhood for companies? No, no, no.

Economics and biology

A Victoria's Secret catalog gets me thinking about economic stimulation, credit, and regulation.

At this time of hair-raising de-leveraging, the going joke is that "We found the WMD's!". This came up in an excellent piece by Henry Blodget in the Atlantic. But I'd like to suggest a different metaphor- that of cancer, another syndrome of defective regulation/intelligence. Blodget takes the position that the system (and human nature) is built to forget the past, so whatever we learn now will inevitably go up in smoke, in the excitement of the next bull/bubble market. Just as competition is the life blood of economic activity and its associated ills, so selection is the lifeblood of biology, and its associated ills such as cancer.

Over evolutionary time, our cells have acquired ornate mechanisms of growth regulation, so that they divide like hell's bells early on, producing a baby from one cell in nine months, but then slow to a crawl, or in the case of many cells like neurons, enter complete stasis, not dividing at all while doing the work of adulthood. There are many controls over cellular decisions like responding to local damage, living amicably with one's neighbors, and whether to divide, culminating in the most extreme solution to all three- cell suicide, called apoptosis.

The most well-known example of such a regulator is p53, a protein which is positioned at a central nexus, receiving signals about damage to DNA, chemical stresses, and other problems that might warrent holding up cell division or even committing hari kari. When signalled, it binds to various genes on the DNA and turns them on to execute the program of either shutting down cell division (p21/CDK complex), or shutting down the cell completely (Bax/caspases).

Through the inexorable process of natural selection, some cells will find a way around the commands to stop growing or to destroy themselves. They may have DNA damage to the very genes, like p53, that provide that regulation, or their defect may generate vast over-expression of pro-growth signals that become immune to countervailing influences. This is cancer, and it takes several defects in the regulatory system to allow such over-growth to develop.

Is that starting to sound familiar? The financial system is set up with its own selective imperatives, foremost of which is to make money. Once a bull market gets going, as Blodget relates, the naysayers tend to be wrong year after year after year, lose money, and get sidelined. Cheerleaders such as Blodget himself during the internet stock boom, and real estate agents parrotting the mantras of "real estate never goes down" hold the floor while the music is playing and the disease is getting worse. And worst of all, regulators like the Fed are also overtaken with deregulatory zeal, even in cases like Ben Bernanke, who despite being a student of the great depression promoted the idea that regulators had no role in preventing bubbles, but can only hope to clean up after them. The regulatory systems become compromised, and the disease spreads until the music finally stops, and everyone scurries for cover. Thankfully, this disease is not terminal, but it is still extremely painful, and worth trying to prevent.

I think that throwing up our hands in the face of this process (as Blodget fatalistically does) is not acceptable. Biology labors against a far more difficult problem, there being billions years of evolution that went into the cellular control mechanisms that keep us (mostly) alive through reproductive age. We ask medical research to win the "war on cancer", but are we to ask no more of economists than to accede to human psychology, and let wealth and productivity wither periodically for the freedom of the financial markets to engage in speculative excess?

One template to look at is bank regulation. Banks in their regulated aspects did quite well during this crisis- it was the unregulated derivatives, hedge funds, and wildly overleveraged "investment" banking that collapsed, with the remaining investment houses ironically seeking protection by taking the form of regulated banks. Banking regulation restricts leverage to about 1:10, as well as restricting the targets of that leverage- collateralized loans in such things as real estate or businesses with whose operations the bank has some, if not thorough, familiarity. In combination with modest deposit insurance and other guarantees from the government, this makes for a quite stable system.

The amazing thing was that the Fed, other regulators, and congress decided that other actors in the system that made far riskier loans (to speculators in financial markets) could be far more highly leveraged, (1:50 or above), since the government was not directly on the hook through deposit insurance or other guarantees. Even the LTCM collapse did not warn Greenspan and others that this leverage is a disease that could bring down the entire system, while not offering much public good in return. It is, simply, a genteel form of gambling with very, very large amounts of borrowed money.

So, in a rational world, we would have a regulator with general responsibilities to limit leverage, allowing the most leverage in closely regulated and beneficial institutions (banks), while allowing less (instead of more) in speculative and more lightly regulated institutions. Indeed, it has always mystified me why margin accounts at brokerages are allowed at all- borrowing to buy stocks is the surest way to increase market volatility. There is nothing wrong with speculation, which plays an important role in market efficiency, but lending someone money to speculate is like playing Russian roulette, not just for the speculator and the lender, but for the markets and the economy as a whole.

A general leverage regulator is needed because, like the cancer process, financial markets are endlessly inventive (aka "innovative") at devising new ways to gamble. Mutations and lapses in attention will always occur, so that formal rules will always be out of date. No regulatory system is perfect, just as nobody is completely immune to cancer, but we can learn from history and do better, on a speedier time frame than that of evolution. The Fed is ideally positioned to be this regulator, and should have the function of restricting all kinds of leverage added to its portfolio of regulating banks, keeping the currency stable, and promoting sustainable economic growth.

---

While I am at it, let me throw out several more pieces of an economic reform program, though this is mostly oriented to the car bailout and general economic mess, not the financial industry specifically.

• Health care: Relieve businesses of the administrative burden of health care by nationalizing it, as per the pending Obama plans, or something more adventurous like single-payer. Businesses should not shop around for younger employees because they are cheaper to insure. Employees should not depend on employers to provide health care. Incidentally, one step towards cost control could be to revise the FDA approval process to have two levels of approval- one basic level for safety and efficacy, as is done now, and a second level for demonstrated cost/benefit advantage over the current standard of care. One cause of rising health care costs (aside from the absurd duplication and expense of private care insurers/deniers) is that new treatments are not put through a rigorous benefit analysis. Drug and device companies relentlessly push marginal products through the approval process, then devote vast sums to advertise them for benefits that are often absent or minimal.

• Pensions: Businesses should likewise be relieved of the administrative burden and cost inequality of pensions, switching to a nationalized program combining a beefed-up social security with government-run 401K funds. Nowhere is the burden of retirement provisioning more apparent than in the domestic car industry. With roughly 2 or 3 retirees for every worker, they are groaning under this burden, and every sensible program to downsize them in accordance with their self-managed decline in market share makes this ratio even worse. Pensions for all companies (and government entities, which are likewise facing financial chaos from their pension obligations) should be immediately nationalized, so that each employer pays a set tax rate per current employee (like the social security system, only not capped by maximum income). This could be a mix of defined benefits as a safety net and an optional 401K-like account with the government, offering a few selections of risk. Then all retirees, including those not employed (such as housewives, for instance) would get a mix of defined benefits and invested returns that are partially tied to their contributions and former income, and partially set as a safety net not dependent on prior work at all. This would allow older companies with many retirees to compete on a level playing field with new startups, give all citizens the assurance of retirement income whether or not they worked or were married to a worker, and allow workers to switch jobs without fear of losing their pension.

• Unions: I support greater unionization, but unions impose costs as well, especially when they are too successful in gaining income and working (or non-working) condition benefits. Unions should organize downtrodden farmworkers and janitors, not dictate no-work jobs, antiquated labor-intensive technologies, and 100K/year longshoreman salaries. My proposal would be that unions be prohibited from representing anyone over the national median income. This would put higher-salaried workers into the regular job market, instead of an artifically negotiated system. What would this do to NBA players? I am not sure- Insofar as management has monopoly power, in this case congressionally sanctioned, workers should likewise be able to organize. However the government's role should generally be to break monopolies, not sanction them.

• Executive pay: The salaries of many corporate and investment managers have been clearly excessive and economically detrimental, motivating them to find beneficial option sale and exit strategies rather than building better companies. Salaries should be capped at 25X the median salary of the managed corporation including subsidiaries. Extra income should be restricted to a new kind of stock option granted on a five year plan, where the grant price is the mean price for the current year, and the options can be redeemed only after five years, at the mean stock price of the trailing year. This would go a long way to re-aligning the interests of management with those of employees and stockholders. There would be no private pensions, parachutes, etc. One interesting side-effect of this proposal would be to motivate management teams to separate themselves from the underlying base companies so that they could be paid more. But since they would have separated rather than subsidiary relationships, this might open a new market for management services, which might enable corporate boards to bid more effectively for these services, enhancing competition and keeping prices down.

Union, Si!

A quick link for the Employee Free Choice Act

I do not usually post quick links, but this is irresistible. I got an email from the union SEIU to sign a petition for the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), but without much information. So naturally I went to an opposing site (EFCAexposed) to see what they had to say.

The interview they post on their front page is amazing- it plays into every stereotype of plutocracy. A bejoweled, bechinned, and bespoke lobbyist (CEO of the organization, Donald Wilson), seated in a wing-backed leather chair issues a call to arms to the "management community", exuding despair, victimization, and frank fear in face of the onrushing whirlwind that is the Obama presidency and Democratic gains in the Senate.

Crucially, he also lays out the provisions of the EFCA in a very articulate way, such that anyone can judge its merits. And I have to say, he convinced me that its merits are quite positive.

1. Allow unions to represent workers without an election if over 50% of location workers sign a union card.

2. Set a brutally efficient contract negotiation timeline, with 10 days warning, 90 days to negotiate, 30 days for federal mediation, and then off to binding arbitration, though the nature of this arbitration is unclear.

3. Add punitive damages for unfair labor practice penalties, to current compensation penalties.

4. (possible, not in the bill yet) Add prohibitions on strike-breaking.

As the man says, this would shift power from management to unions. But at the same time, the bill introduces new efficiencies in union elections, negotiations, and legal remediation that should also help business in some ways by reducing time and effort spent temporizing, stalling, and generally dicking around with unions, which is destructive to all sides.

After these decades of union decline, and concomitant disempowerment of the working class, it is time to right the ship, and it is clear that this act will be a significant corrective (assuming that arbitration is done impartially). Will increased unionization send more jobs overseas? Yes, but far fewer than it will improve here at home. A future focus on extending union rights in international trade agreements will help level this playing field as well. The overall point remains how best to remediate the imbalance of wealth in the US, which is caused by the natural operations of the free market (and also in part by the class warfare of the last eight plus years, where the wealthy have run Washington towards corruption and inequality). Making the tax code more progressive again, retaining and increasing the "death tax", increasing public stakes in services like health care and education, and helping unions are all effective routes to this end.

(See book on supercapitalism by Robert Reich).

Incidentally, similar arguments also revolve around immigration. The "management community" supports unlimited unskilled immigration, which naturally lowers prices in the unskilled labor market in the US. Employers all the way up the skill ladder are happy to increase their power vs labor by increasing labor supply through immigration, especially of immigrants who can be treated as serfs. Restoring balance in this power struggle involves limiting immigration to sustainable levels, enforcing workplace and wage laws for all US workers, mandating higher minimum wages, and again, encouraging other countries to raise their working standards through our trade deals with them. Oh, and it also means not destroying the rural economy of Mexico by dumping our subsidized corn on them.