The clients she serves face the same dilemmas as workers throughout the country: They're being squeezed out of health and pension benefits and are paying more than their fair share of taxes to subsidize corporate tax breaks. They're threatened by legislative efforts to eliminate overtime pay, the 40-hour workweek and health and safety protections, and their children suffer the consequences of public schools whose funds are jeopardized by risky privatization schemes.

Profits At America's largest companies jumped 30.7 percent from 1994 to 1996, in large part through downsizing, part-timing and contracting-out work.

Profits

While it's the business of business to make money, corporations are changing the rules to maximize profits at the expense of workers and their communities. Profits at America's largest companies jumped 30.7 percent from 1994 to 1996, in large part through downsizing, part-timing and contracting-out work. The result? CEOs make, on average, 419 times as much today as the factory workers who create their wealth. Employees still working standard full-time jobs--and 27 percent no longer do--increased their productivity by 20 percent since 1978, but got 8.6 percent less compensation.

Taxes

Working families know taxes are essential to finance government programs that help everyone, but they are hurt when the tax burden balance tilts in favor of corporations and the rich. Total federal revenues from corporate taxes dropped from 35 percent in 1945 to 11 percent in 1998, and thousands of businesses pay no income tax at all. Yet in recent years, payroll taxes on workers were hiked while capital gains taxes, aimed at corporations and wealthy investors, were cut.

Benefits

Fewer employers are offering pensions--especially good, defined-benefit pensions--and more are making health insurance unaffordable. While the number of the uninsured continues to grow, workers who have health coverage increasingly pay more for less. Average health insurance premiums jumped 146 percent from 1988 to 1996, and 8 million fewer Americans had employer-based coverage in 1996 than in 1989. The shift to managed health care plans boosts employer profits while limiting treatment and medication. The cost shift hits hardest those least able to defend themselves: the millions of children with no coverage at all.

The number of workers guaranteed a secure retirement has declined as employers shift to "defined-contribution" plans, where workers shoulder the investment risks. Retirement security will be further compromised if Social Security is replaced with private accounts, subject to stock market volatility and likely higher retirement ages and benefit cuts, so Wall Street money managers can reap huge profits.

Education

In the meantime, our children attend public schools that scramble for money to pay for repairs, supplies and teachers--even as private education companies cut corners to turn a profit with risky, tax-subsidized privatized education experiments and school vouchers.

Fighting Back with Strong Unions

That's why today's unions are challenging the Corporate Agenda.

Working wit their communities, unions help create strong U.S. jobs while pursuing laws and policies that make livable wages, fair taxes, retirement security and good schools possible. Union workers earn about one-third more than nonunion workers, and are more likely to have health coverage and good pensions than nonunion workers. By joining together in unions, workers have a voice on the job--and the strength to challenge the Corporate Agenda.

Sources: Profits: Fortune: productivity and compensation: Economic Policy Institute; CEO pay: Business Week; tax brakes; Citizens for Tax Justice, U.S. General Accounting Office; corporate income tax: U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Economic Report of the President; premiums: Lewin Group Inc.; uninsured: Economic Policy Institute, Families USA; training wages: The Century Foundation.

THE CORPORATE AGENDA

• Seeks to slash taxes for corporations and the rich.
• Backs privatizing, downsizing and outsourcing.
• Pushes to deregulate industries and enact free trade agreements.
• Tries to weaken unions and diminish workers' freedom to choose a union and have a voice in politics.

For more information, contact the Common Sense Economics Project, AFL-CIO, 815 16^th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006. Fax: 202-508-6987; e-mail: atwork@alfcio.org.