Bush In Fantasy Land

    It's pretty clear to a majority of people that the president operates in a non-reality-based world when it comes to the Iraq war. So it is with the economy as well. Today, he's visiting a facility of Federal Express in Washington, D.C. to talk about the new job numbers.

    Now, I understand why he would use FedEx as a backdrop: the CEO Fred Smith just held a $2,100-a-plate fundraiser for Bush in Memphis last week. Nice. And you can't get more regular guy than Smith, right? After all, he pulled in $5.25 million compensation and $5 million dividend income this year alone. Right up the president's alley. Times are wonderful for Bush and Smith.

     But, for regular people, we know times are not great at all. Paul Krugman has a solid column in today's New York Times called "The War Against Wages." (You have to be a Times subscriber to see it, I believe). Krugman's first paragraph sums it up:

Should we be cheering over the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has finally set a new record? No. The Dow is doing well largely because American employers are waging a successful war against wages. Economic growth since early 2000, when the Dow reached its previous peak, hasn’t been exceptional. But after-tax corporate profits have more than doubled, because workers’ productivity is up, but their wages aren’t — and because companies have dealt with rising health insurance premiums by denying insurance to ever more workers.

    Krugman, then, links the attack on wages to the attack on unions, describing the decision in the Kentucky River cases by the Bush National Labor Relations Board. His final paragraph sums up the whole rotten situation:

So what’s keeping paychecks down? Major employers like Wal-Mart have decided that their interests are best served by treating workers as a disposable commodity, paid as little as possible and encouraged to leave after a year or two. And these employers don’t worry that angry workers will respond to their war on wages by forming unions, because they know that government officials, who are supposed to protect workers’ rights, will do everything they can to come down on the side of the wage-cutters.

    Which brings us right back to the president's embrace of Fedex. To just mention a few points about that company's sordid attack on its workers: FedEx Express workers in California sued the company for widespread off-the-clock work (earlier this year the company settled for $30 million); FedEx shifts the risks and and costs of working for the company on to the workers by forcing them to be independent contractors, which means the truck drivers assume costs that should be paid by FedEx--like trucks, and equipment like uniforms and digital scanners; by forcing workers to be independent contractors, the company avoids paying income tax withholding, unemployment insurance premiums, worker compensation contributions and other state or federal contributions, and avoids state labor laws and even federal laws like the Family Medical Leave Act. And need I mention that a California court ruled that this contractor set-up was a scam back in 2005 and the state, then, found the company owed nearly $8 million in back taxes.  Since 1988, the National Labor Relations Board, no friend of labor as we know, has ruled 7 out of 8 times that the FedEx ground drivers are employees and not "independent contractors." 

    I could go on. Ironically, it says a lot that in trying to convince the people that the economy is actually doing well and that workers' lives are improving, the president would choose as a backdrop a company that does its best to make sure that workers' lives are even more insecure.