Declaring War on Economic Insecurity in the US

The Left seeks to level the playing field between labor and management.

At-will must go. An employer who wants to get rid of an employee should have to prove to the Department of Labor either that the move is required due to the company’s finances—and then only after upper management have absorbed pay cuts and stockholders lose their dividends—or that he did something wrong, in which case he should be entitled to a hearing before an impartial court system established to litigate labor-management disputes before a jury.

Workers’ power relies first and foremost on the right and ability to withhold labor after contract negotiations break down. Therefore, every American worker in an enterprise with 10 or more employees ought to be legally guaranteed the right to join a union—even if they are the only member of their company’s workforce who wants to sign a union card.

If workers are truly essential to the functioning of the nation, like firefighters and postal workers, they should be remunerated accordingly. In the case of exceptional categories of workers deemed essential in matters of life and death, which should be highly limited, the loss of the right to strike should be compensated by guaranteed raises pegged to the inflation rate.

The system is random and arbitrary. When I lost my W-2 job as a syndicate executive, I qualified for unemployment even though I had only worked half-weeks. If my syndicate cans me as a cartoonist and writer, I do not.

The ultimate manifestation of economic insecurity, the abject poverty that leads to homelessness, hunger and death, ought to be impossible in this wealthiest of all countries in history. Even if they “want” to do so, the Left should not allow people to sleep outside, for the freedom to die in the cold is no freedom whatsoever.

Next: How to abolish homelessness.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist)