“At Will” Employment Laws Unproductive, Barbaric

You’ve seen how TV covers the immediate aftermath of a disaster. A tornado or earthquake or whatever has just ripped through a community. Rubble and bodies lie scattered. Asked to comment, stunned survivors weep and confirm the obvious—they’ve lost everything.

Then the reporter’s wrap-up: “Now, the rebuilding begins. Back to you, Bob.”

The impulse to clean up and move on after taking a hit is universal. But the underlying assumption—that everything will eventually be OK again—is uniquely American. Taking office four months into the economic collapse, President Obama played to our belief that gumption cures everything, saying in his inaugural address: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

They don’t roll that way in Yugoslavia, where Serbs still seethe over a battle fought in 1389. Nor in the Middle East, where displaced Palestinians hold on to deeds and house keys for homes they lost 60 years ago. People nurse resentments. They long for revenge.

Here in the United States, the overall unemployment rate is over 20 percent and rising. Corporations collected trillions of dollars in government bailouts, while ordinary workers got nothing. Millions of people are losing their homes to foreclosure, yet the president has yet to lift a finger to help them. Meanwhile, companies like Goldman Sachs are paying their officers obscene bonuses. How come there’s no social unrest? Where’s the outrage?

As the little girl in the “Addams Family” movie said: “Wait.” In the meantime, Americans’ tolerance for getting fired and becoming homeless owes everything to that trope: “Now, the rebuilding begins.”

Lost your job? Hit Monster.com and cut-and-paste your résumé until your index finger turns sore. Lost your house to foreclosure? Your brother-in-law’s couch will see you through. And those CEOs who profited from your misery? Admit it—you’re jealous. You’d do the same if you were in their position.

But there’s a rub. A big rub. After a layoff, the rebuilding doesn’t begin.

“On average, most workers do not recover their old annual earnings” after being laid off, Till von Wachter, a Columbia University economist, tells <span style=”font-style:italic;”>The New York Times</span>.

Wachter studied the income histories of workers who lost their jobs a quarter-century ago, during the Reagan recession of 1981-1985. The results were startling. “Even 15 to 20 years later, most on average had not returned to their old wage levels,” he found.

The former layoff victims now earn 15 to 20 percent less than comparable workers who had not gotten canned. “One of the main reasons for the [lower pay], according to economists, is that workers who endure a layoff are more likely to be laid off again,” reports the <span style=”font-style:italic;”>Times</span>.

“What tends to happen is the worker has to start over with a new employer, sometimes in a new industry,” explains UC Davis economics professor Ann Huff Stevens. “You’re at the bottom of the totem pole again.”

Many of the people Wachter studied “had been forced to drastically change their lifestyles to cope with lower incomes. Several have struggled with long bouts of unemployment. Some were laid off several times. Many have been forced to lean heavily on spouses’ incomes.”

Layoff victims followed the rules. But it didn’t do any good. During the 1980s and 1990s the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the middle class withered away. Now, among industrialized nations, only Russia has a smaller middle class and higher poverty rate than the United States.

Maybe the rest of the world has it right. If Americans began holding grudges against the corporate chiefs and politicians who exploit their labor and rip them off, they wouldn’t have to silently absorb losing their jobs so some rich executive can give himself another raise.

There is a better way: ban layoffs.

Outlawing layoffs would mean getting rid of the brutal concept of “at will” employment. In the U.S., employers can hire and fire you whenever they feel like it. There are limited exceptions. It’s illegal to fire you because of your race or because you refused a sexual advance, for example. But you have to hire a lawyer and go to court to enforce that law. In general, employers hold all the cards.

In France, on the other hand, almost every worker receives a written employment contract. Almost all French employment contracts are for an indefinite term. You can keep your job as long as <span style=”font-style:italic;”>you</span>-—not your boss—feel like it.

Firing an employee in France is hard. “Dismissals are subject to stringent, and often bureaucratic, procedural statutory constraints,” says the Parisian law firm Triplet & Associés. “Redundancies, or layoffs on economic grounds, are subject to separate and complex procedural and substantive constraints particularly in the case of multiple dismissals…It is extremely easy and at virtually no cost for an employee to start litigation against his (ex) employer before separate Labor Courts…It is rare that the plaintiff be other than an employee and just as rare that claims be dismissed with no award whatsoever being made against the employer.”

French workers don’t have to dig out of nearly as many layoffs. When they do, they’re entitled to generous severance packages.

Don’t these pro-worker protections allow slackers to keep their jobs? Don’t they hurt the economy? Nope. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, hourly productivity is higher in France than in the United States.

It’s time to eliminate the barbaric wage slavery of “at will” employment. Only then can the rebuilding—of the American middle class—truly begin.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

After Professor Gates, Why Pretend?

