Happy Labor Day from The Bugbear Dispatch

Hello, fellow bugbears! I hope your three-day weekend is off to a great start, or, if you have to work this weekend, that all goes well for you.

Because it is a holiday weekend, I’ll keep my post short this week. And I’ll focus on labor and economic issues in honor of the holiday.

Those of you who have been reading The Bugbear Dispatch for a while may recall my June 3 essay on why Americans don’t love President Joe Biden’s economy, despite inflation falling after its historic rise, low unemployment, and wages beginning to outpace inflation. At that time, 56% of Americans told pollsters they thought the economy was in a recession, even though it objectively was not.

In that essay, I linked to analysis from Julia Shapero on the topic, appreciating her work for its lack of condescension toward Americans who are sour on the economy even though it was in decent shape by all official indicators. But was, and is, the economy really in decent shape for ordinary Americans, whatever the typical indicators, erm, indicate? In June, I put it this way:

Why aren’t Americans all sunshine and flowers and puppies on the economy? Shapero and in fact many commentators get at some of the reasons: continuing sticker shock from recent historically high inflation; the impact of the now high interest rates needed to get inflation under control on people’s credit card balances and prospects for getting a mortgage.

But I haven’t seen any of them come up with what I’m convinced is at the root of the problem—probably because that would require them to face facts that are uncomfortable for the highly privileged.

Here are a few facts that aren’t as pleasant to hear about as low unemployment and high job creation rates.

The homelessness rate has hit historic highs in recent years. Housed Americans in many areas can look around in their environments and see direct evidence of this in the form of encampments and unhoused people on the street.

Homelessness is high because housing is limited and unaffordable. Many Americans, myself included, feel stymied because we are unable to save up anything close to a sufficient down payment to put on a house, and so are stuck renting. But we’re lucky compared to those who have been unable to make rent, possibly because of one medical accident or lost job. Since most Americans have little to no savings, one disaster is all it takes to push many people into homelessness, and the ever-increasing costs of both renting and buying exacerbate the problem.

Over the last almost three months, it has become clear that grocery corporations and corporate landlords have been price gouging Americans—blaming “inflation” while raising food prices and rent well beyond what the actual inflation rate would require, and thereby reaping predatory profits off the backs of the hard-working Americans whose lives are unnecessarily precarious. Make no mistake—many Americans face a precarious existence due to this country’s lack of a robust social safety net and our leaders’ romance with “the market.”

United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 in Portland, Oregon is currently on strike. If you’re in the area and happen to pass by a Fred Meyer picket line this weekend, consider stopping to give the striking workers some encouragement.

In the immortal words of LeVar Burton, “You don’t have to take my word for it.” Joshua P. Hill, over at his New Means Substack, brings the receipts.

Meanwhile, a new Wall Street Journal/NORC poll shows that a only about a third of Americans believe “the American dream still holds true.” (Fwiw, thanks in large part to systemic racism and misogyny, the American dream has never held true for most of us, but in the mid twentieth century it was certainly more widely accessible than it is now.) A similar poll from 2012 still found over half of Americans had faith in the American dream.

A political cartoon published by the Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette on July 19, 1901. Via Wikimedia Commons.

As for me, someone whose living is somewhat precarious (despite a PhD—albeit in modern Russian history—from Stanford), I’m with the two thirds. Yes, it is a privilege, and one I am grateful for, to write for a living. But writing is still work, and it has gotten harder and harder for individual writers—particularly writers with integrity—to get by in today’s messed up mediascape.

I lost my weekly column for openDemocracy back in April due to that UK-based organization’s financial issues, and I haven’t even begun to make up for that lost income. Further, despite my (much too expensive) ACA insurance, a major healthcare incident would be devastating to me. And, of course, I remain locked out of the housing market and subject to the whims of the faceless, merciless corporate property management companies that have replaced individual landlords of yore you could actually have a relationship with.

At the same time, a number of current developments are giving me more hope for a better future than I’ve had in a good while. For one thing, while I have my criticisms of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, it was great to see so much emphasis put on Union Labor. I laughed out loud at the utterly icy treatment the former CEO of American Express got during his (completely unnecessary) speech. That DNC crowd was robustly pro-labor, as are Biden and current Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

And the FTC is currently involved in several antitrust investigations and actions, including against RealPage, the software company that made the recent bout of landlord collusion/price fixing possible, and against Kroger’s attempted merger with Albertsons. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a start.

The proposed merger of Kroger with Albertson’s, which the FTC has sued to block, affects those of us who live here in the Pacific Northwest. Specifically, it would sweep up the once strictly local Fred Meyer chain into Kroger’s grocery mega-empire. While some Kroger workers have access to unions, the unionized Fred Meyer workers oppose the merger.

In fact, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 555 in Portland, Oregon is currently on strike in relation to this issue and a variety of unfair labor practices. If you’re in the area and happen to pass by a Fred Meyer picket line this weekend, consider stopping to give the striking workers some encouragement.

On that note, if you’re a reader in another area with information on how to support labor locally, would you please drop that info into a comment here to help spread the word? Thanks, and enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend!

The Bugbear Dispatch extends a special thanks to our founding subscribers Jody, Ryan Boren, Katie in Seattle, Kel, Roslyn Reid, Rob B. and anonymous for their generous financial support of this publication.