By Ben Davis, USW

By Nathan Jensen, Professor of Government, and Calvin Thrall, PhD Student in Business and Development

New York offered Amazon close to US$3 billion to build a “second” headquarters in Long Island City on the promise of 25,000 jobs.

Since the deal was joyfully announced in November, however, many local residents and some politicians in the area have been questioning whether it’s worth it, both in terms of the price tag and the impact on housing and traffic congestion. There’s now a real possibility that the deal could be blocked, and Amazon itself is reportedly reconsidering the move.

The research supports those who question the wisdom of cities and states incentivizing economic development. Studies suggest the jobs and economic gains are usually not worth the tax breaks since the majority of companies would have come even without incentives.

And that’s when the companies try to live up to the promises they made. They don’t always do so, with the latest example being Foxconn’s announcement that it is reconsidering plans to build a factory in Wisconsin – less than a year after agreeing to create up to 13,000 high-tech jobs in exchange for more than $4.5 billion in incentives.

But how often do companies that agree to build factories and create jobs in exchange for economic incentives back away from their promises? And when they do, do taxpayers ever learn about it?

To shine light on these questions, we conducted a study of a Texas economic development program. Taxpayers in any American city considering luring a company with cash should take heed.

Trump staffed his golf clubs with undocumented workers — now these women are speaking out about how they were mistreated pic.twitter.com/KlpewpGAqB

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) February 11, 2019

“America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump declared in his State of the Union address. Someone should alert Trump that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it is socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. That pretty much describes the $21 billion saved by the nation’s largest banks last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went into massive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, more than 4,000 lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs.

Banks that are too big to fail – courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout – enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83 billion a year, because creditors facing less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans. Last year, Wall Street’s bonus pool was $31.4 billion. Take away the hidden subsidy and the bonus pool disappears.

Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. They’ll make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

Trump is promoting socialism for the rich and harsh capitalism for everyone else in other ways. Since he was elected, GM has got more than $600 million in federal contracts plus $500 million in tax breaks. Some of this has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22m in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

By Ken Estey, Brooklyn College

In the week before Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown announced his “Dignity of Work” tour, with events in New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina, and his home state, Ohio. The tour placed the working class at the center of Brown’s potential bid for the U.S. presidency in 2020. The legacy of King’s unwavering support for workers and unions lies at the center of Brown’s message, as Brown makes clear by quoting King on his website: “No work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance.”

Deep springs refresh the enduring idea that work has dignity, a source that could inspire workers to stop the relentless assaults on their lives and their labor. While we may not think of “dignity” as a religious concept, it has many familiar religious and theological dimensions that resonate with how many workers think about their work and their own work ethic. Brown’s message draws not only on Reverend King but also on his mother’s Lutheran faith and Pope Francis’s emphasis on the dignity of labor.

At the heart of these ideas is an understanding of work as a calling.  As King said, just before the more familiar claim that no work is insignificant, “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” The idea that work is a “calling” is rooted in Martin Luther’s Reformation idea that all workers have a vocation, and that God places everyone in a station in which they undertake their labor. This defines work as not just a product of an economic arrangement but as central to the created order. These ideas about work, which we can trace through the half-millennium journey from Martin Luther to Martin Luther King, Jr., may echo through much of the next presidential campaign.

But however we might welcome attention to the dignity of work, this way of talking about work does not directly address the precarious character of the contemporary workplace in this age of automation, outsourcing, “gig” employment, deregulation, and union busting. Brown’s potential candidacy will not reach uprooted workers if it does not reckon with the unrepentantly neoliberal economy in which this work occurs. Merely repeating the phrase “dignity of work” without thoroughly upholding the dignity of workers risks romanticizing work to the peril of those who actually perform it.