Andy Stern: Changing How America Works

By Andy Stern, AlterNet. Posted November 2, 2006.

Editor's note: On Oct. 18 SEIU leader Andy Stern was in the Bay Area on a book tour and gave a talk at a crowded event at Lukas Restaurant in Oakland. The event was sponsored by Drinking Liberally, a group started by Justin Krebs that brings together progressives in a number of cities to hear quality speakers and to connect over a beer. The following is a transcript of Stern's talk.

Ercilia Sandoval is one of the people in this country who did exactly what she was supposed to do. She worked hard every day sweeping floors, cleaning toilets and taking out the garbage in some of Houston's most elegant office buildings. She is willing to work hard to raise her two girls. She tried to save what she could, but on a little more than $5 an hour, it's hard to find enough money to pay the bills.

Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ercilia was already a fighter and a leader among her co-workers, but she was probably going to die. And her problem was that she had experienced problems with her health over a long period of time but couldn't afford to go to a doctor, couldn't afford to get health care and now she's worried about what this means for her kids. Her work is dedicated to all the mothers in Houston, Texas, who are janitors, whom she doesn't want to have live through the same thing. She happens to be on the Glamour magazine website right now; she's up for nomination as one of the five women of the year for Glamour.

I wrote this book because people like Ercilia should not work a day and be poor in the richest country on the face of the earth, and certainly not to be dying in this country because they're poor. I wrote this book because I love this country, and I think America is a gift. Its greatest gift is this: People have come here from all over the world, and all they expected to do was work hard. And what they hoped was that their work would be rewarded. What they dreamed about was that their kids were going to do better than they were. That was the American Dream. And despite a civil war, two world wars, recessions, depressions, the American Dream has survived. Until now.

Fifty-two percent of all parents say that their kids are going to be worse off than they are. And the facts now are beginning to bear that out. That's not the America I want; I don't think that's the America we all need. I wrote this book because I think there are answers all around us. But in order to get to the answers, we have to understand the context of the discussion.

This is not our fathers' and grandfathers' economy. We've gone from an economy that's 9-to-5 to 24/7. We're living through the third economic revolution in the history of the world: The first was the agricultural revolution, which took 3,000 years; second was the industrial revolution, which took 300 years; this revolution is going to take 30 years. As we move from a national to an international economy, from muscle to mind work, no generation of people has ever witnessed so much change in a single lifetime.

This revolution is televised, it's Google-ized, it's digitized, it's in your face, on your screen 24/7. It is relentless, and it's unending and it's far from over. But it's not our fathers' and grandfathers' economy. The number of transistors that were produced this year in the world was greater than the number of grains of rice that were grown. The Furby -- that kids' toy -- has four times the computing power of the Apollo spaceship that landed on the Moon. The world is going to send 84 billion emails today. In the late 1980s, there was no such thing as email.

We are as far today from the New Deal, as the New Deal was from the Civil War. I'm sure Roosevelt admired Lincoln, but he built an economy for 1935. And we need to build an economy for the 21st century. Thomas Friedman is partially right, the world is flat -- we now have a much more integrated global economy, particularly as we digitize things all around the world.

We now understand the facts about blue-collar jobs. Those that have white-collar jobs are increasingly going to see them go overseas by 2008. In China, America has its first real economic competitor. Last year, half of the concrete that was poured in the world was poured in China. America had 65,000 Intel Science Fair finalists last year, a record number. China had a million.

If you go to Beijing, where some of us have been ... if you think Washington's a cool place to be with one beltway, Beijing has six beltways. And while we were there last time, they announced they were going to build 110 hotels in Beijing by 2008. China owns a trillion dollars' worth of the foreign currency, and they're not just neutral bankers when it comes to policy. We have real competition.

Companies -- not countries -- are making the rules in the global economy. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, 52 are companies, and only 48 are countries. The sales of Wal-Mart are greater than the GDP of Ireland, or Singapore or Venezuela. The companies are beginning to put pressure on the countries like France about their employment policies. Companies, not countries -- global trade, global finance, global companies. We've got to create global regulation and global government instead of allowing companies to make the rules.

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Andy Stern is president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).