SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
labor party
When Will Public and Private Sector Workers Unite Against Mass Layoffs by the Billionaires?
Billionaires eat the jobs of working people for breakfast so there's no real point in distinguishing between the "good" and the "bad" ones. Until workers of all kinds are united against our common enemy, there is little hope for the kind of society the working class envisions—and deserves.
Mar 05, 2025
The destruction of jobs, both public and private, creates billionaires. But most working people don’t know that, and the Democratic Party is afraid to say it.
Why? Because billionaires who have killed jobs of all kinds, dominate both political parties with their ill-gotten gains. Money buys silence.
The power of billionaires is rising as their numbers increase. In 1990, there were 66 billionaires in the United States. In 2023 there were 748. And in the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth in 2024 increased by $l.4 trillion, that’s $3.9 billion a day.
How did that happen?
It’s hard to wrap your mind around how much a billion dollars is. If you earned $1,000 per hour, it would take you 68.5 years to reach $1 billion, and at that point you’d have as much money as one thousand millionaires. That’s a lot of money, more than we can imagine, certainly more than any human being needs, ever.
To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.
But they earned it, right? Isn’t earning billions of dollars a just reward for unparalleled entrepreneurial success? And isn’t criticizing that success sour grapes, the same as criticizing what makes our country so prosperous, free, and strong?
Maybe, until you look under the hood.
To become a billionaire, you have to be willing to kill jobs with reckless abandon. It is one of the most effective ways to extract money from working people.
The carnage started with the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 1970s, widened during the Reagan years, and was then adopted as the mantra of the Clinton administration during the 1990s.
The deregulation of Wall Street allowed companies to buy each other up with few constraints, often using borrowed money and putting the debt on the books of the acquired company. Layoffs are then used to pay off that debt.
Deregulation also led to the legalization of stock buybacks, which allowed companies to repurchase huge amounts of their own shares and drive the share price up. Wall Street investors and CEOs, who were increasingly paid with stock incentives, became fabulously rich as the price of their shares rose, though their company was no more profitable. Layoffs are then used to finance those buybacks.
Before deregulation, corporate leaders were ashamed if they had to lay off workers. They saw that as a sign of their own failure as managers. CEOs then thought themselves to be in the service of their employees, their communities, and their shareholders.
But free-market ideologues in the 1970s waged a successful campaign to favor shareholder supremacy above all—jobs, workers and communities be damned! (Please see Wall Street’s War on Workers, for the details)
Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.
That new cutthroat Wall Street mindset has led to approximately 18 million involuntary layoffs per year, year after year, since the 1990s.
But wait, you probably thought most job loss was caused by new technologies, like those that caused the disappearance of elevator operators and horse and buggy drivers?
Nope. Technological change, even AI, changes overall job composition slowly, over many years, even decades. Newness is expensive, so changes are adopted incrementally as costs come down.
But Wall Street-driven job destruction happens in a flash. All it takes is a stock buyback, a merger, or a private equity purchase, and jobs will be cut overnight to pay for the deals.
Public Employees Are Now Sitting Ducks
When labor unions represented more than 30 percent of private sector workers, from WWII to the 1960s, their wages and benefits improved year by year. So did the standard of living of public sector workers.
In New Jersey, for example, 40 years ago there were 60,000 high-paid auto workers with good pension plans. Public sector workers used them as a yardstick to increase their own compensation, as well. But today, those autoworker jobs are gone, which has put downward pressure on the wages and benefits of public sector workers.
Overall, in 1980, more than 50 percent of all private sector workers had pensions. Today, it’s only 11 percent. Meanwhile, 75 percent of state and local government employees, and nearly all federal workers, continue to have access to such plans. That’s why they are sitting ducks.
Divisive politicians can fire away by saying, “Why should private sector workers like you pay taxes to support public sector worker’s benefits that you don’t even have!”
There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.
That’s one reason why Trump and Musk have been getting away with trashing federal employees, with very little blowback from working people in the private sector, at least so far.
But there’s more.
Musk and his fellow billionaires need to cut federal government jobs so they can continue to stuff themselves at the federal trough. They want job cuts to pay for the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that go to the largest US corporations via tax breaks, subsidies, and fat federal contracts. Last year alone, Fortune reports that Musk received $6.3 billion in federal and local taxpayer funding, and during the past four years the total was nearly $25 billion.
Privatization of public sector jobs also is a bonanza for wealthy investors. Just imagine the billions to be made by turning over the postal service to the private sector.
There’s no way around it. The mass slaughter of jobs, whether public or private, grows billionaires.
“Save Our Jobs from Billionaire Greed.”
Imagine if federal worker unions and Democratic Party officials showed up at the plant gate of a company that was about to close its doors to finance hefty stock buybacks for its billionaire owners. A show of support for their fellow layoff victims and a unity message aimed at stopping billionaire job destruction would be simple to craft and easy to share. It would be news.
Why aren’t the Democrats doing this?
Because they don’t want to upset their billionaire donors by interfering with Wall Street’s pillage of working people. As Ken Martin, the new chair of the Democratic Party put it recently, “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with the Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money…”
If the Democrats dared to look under the hood, they would find that every one of those “good billionaires” is making money from job cuts that boost the value of her or his portfolio.
I was born and raised as a working-class Democrat, but I know that the slaughter of public and private sector jobs won’t stop until there’s a new party that truly represents the interests of working people.
Only then can we fight back against the billionaires and their two-party poodles so willing to curl up in their laps.
Keep ReadingShow Less
It's Almost 2024. Where’s the Party of the Working Class?
Is it possible to build a political party that truly speaks to the needs of working people in an era of runaway inequality and incessant mass layoffs?