The current national conversation about race and the police reminded me about an incident that occurred when I was in Uzbekistan. As I walked into an apartment complex for an appointment I noticed the decomposing body of a man lying on the side of the road.

“How long as he been there?” I asked my host.

“Three, maybe four days,” he said.

“What happened to him?”

“Shot, maybe,” he shrugged. “Or maybe hit by a car. Something.”

I didn’t bother to ask why no one had called the police. I knew. Calling the Uzbek militsia amounts to a request to be beaten, robbed or worse. So desperate to avoid interaction with the police was another man I met that, when his mother died of old age at their home in Tashkent, he drove her body to the outskirts of town and deposited her in a field.

With the exception of New Orleans after Katrina, it’s not that bad here in the United States. Consider Professor Henry Louis Gates: he shouldn’t have been arrested by that Cambridge, Massachusetts police officer, but he came out of the experience physically unscathed.

Nevertheless, the Gates incident has illuminated some basic, strange assumptions about our society. Cops think they have a constitutional right to be treated deferentially. And black people think cops are nice to white people.

Yeah, well, take it from a white guy: we don’t like cops either.

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. references “the African immigrant killed while reaching for his wallet, the Maryland man beaten senseless as he lay in bed, the Miami man beaten to death for speeding, the dozens of men jailed on manufactured evidence in Los Angeles and manufactured police testimony in Tulia, Texas, the man sodomized with a broomstick in New York. Are we supposed to believe it coincidence that the men this happens to always happen to be black?”

Of course not. Blacks are 30 to 50 percent more likely to be arrested than whites for the same crime. Their prison sentences are longer. In the notorious “driving while black” New Jersey trooper case, African-Americans made up 70 percent of those randomly pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike—but fewer than 17 percent of motorists. Blacks are more likely to be stopped, frisked, arrested, beaten and murdered by the police than members of all other ethnic groups. American racism against blacks remains systematic, pervasive, and murderous. When there’s a policeman in the picture, it’s best to be white.

Still, whites and blacks have more in common than they think when it comes to their feelings about the fuzz. When those flashing lights appear in the rearview mirror, even the biggest right-winger’s day is ruined.

No one should be less scared of cops than me. I’m white, clean-cut, middle-aged, invariably polite: “Hello, sir. Is there a problem, officer?” Yet I can’t point to a single positive experience I’ve ever had with a cop. Neutral ones, sure—basic, cold, bureaucratic interactions. But no great ones.

And lots and lots of negative ones.

Where to begin?

I’ll never forget the New York traffic cop who stepped off the curb in front of my car on Madison Avenue and ordered me to turn right. He wrote me up for illegal right turn. “But you told me to,” I protested. “Wrong place, wrong time,” he smirked. $165 plus three points on my license. I appealed. The cop lied under oath. The court believed him.

Or the Nevada highway patrolman who pulled me over. I was doing 80 in a 70. He wrote me up at 100 mph. My brother-in-law, never the suck-up, confirmed I was going 80. I was so furious—the fine would have been $400—that I spent double that to fly back and challenge the ticket in court. I won.

When my 20-year-old self forgot to turn on my headlights as we pulled out of a parking lot while on a road trip with my druggie roommate, a Massachusetts cop pulled us over. I couldn’t begrudge him probable cause; pot smoke billowed out the window, “Cheech and Chong”-style, when I opened it. Still, what came next was unforgivable: he handcuffed my arms so tight that the metal cut to the wrist bone. (The scar lasted ten years.) When we got out of the town lock-up the next morning, $400 was missing from my wallet. (A judge, examining my wrist a few months later, dropped the charges. My $400, of course, was gone forever.)

An LAPD cop—it bears mentioning that he was black—arrested me for jaywalking on Melrose Avenue. I wasn’t. I didn’t resist, but he roughed me up. Upon releasing me, he chucked my wallet into the sewer, laughed and zoomed off on his motorcycle. I filed a complaint, which the LAPD ignored.

And so on.

I admit it: I don’t like cops. I like the idea of cops. The specific people who actually are cops are the problem. My theory is that cops should be drafted, not recruited. After all, the kind of person who would want to become a police officer is precisely the kind of person who should not be allowed to work as one. But I didn’t start out harboring this prejudice. It resulted from dozens of unpleasant interactions with law enforcement.

Race has long been a classic predictor of attitudes toward the police. But high-profile cases of police brutality, coupled with over-the-top security measures taken since 9/11 that targeted whites as well as blacks, have helped bring the races together in their contempt for the police. In 1969, the Harris poll found that only 19 percent of whites thought cops discriminated against African-Americans. Now 54 percent of whites think so.

Don’t worry, Professor Gates. We don’t care what you said about the cop’s mama. A lot of white guys see this thing your way.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL