This edition of Labor's Corner has been underwritten by the United Steelworkers of America.

The cente for the Study of Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the Bridge Structural and Ornamental.

Ironworkers Union Local three.

Does manufacturing matter in America?

Are we losing our middle class standard of living?

Stay with us and Labor's Corner will explore the way these issues are shaping the future of our country.

[Music Plays] This is Labor's Corner, a weekly forum for discussing issues faced by today's working people and their unions.

Presented by WQEX in conjunction with the Philip Murray Institute of Labor Studies at Community College of Allegheny Count and the University of Pittsburgh Labor Archives, Labor's Corner is a Pittsburgh first dedicated to presenting the workers point of view.

Hello, I'm Chuck Martoni.

Welcome to Labor's Corner.

Tonight we will be viewing a videotape produced by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

It's called Losing Ground America's Shrinking Middle Class.

Let's watch.

[Music Plays] [Singing] (♪) God Bless America My home!

Sweet!

Home!

(♪♪) What do we want?

Justice!

We earned it!

We earned it!

We sweat for it!

We sweat for it!

What do we want?

Justice!

The jobs are disappearing in massive numbers.

There are no other jobs available with the kinds of skills that people have.

And so people are now having to learn how to survive.

I got a boy in the service and graduate and I got another one, I graduated.

He's married.

You got a kid?

I've got two living at home, 16 or 17.

They can't find jobs anywhere.

If I go out and take a job flipping hamburgers or whatever you want to call, I'm taking the job away from him.

As long as our manufacturing base is is eroding, our middle class is sure to erode because manufacturing in the past had provided the latter, the latter on which low wage workers could aspire to middle class life without your magic manufacturing base.

You don't have that ladder.

And it really made me feel right down because, you know, after 19 years of working on one job, you know, I just felt like I was there for the first time in our lifetime.

People know that their children will not be doing quite as well as they're doing.

We had over 30.5 acres of land and it was our dream, the American dream, and we had to give it up.

We live in an age of uncertainty.

Computers, robots and a flood of imports have radically altere the American economy and changed the face of American society more and more.

We are a nation of rich and poor.

Since 1973, the real weekly pay of American workers has dropped nearly 15% in the last eight years.

Over 2 million families have fallen out of the middle class.

Nowhere is the change more dramatic than in basic industry, as low paying service jobs replace high paying manufacturing work.

Families and communities struggle in a world with new ground rules, a world that seems to have no place for America's dreams.

I worked at this plant for over 30 years.

Right behind me is the old blast furnace.

To the right over here is U.S.

steel republic steel.

This is the center of 25 miles of steel mills that are no longer in existence in producing 3300 people worked in this sheet and tube complex here.

I was here the last day that they tapped the heat out of this furnace.

It's a really a sad day.

People's lives were invested here and the whole community had an investment here.

But sheet and tube and like and J and L decided to pull out.

And the whole valley is now as depressed as this building is here.

I worked at Eastern Stainless Steel and I was a crane operator for seven years.

To give you an idea of the situation.

There are approximately 2 to 300 people working now.

There used to be close to 2000.

I'd like to get into something semiprofessional.

I've tried stockbroker trainee positions.

I have a bachelor's degree in education, but I really wouldn't have to go back to teaching because I need another year of school to upgrade my education.

I've got a family now that I need to think about, and I can't afford to spend a year in school In Western Pennsylvania, the story is much the same.

We talked with laid of industrial workers in Aliquippa.

My youngest one, who happens to be very popular in school, is has been very worried and very concerned that, you know, she's going to lose her popularity.

And it's not just that, but she's very active in community activities and with the school net.

But she still embarrassed at times because I can't afford to do the things that I used to do.

I live by odd jobs and whatever word of mouth, stuff like that.

The wife has to take a job which she never had to.

And this is really hurting the family.

We have no money to, you know, do things we used to do together as a family, take vacations, just her and I to step out for a dinner and meal somewhere here and there, go to a movie.

It just hurts very bad.

The $400 a month mortgage payment was looking like it would couldn't be met.

So I voluntarily auction my house off and I was planning on moving out of the area to Florida to look for work.

And I have relatives down there, and it really affected my daughters and my son because we had over 30.5 acres of land.

And it was our dream, the American dream, and we had to give it up.

You know, at one time, our youth had somethin to look forward to in Aliquippa.

They had a meal to go into.

They had a choice of their families being able to be able to put them through college.

Now our kids have no future.

Retired workers have not been immune.

As companies cut back, many employees retired early with the promise of a secure future, only to find their pensions in jeopardy.

Earlier this year, LTV steel retirees demonstrated in Washington after filing for bankruptcy.

The company refused to pay $400 a month pension supplement.

What do we want?

Justice!

We earned it!

We earned it!

We sweat for it!

We sweat for it!

What do we want?

Justice!

We earned it!

We earned it!

LTV had no right to take away or attempt to take away, as they did in July.

Your health benefits.

You don't pull the IV out of somebody who's in the midst of an operation on the operating table.

Right, right.

Second, they had no right to take away your pension.

You do not cut people's lifelines when they're about to drown.

Statistics show that every 1% rise in unemployment produces these results.

But workers and their families aren't the only ones struggling with deindustrialization.

Communities see their tax base wither as incomes fall and federal programs are cut back.

Every dollar lost in taxes paid by the LTV Corporation had to be picked up somewhere.

As the taxes rose, the property burden was taken from the the industry and placed on the homeowners.

And that created a lot of problems for folks who became unemployed or underemployed.

The federal revenue sharing had been decreased over the past six years.

I believe we originally received somewher in the neighborhood of $400,000.

This last year of the payments, we were receiving $225,000.

That's been reduced to zero.

We had as high as 15,000 people employed right here at this particular steel plant.

And today we have approximately 800 people employed.

What has happened?

Where are the people?

Take a walk through downtown Aliquippa, where we're located, and you see very few businesses that are still open.

Most of them have been closed shut because there's no work or there's no work.

There is no money.

Well, our forces have been cut approximately half from 33 to 17 men and from seven vehicles.

We went down to three vehicles.

Crime has increased in burglaries.

We've had more thefts like auto accessories.

And we've had.

Shoplifting has increased.

Plus, domestic problems have also increased.

Our street Department of road department was reduced from approximately 60 employees down to six.

Our full time paid for our department was reduced from 20 firefighters down to the present complement of seven.

Who wants to put their business into a place where the products of the school, the train are not trained workers?

Who wants to put their business into a place where, because there's not enough police, because the housing is run down, there's crime.

Who wants to put their business into a place where there's no public facilities, where there are no parks, where the roads aren't very good, where you when you go down to the municipal courthouse, you've got to stand in line all the time, because there aren't enough employees to take care of your basic needs, like getting a license plate or something like that.

So the whole community declines, and then the private sector from the outside looks at this and says, we don't want to move there.

Are these the problems of a few aging industries and the communities that depend on them, or are we headed for what one economist has called slow 1929?

A new think tank, the Economic Policy Institute, grappled with these issues at a recent conference.

So the good news is that America is creating lots of jobs.

But the question is, what is the nature of those jobs?

What wages do they pay?

What kinds of fringe benefits?

But when we look at the more recent period, the period marked, of course, by growing trade deficits, growing budget deficits and continued losses of employment in the manufacturing sector, we found that three out of five of the net new jobs created since 79, 58%, to be exact, paid under this $7,000 standard.

Moreover, the absolute number of jobs that pay $28,000 or more fell by about 400,000.

These results are not only for young people or for minorities, or for women.

Indeed, perhaps the most staggering finding is that it is precisely the most advantaged group in America white men who have seen the largest relative decline in high wage jobs and the largest growth in low wage jobs.

In Youngstown, Ohio, the Giant Eagle supermarket chain wants new workers to start at $3.50 an hour and peak at $5.

Local 880 of the United Food and Commercial Workers is resisting the move.

When I started, you could begin at minimum wage and work your way up to eight $9 an hour.

No one's going to get rich at 8 or $9 an hour.

But you ca you can maintain some some piece of the American dream at that rate.

And that's what we're looking for, to enable our peopl to to achieve that in this town.

That was a very strong labor town.

We had fights for the eight, nine, $10 wage in the most recent history.

But in the last 2 or 3 years, we've had fights for basically the four and the $5 job.

In 1986, the US trade deficit hit a record $170 billion.

Many see mounting deficits as an economic time bomb.

No country can forever run a trade deficit because to run a trade deficit forever, you have to borrow an infinite, infinite amount of money.

It takes a million people in American manufacturing to produce $42 billion worth of goods and services.

So a trade deficit of $170 billion means that there are 4 million people not working in American manufacturing who would be working there if we balanced our balance of payments.

The American trade deficit is the economics as a black hole is to astronomy.

It's going to completely change the face of America and to some extent, the face of the world.

In Pennsylvania, former steelworker Mike stout blames systematic disinvestment here by US companies for the trade deficit.

He cites a shift to low wage countrie where labor peace is guaranteed.

In 1985, U.S.

steel announced that they had formed a joint venture with Pohang Iron and Steel in South Korea.

They shut dow the rest of the homestead works.

They shut down the Geneva Works through a total of 5000 people out of work, and formed a joint venture with Pohang Iron and Steel, and at the same time, the very month that US steel formed this joint venture with South Korea, the South Korean government with a US tax dollars, billions of U.S.

tax dollars in foreign aid, did a sweep and arrested every major union official in the country, outlawed unions in the steel industry, and blackballed over 100 union officials in the steel industry in South Korea.

The Americans were living in Mexico, working with the Mexican government.

Yes.

Have, in fact sent out 120,000 invitations to teach American business people how to compete, how to send their products component parts to Mexico, where young women ages 16 through 19 are working in making dora plants, making dora in Spanish meaning to put together, to put these component parts together.

These young people were earning $60 a month, including their benefits.

Was mind boggling to believe that 141 Pennsylvania corporations are not taking advantage of this.

Now we know what has happened to the jobs in America.

In today's world, nobody regulates international multinational corporations.

In fact, it's a myt that competition internationally is between American companies and, say, Japanese companies.

American companies are Japanese companies.

IBM is the major exporter of computers from Japan.

Every major automobile company in the United States gets engines, transmissions and transaxle from Japan.

American and Japanese companies are like that.

What's being done now to help displaced workers adjust to the new international economy?

We spoke with Alex Garcia, director of a job placement center in western Pennsylvania.

We've taken through approximately 300 employees out of a around a thousand employees were affected at the time of the plant shutdown.

The center will be still be here until the end of this year.

We were scheduled to shut down in in June, but just got a six month extension by the state.

We're hoping that into in the time between now and December that something else could, could turn up and the center could continue to be here.

But that's not a definite.

In Baltimore, joblessness is helping stretch social services to the limit.

The recently new unemployed, we have seen a doubling in our caseload in some instances maybe a tripling.

We take in maybe 30,000 applications for food stamps a month and our income maintenance staff has been really more overwork than it has been in the past.

Our caseloads in social services and child welfare services in particular, has even tripled.

In southwestern Pennsylvania, the unemployed have organized to help themselves.

Now the jobs are disappearing in massive numbers.

There are no other jobs available with the kinds of skills that people have.

And so people are now having to learn how to survive.

And they are now the workers or the unemployed people that they used to scoff at the welfare people, and they are not prepared to go and get food stamps.

They don't know how to g get help on their utility bills.

