BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Vic Bussie, whose name was synonymous with the labor movement in Louisiana, is dead at age 92.
He died early Sunday, three days after an operation for stomach cancer, said his wife, Frances "Fran" Bussie.
She said he had been moved to a private room after two days in intensive care, and on Saturday rejected the doctors' suggestion that he return to the ICU and go on life support.
A railroad worker's son who grew up in north Louisiana, Bussie — his given name was Victor — began his career as a firefighter. He was head of the state AFL-CIO for 41 years until his retirement in 1997.
Robert Reich: The Limping Middle Class Reich lays out a long list of "could have" policy responses to the wage stagnation that began in the late 1970s.
The puzzle is why so little has been done in the last 40 years to help deal with the subversion of the economic power of the middle class. With the continued gains from economic growth, the nation could have enabled more people to become problem solvers and innovators — through early childhood education, better public schools, expanded access to higher education and more efficient public transportation.
We might have enlarged safety nets — by having unemployment insurance cover part-time work, by giving transition assistance to move to new jobs in new locations, by creating insurance for communities that lost a major employer. And we could have made Medicare available to anyone.
Big companies could have been required to pay severance to American workers they let go and train them for new jobs. The minimum wage could have been pegged at half the median wage, and we could have insisted that the foreign nations we trade with do the same, so that all citizens could share in gains from trade.
We could have raised taxes on the rich and cut them for poorer Americans.
But starting in the late 1970s, and with increasing fervor over the next three decades, government did just the opposite. It deregulated and privatized. It cut spending on infrastructure as a percentage of the national economy and shifted more of the costs of public higher education to families. It shredded safety nets. (Only 27 percent of the unemployed are covered by unemployment insurance.) And it allowed companies to bust unions and threaten employees who tried to organize. Fewer than 8 percent of private-sector workers are unionized.
Laura Clawson: A 'culture of accountability' aimed only at poor people
Matt Taibbi: Sportswriters Rally to the Cause of Unpaid Labor
Major college football players spend an average of 44.8 hours a week in practice or in games, and everyone knows that a lot of the players get “tutors” to write their papers for them, if their professors aren’t already being pressured to soft-pedal their grades.
The reason they spend so much time at practice instead of in the library is because the amounts of money now involved have skewed the priorities of the universities. College sports has become such a huge business that coaches have to drive their kids hard to be competitive.
The same corporate ruthlessness that drives management in any other big industry drives coaching staffs in college sports. If your second-string linebacker is spending his weeknights studying botany instead of his blitz package, that doesn’t mean he’s a good kid who does what his parents tell him. It means he’s an unreliable worker. Coaches with multi-million-dollar salaries won’t hesitate to cut or discipline a player whose iffy priorities imperil his chance at a contract extension.
So playing college sports is not a unique “student-athlete experience.” It’s a job like any other job. Just like in any other corporate job, you go to work every day for a stress-sick executive who needs you to bust ass 24 hours a day to save his neck and stave off his aneurysm.
Unlike any other job, though, you don’t get paid, because the company you work for, the NCAA, has cleverly designed a series of pompous rules making it “illegal” for you to be compensated.
Today President Obama is in Detroit speaking to union workers and pretending to care about any of this although one need only review his administration's policy choices to understand he clearly does not. But I'm sure today will make for some pleasant soundbites.
While he's in Michigan, I wonder if Obama, one of the country's most prominent charter school advocates, will even bother to address that state's plan to privatize public education.
The Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals (MASSP) says that teachers from private companies would be required to have the same credentials as existing public school teachers. Public school districts, MASSP notes, would begin soliciting bids from private "instructional services" companies once existing teacher contracts had expired.
Michigan Education Association spokesman Doug Pratt says Pavlov's plan is a "terrible idea" that would erode the quality of public school teaching because districts will look for the lowest bidder, not the best teachers. "Instead of having teachers who care about their students learning and their personal growth as their top priorities, the corporation's bottom line would be what they care about most." Pratt also claimed this is a way to kneecap teachers' unions in Michigan. "Privatization is a type of union busting," he says.
As for me, thanks to Tropical Storm Lee this Labor day marks the end of what has been a much needed 4 day weekend. Even though we actually did laundry on this Monday, there aren't any obligatory red beans on the stove. (Suck it, Treme!) So I'm going out now to find something to eat and to try and make sure the rest of this day isn't wasted. Be safe. Try not to take any $250,000 "loans" from suspicious characters.
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