Churnin' some middle class love

While we're looking forward to SIEU president Andy Stern's appearance in Portland next Tuesday (including at a book signing event hosted by Drinking Liberally that evening), here's another reason to like what Stern's been up to lately:

The SEIU has contributed $100K in seed money to United Professionals, a nonprofit membership organization launched this year by Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream.

UP is concerned with issues facing professional workers, whether they're fully employed (today), or underemployed, or flat-out unemployed:

As Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, says, "Given the level of churning and layoffs, there is a need for workers organizations that exist outside the workplace, industry, occupation." […]

"The rap among policy elites is that once you're college educated your problems are over," says Bernstein, who serves as an UP advisory board member. "You are now officially insulated from any of the pressures of the global economy, the health care problem, job insecurity. Unfortunately, that's wrong, and white collar workers recognize that these challenges no longer only befall those in the factory sector, who've been getting whacked by globalization for years."

In fact, according to PR Newswire, 31 percent of college educated workers have no employer based health coverage, and 39 percent have no employer-provided retirement plan. More than half of the non-union workforce tells pollsters they would like to be part of some type of collective bargaining entity. "While white collar workers may not have a union orientation," Bernstein says, "many recognize that forces such as global offshoring have diminished their bargaining clout."

Economic boosters in this country have been getting by for some time now on the argument that the college degree is a guaranteed ticket to box seats in the middle class. Ain't necessarily so. Ask the next three people you meet with white-collar jobs how confident they are that their jobs will still be there in five years, or that a secure retirement will be there at the end of their careers.

United Professionals is an idea worth pursuing and supporting, and hats off to Stern and the SEIU for once again realizing that unions need to be thinking about creative ways to give more Americans access to the protections afforded by collective bargaining, not thinking up ways to close the gates and cut workers off from those rights (the latter, after all, is the Bush administration's self-appointed job, and so far it's one of the few places where they've been up to the task).