And so we have, first of all, tried to provide the information and referrals for them to get to that help by having unemployed workers come here and join our committee, sit and answer their phone calls, answer them when they come in, get them started in helping themselves, and then to provide the backup.

In nearby homestead, the Rainbow Kitchen provides food, clothing, and counseling to a growing number of people.

Co-Director Dolores Patrick sees it only as a stopgap.

I see private charities as a temporary relief for these people.

We try to deal with their problems, but the main problem is that there's no employment.

We could have full employment in this area.

We would be glad, glad to go out of business.

With private resources strapped, many see a key role for government if America is to continue to prosper.

In 1986, America's Catholi bishops issued a pastoral letter calling for new social and economic policies.

This year, Maryland's bishops issued a special report on their state.

We spoke with Bishop Francis Murphy.

We are not canonizing every government program in the past.

At the same time, people tend to say that because it was a government program, it didn't have any benefit.

And and our research would verify the fact that many government programs in the 60s and 70s succeeded and moving people out of poverty.

Basically, the bishops are saying, let's look at what works.

Let's be honest and say what doesn't work.

But certainly there's no way that we can avoid having government intervention, government cooperation in dealing with the very serious economic problem.

The problem is not that th the economy of the United States is in great shape, and we just have a few people who need to be given, given some welfare.

We can't afford poverty anymore in America.

We can't afford to have large numbers of people who are unemployed, standing on street corners, kids standing on street corners with nothing to do.

Now that is a waste of resources.

We can't afford that anymore because we are in a real competitive struggle with nations like Japan, for example, which have full employment with nations like Sweden, which have full employment.

They don't have their people standing on the street corner doing nothing.

So I'm talking about a public sector investment program for the for the 1980s and the 1990s.

If you look around the world at our major competitors, the West Germans and the Japanese, both of those countries are putting a larger proportion of their economy into the public sector than we are.

It's going to take a federal job, jobs creating policy that's going to take the national government funding it, and it's going to take a tremendous will of Congress and the president that's sympathetic to that to make it happen.

We hope that our strategy of self-hel organizing for unemployed people can contribute to the forces going to be needed for that, but it's probably going to be the next economic downturn in a national recognition that unemployment is a big problem before that's going to be possible.

Economists see stepped up training as a key to America's staying competitive.

Where we really fall down is we have no skill training program for the non-college bound.

That group of people that does not plan to go to college, which is in fact, or graduate from college, which is in fact, even today, about 70% of the population, we have no skill training system for that group.

I can tell you how they do it in Germany.

I can tell you how they can do it in Japan, but I think I can honestly say if I had a son or daughter who wanted to be a skilled machinist, I couldn't tell them how to do it.

There is no system in the United States for producing those kind of people.

The basic challenge for us is to build up the skills and competencies of the American workforce.

In today's world, every factor of production except one is absolutely mobile internationally.

The new, most modern, up to date machinery, capital, ideas, research and development the only factor of production that is immobile and upon which our standard of living depends is our workers, their skills and competencies.

That has to be our goal.

And if you've got a government that's putting money back into its people investing in skills and as I say, clean air and clean water and adequate sewers and roads, you can't get your goods to market unless you have good roads and you can look around you.

You don't have to be an economist.

Look around you in the country and you see our roles are full of potholes because we're not making those kinds of investments.

So with a government that's clear and competent, then that is something that leads to economic growth, that nurtures economic growth.

And it's always been that way in America.

There has to be a self-sufficiency in the United States.

We're big enough to be self-sufficient, but are we smart enough?

And we're not putting our minds into manufacturing so much that brains are fooling aroun with maybe some inventions, ways of better automation, and ways of making money in the market?

I mean, fooling around instead of making.

We're not making things.

Some are exploring new ways to revive sagging industries in Pennsylvania.

The state created the Steel Valley Authority in 1986, giving it the power to bu plants that could be profitable.