Dec 27, 2023
A quarter century ago, the late labor leader Tony Mazzocchi issued a dire warning. Unless a labor party was created, working people would abandon the Democrats and flock towards authoritarians who would promise job protections and economic stability. Mazzocchi found enormous resonance among workers when he declared, “The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own.”
That rings even more true today for many working-class people. But is it possible to build a political party that truly speaks to the needs of working people in an era of runaway inequality and incessant mass layoffs?
Because neither Mazzocchi nor other labor leaders wanted to create a spoiler party that would siphon off Democratic votes and elect Republicans, the idea never found a way to gain significant traction. But the opportunity to create a new party would be more likely if one of the two major parties imploded, which might be happening right now to the Republican Party as it wallows in the fantasy world of Trump’s election lies and conspiracies.
Liz Cheney, the former number-three ranking Republican leader in the House of Representatives and the daughter of George W. Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney, has impeccable conservative bona fides. But she no longer has a home in a party dominated by Trump acolytes. After voting to impeach President Trump and having co-chaired the January 6th congressional investigation, she lost her Wyoming seat in the House to a MAGA Republican.
Having worked all my adult life in support of labor, it saddens me even to speculate about a battle for the allegiance of the working class between the corporate Democrats and the right-wing Republicans.
Cheney is currently considering a third-party presidential run which, in effect, would create a second Republican Party. Because she sees Trump as a clear and present danger to democracy, she wants to defeat him by denying him ‘moderate’ Republican votes. (These days the definition of a ‘moderate’ seems to be anyone who accepts that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.)
She is aware that her presidential run could launch a rival Republican party, but said, “I don’t know if our party can be saved. We may need to build a new party.” And so, it is conceivable we could soon have three major parties—the Democrats, the Trump Republicans, and the Cheney Republicans.
Which of these is the party of the working class?
Not the Cheney Republicans. Her party would draw the corporate never-Trumpers who also are fiscal conservatives, seeking to balance the federal budget and trim social welfare programs. These corporate Republicans would have little use for labor unions and labor law protections. They would stand in opposition to raising the minimum wage and would oppose facilitating union organizing. They would also likely advocate for an increase in the Social Security retirement age, which harms many in the working class who tend to die younger than higher-income people. As a result, it’s highly doubtful that Cheney and her backers would be able to attract much working-class support or that of any labor unions.
The Democrats might be feeling cocky from a Republican Party implosion. That should make it much easier for Democrats to retain working-class support. Then again, there is the risk that the Democrats might move even closer to Wall Street as the Cheney party becomes a serious competitor for the backing of wealthy financiers who are socially liberal and alienated by MAGA. Unlike the Democrats, Cheney wouldn’t have to straddle between supporting policies that enrich the well-to-do while also claiming to support the working-class.
Starting with Bill Clinton, the competition for Wall Street cash pulled the Democrats further away from the working class, who the Dems thought had no place else to go. It could happen again.
Moving even closer to Wall Street could compound the difficulties that the Democrats already have. Not only are white working-class voters moving away from the Democrats, but so are Black and Hispanic voters. Biden’s support among non-white voters has fallen from the 70 percent he received in 2020 against Trump, to 53 percent today. And the decline has been dramatic among non-white voters with no college education and whose incomes are less than $50,000 per year. Many of those voters are unlikely to rush toward the Trump or Cheney Republicans, but they might instead sit out the election, which would be enormously harmful to the Democrats.
This creates an opportunity for the Trump Republicans to draw working-class voters by focusing on job security. But the Republicans seem fixated on culture wars and therefore run the risk of alienating working-class people of all shades and ethnicities who have become more liberal since 2010 on key social issues, including immigration. The research done for my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, strongly suggests that the number one working-class issue is job security, not critical race theory, not gendered bathrooms, or Mickey Mouse. Taking on corporate power has resonance, and for good reason. These workers have suffered through nearly 30 million mass layoffs since 1996.
Right-wing Republicans have made a handful of selective anti-corporate gestures. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Oh.) is going after Silicon Valley corporations over privacy issues and wants to break them up. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is pushing legislation to help shareholders change corporate woke policies. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) even introduced a bill to get corporate money out of politics. Also, there are Republican attacks against corporations over diversity policies. There are attacks against corporate climate change-oriented investment policies, and even attacks against Disney for opposing legislation that would be harmful to the LGBTQ+ communities in Florida. But if you have had the stomach to listen to the Republican presidential debates you have heard the candidates competing to flash their anti-labor credentials, too.
It’s unlikely that the current flock of Trump Republicans will accelerate working-class support. But that could change in a hurry if they dared to attack corporate mass layoffs, the way Trump did by successfully pressuring the Carrier Corporation to refrain from moving a facility from Indiana to Mexico in 2017.
A much better outcome for the working class and the country would be for the Democratic Party to attack wasteful mass layoffs caused by stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts. When GM recently announced a $10 billion stock buyback designed to please Wall Street, the Democrats were silent. They missed an opportunity to hold the company to account for enriching Wall Street instead of investing more in clean car research and development. Rather than compete with Tesla, the top officers and Wall Street hedge funds pocketed the money. Stock buybacks before 1982 were considered stock price manipulation. The Democrats should call for their elimination.
Allow me to walk out on a limb and make an early projection: The party with the nerve to take on Wall Street and fight against each and every mass layoff is likely to become the party of working people.
Having worked all my adult life in support of labor, it saddens me even to speculate about a battle for the allegiance of the working class between the corporate Democrats and the right-wing Republicans. It just shows how far the Democrats have drifted away from the real needs of working people.
And sadly, Tony Mazzocchi’s statement may soon need amending: “The bosses have three parties: we need one of our own.”Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular