Reich Sees Need For New Social Contract

Berkshire Eagle ^ | July 17, 2002 | Stefanie Cohen

[HalfIrish]

Reich Sees Need for New Social Contract

By Stefanie Cohen, Eagle Correspondent

LENOX -- Whatever happened to the social contract? What happened to the tacit, but guaranteed understanding that if a company performed well, then its employees would benefit? That raises would be offered, and pensions would grow?

Robert Reich, the former secretary of labor under President Clinton and one of four Democratic hopefuls for governor of Massachusetts, argued Monday evening that certain unwritten, but nonetheless understood, ideals about labor in the U.S. can no longer be expected by citizens. But Reich believes the time is ripe for their return.

A guest of the "Brandeis in the Berkshires" lecture series at Shakespeare & Company, Reich explained to a full house at the Founders' Theatre that three important ideals about working in the United States have fallen by the wayside since the late 1970s.

The recent rash of corporate scandals provide classic examples of an egregious, but not entirely unexpected, breach of the social contract. The idea of 40 years of loyalty to a company, after which time one receives a nice pension and a watch, no longer exists, said Reich.

And Americans who work full time should not necessarily expect to keep their family from impoverishment, Reich said, thus the phrase "working poor." If for some reason a worker is unable to find a job because the market is not healthy, there is little in the way of subsidies to buoy him or her until a job is secured.

The opportunity to make the most of yourself via pubic institutions is also no longer viable. Quality public education is a myth in poorer communities, he said, where the property taxes do not provide enough of a budget to teach children properly.

According to Reich, certain conditions are prerequisites to the social contract being upheld: fear of a common enemy, a belief that as Americans we are all in the same boat, and a degree of public virtue. As these ideas have lost popularity of late, so have some of the basic ideals upon which this puritanical, hard-working country was founded.

Globalization blamed

Reich blamed globalization for widening the potential work force but lowering the value of the worker. Companies now scour the world for the cheapest labor.

"Globalization helps those who are educated to trade in on that, while the poorly educated are replaceable by employees who are much less expensive," he said.

In addition, incomes have widened so much that the wealthy see little of themselves in the poor, and therefore cannot envision "being in the same boat" as those without means.

"Those on the winning end don't even look like losing-end type people," said Reich. "They are often not the same skin color or the same ethnicity."

Also, the rise of technology has separated neighbor from neighbor and ended a feeling of solidarity between citizens. People can now do business with international companies from their home offices, he said. A feeling of public virtue doesn't exist because people don't necessarily conduct business within their own communities any longer.

But Sept. 11 changed a lot of that, said Reich. Planes fell from the sky and brought down the World Trade Center and a host of hardened ideals and morals.

"Now we have a common enemy that we are all vulnerable to," he said. "In a way that is very profound; we are all in the same boat again. There is a good opportunity here to talk about the social contract again, to use words that have all but died out of the lexicon, like public good, common good, public interest."

Reich questioned the Bush administration for not making more of such an opportunity.

"After Sept. 11, when the public wanted to know what we could do to make things better, we were instructed to buy, to spend money. That struck me as, well, odd," he said. "We were wanting an opportunity to talk about shared ideals, and here we were sent out shopping."

Reich said that throughout American history, there have always been moments, or eras, when politicians were able to talk about ideals in a way that captured the public imagination. The Progressive Era, for instance, brought about sweeping changes in child labor, worker safety, antitrust laws, and the Food and Drug Administration. The public realized a need to "save capitalism from itself," and because the leaders of the time, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, recognized the opportunity as such, vast changes were made.

A professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis and a member of the faculty at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Reich said he has seen a shift in his students' sensibilities since the early '80s.

"We are approaching another era of reform, an ethical renewal, a reknitting of the social contract and of links between communities. I have felt a palpable sense among young people that they want to do public service. I think we are ready for a reform," he said.

[HalfIrish]

The usual socialist nonsense from our little buddy, with some pandering comments about skin color thrown in for good measure. I'd like to see him get the Democratic nomination just to see what Romney's response to this tired old liberal claptrap would be.