Attorney Jay Hornack, a key figure in establishing th authority, explains its purpose.

Even if a community grou formed a corporation or employee cooperative of some sort, which had sufficient backing and could prove that there were markets available which could keep a facility operating at a profit, even though it wasn't as high as a profit as U.S.

steel might want.

There was no way that you could require a U.S.

steel under the law to turn that plan over.

And it was out of Youngstown.

And some of the thoughts that people had in Pittsburgh in the early 80s, that there was a legal mechanism, namely, the power of eminent domain, which could, in essence, force a sale of a profitable operation from a U.S.

steel or a gel to a governmental body that had that power of eminent domain.

And that body, in turn, would either operate the facility itself or turn it then over to a third party.

In Youngstown, Pat Rosenthal of Northeast Ohio Legal Services is promoting worker ownership.

She talks about successful models in this country.

Nearly half of the plywood industry has been produced through work around cooperatives in the northwest.

Another model that is really an international model is a system in Spain, in the Mondrian region, where there are more than 100 workaround cooperatives.

And that's the model that many of the cooperatives that are being supported in this country are founded on.

A lot of people are beginning to recognize that at the plant level that unless you get worker participation in the decisions of the companies, you're not likely to get a good output.

You know, I like to get quality and you're not likely to get flexibility, and therefore we're losing our competitiveness.

That's the reason that many American companies are emulating the Japanese quality control circles and quality of work life programs.

What is not well understood is that those quality of work life programs are not likely to really be very effective, unless those workers have an independent source of power.

Public private initiatives a massive commitment to retraining a more active and effective government.

Whatever approaches we take.

They can't come too soon.

Middle class America depends largely on education and on training, and also on all kinds of infrastructure investments.

And I hate that word infrastructure, but we're talking about highways and bridges.

We're talking about health.

We're talking about the countless ways in which the federal government in the past has come to the aid of developing a strong and effective manufacturing middle class in America.

As long as our manufacturing base is is eroding, our middle class is sure to erode because manufacturing in the past had provided the latter, the latter on which low wage workers could aspire to middle class life without your magic manufacturing base.

You don't have that ladder.

Without the latter, you lose the middle class.

We need to get those good jobs back.

That means we need a national program to become more competitive, to deal with the unfair trade practices that go along around the world where we cannot sell our good to foreign countries, but they get to sell their goods here, and we need to upgrade our labor force.

One of the things that's going on is that our people are not adequately trained for the new kinds of jobs that are developing the new kinds of computerized, automated jobs in telecommunications, etc.

in order to train people, we need to put money into the into the training programs.

We need to make those training programs work.

That's the basic way you increase the productivity of the populatio and you increase family incomes.

Thank you for joining me tonight.

The tape we just viewed was very thought provoking.

It illustrate the serious nature of the crisis facing many of our communities.

The only way that we can begin to solve the problem raised by the program you saw tonight is for the entire community, organized labor, business and all levels of government to work together to put America back to work.

Join us next week for The Myth, The money, and the many, an animated film by Fred, right?

The United Electrical Workers, renowned labor cartoonist.

See you then.

[Music Plays] Solidarity Forever!

Solidarity Forever!

Solidarity Forever!

The union makes us strong!

What do we want?

Jobs with Justice!

What do we want?

Jobs with Justice!

What do we want?

Jobs with Justice!

Who needs unions?

The workers, the workers!

Who needs benefits?

The workers, the workers!

Who needs health care?

The workers, the workers!

What do we want?

Jobs with Justice!

Who built America?

The workers, the workers!

What do we want?

Jobs with Justice!

What do we want?

Justice!

Justice!

Get the working man together.

Get them together in the organization.

It's the only way to operate.

It's the only way we got to fight and chance.

This edition of Labor's Corner has been underwritten by the Bridge Structural and Ornamental Ironworkers Union local number three, the center for the Study of Labor Relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the United Steelworkers of America.