[P2P-F] AFL-CIO "What Do I Think?"

Thu Jun 20 20:29:12 CEST 2013

I received a bulk email today from the AFL-CIO advertising their online
discussion site in preparation for a September AFL-CIO convention. The
moderator for today's discussion was former Labor Secretary Robert Reich
and the theme question was: "The rich keep getting a bigger share of the
economic pie while everyone else’s share keeps shrinking. What should be
done to reverse this trend?"

http://www.aflcio.org/About/Exec-Council/Conventions/2013/Discussion-Page#question7

My suggestion was "Stop growing "the pie." Restore the commons instead." I
added a reply linking to my elaboration of the concept of "labour power as
a common pool resource":
http://commonsandeconomics.org/groups/stream-2-labor-and-care/forum/topic/labour-power-as-a-common-pool-resource/

Bob Reich replied to my comment:

> They go together. Economic growth doesn't have to result in more
> consumption of material goods. It can also result in a better environment,
> better public health, better education. All growth does is create the
> economic capacity to do these things. How we use growth -- either for more
> consumer goods of for more public goods (the commons) is a political choice.

To which I replied:

> There is a very large literature that disagrees with that assumption, Bob.
> A good place to start would be with Jonathan Rowe's "Our Common Wealth" or
> the 1995 Atlantic Magazine article on the GDP Jonathan co-authored. Also
> the commons is not just another term for public goods. See Elinor Ostrom's
> Nobel Prize winning work on the commons.

I suppose it's a step in the right direction that the AFL-CIO *says,* "It’s
time we started hearing from YOU. Join the conversation online and tell us
what you really think about the future of the labor movement. We’ll use
your ideas to shape our agenda for the convention." But judging from Bob
Reich's reflex reply to my comment, I have to be skeptical about the extent
to which ideas deviating from the conventional wisdom will shape the
AFL-CIO agenda

-- 
Cheers,

Tom Walker (Sandwichman)
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