Stewardship Is Key
Friday, July 25, 2008(Rochester Business Journal)
Assisted By: Aron J Reina, Lead
Field Organizer, Rochester & Genesee Valley
Area Labor Federation,
AFL-CIO
Throughout the history of civilized society, we have held high the stewards of our societies. From the original stewards, mothers, to village elders, to governors, to presidents and prime ministers, we have organized ourselves as a collective society. Realizing the need to work together, we have also realized the need to place trust in our fellow workers to provide information and assistance we cannot easily obtain on our own. It is through this very premise that our country is formulated – a system which is in serious disrepair.
Within the Union movement we have some of the most highly regulated processes of any workplace. Regular reporting, frequent audits, federally monitored elections, publicly accessible financial statements, and many other features are just the beginning of the transparency with which unions must operate. Sure, it can be difficult to aggregate all union information, but if it were easy economists would fix our economy in the same amount of time. Unions represent all walks of life, all industries in our country, and people of all classes, creeds and colors.
Beyond the regulatory practices, unions also provide stewardship to our members. Stewardship in the form of training on the job, services related to job performance, healthcare programs for sick workers, retirement programs for those who have toiled, and daycare programs for those still trying to provide. We don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk – and when prevented, we build ourselves a new sidewalk to use.
The past decade has seen a decline in stewardship. We have seen fewer people wish to become stewards, and a flight toward the back porch. Becoming “involved” has lost its perceptual value, and young people seek places outside our community to begin their lives. We have been scared away from tough conversations by spin politics, scared away from difficult reality by the limitations of the press, and scared away from success by the politics of fear.
Stewardship is a process
by which one individual steps forward,
taking the reigns, and upon exiting, leaves the
situation as well or better
than he/she found it. For too long the stewards
of
Betting against our own success, these Monroe County Neo-Cons convinced themselves that a tax intercept was the ideal solution to our county’s projected financial shortfall. Now, months later we all find that simply isn’t true – and we’re still holding a massive budget deficit. In the same period of time, Business is clamoring for more tax breaks, and lower payments to workers. Companies moving from one portion of our community to another focus on tax reductions through our broken Industrial Development Agencies (IDA), yet fail to create the prescribed jobs. Even contractors in our area are attempting to make false claims of cost savings by reducing wages and benefits to construction workers. At each of these steps, these self-focused organizations are enabled by a government all too happy to oblige – disregarding their responsibility as stewards of our community.
The same analogy can be seen throughout our country as a result of neo-conservative ideology; one which masks private profit in good intentions. A badly mismanaged war feeding billions in profit to a small handful of contractors; an oil crisis while Big Oil posts the largest profits in the history of our planet; bank failures; CEO bailouts amidst collapsed companies; ever higher energy costs from the spawns of Enron deregulating the generation of heat and electricity; the loss of retirement and health benefits are but a small list of those issues created when the economic pass-through inherent in trickle-down economics was never realized.
It is time for our country, our state and our county’s stewards to step forward and lead. We cannot afford to watch as we drive ourselves into a further economic decline through policies proven to fail. Believing studies based on hypothetical results rather than studies using hundreds of true-life scenarios is reckless at best – risking the jobs, and subsequently the taxes paid by, thousands of construction workers throughout our state. Again, having faith that tax reductions will create jobs is naïve given that true examples clearly display that only 1/3 of those promised careers are ever manifested. Our stewards have let us down, and let our community down.
According to Alan Greenspan, 70% of our economy is based upon consumer spending. This means we must get wealth in the hands of workers for a successful economy. Instead, for a generation we have seen the largest transfer of wealth in history to the wealthiest from the rest of us. This election will not be about social issues, important as they are to the fabric of our country. Instead, this election will be about the economy, and how our new stewards will facilitate the work of our working men and women. Together we stand to make our country whole again. With a continued divide, we stand to fail to stand at all.