Ross Eisenbrey ’74 believes the American working class is under siege.
And he wants to do something about it.
By Tom Nugent
On July 31, 2003, a 50-year-old labor expert named Ross Eisenbrey hurried through the great bronze doorway at the front of the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
A slender, neatly pressed man with a silver-flecked mustache, the elegant-looking Eisenbrey ’74 could have easily passed for a State Department diplomat. But this veteran labor lawyer hadn’t journeyed to Capitol Hill on a diplomatic mission.
Eisenbrey, the policy director for the liberal-minded but nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI), was in the middle of a war—a self-chosen, career-long struggle to protect 130 million U.S. wage earners from the “modern robber barons” who he believes are stealing their labor to gain higher profits.
As he rode a clattering elevator toward the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing room where he was scheduled to testify, he carefully reviewed the arguments he’d be making.
Armed with a briefcase full of statistics, he was confident that he could show the panel of senators (including such well-connected Republicans as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Ted Stephens of Alaska) that the Labor Department was about to make a disastrous mistake by implementing sweeping new regulations that would curtail overtime pay for millions of Americans.
According to Eisenbrey, who’d spent most of the 1980s fighting against such “anti-labor” measures while serving as legislative director for the late Michigan Democratic congressman William Ford, the proposed regulations represented nothing less than “an attack on the working people of America.”
Yet as he strode into the Senate hearing, Eisenbrey was realistic about his chances. Even if he was able to persuade the subcommittee and the rest of the Senate, it was highly unlikely that the president would sign legislation that would prevent overtime cutbacks.
Although Eisenbrey did his best to torpedo the new regs—by analyzing the proposed changes in detail and then telling the subcommittee that “the paychecks of millions of workers are at stake”—the new rules went into effect the following year.
“The impact of those rules was to diminish the rights of people who are paid a wage in this country,” he would later say. “Unfortun-ately, millions of Americans will now work longer hours and get less pay for it, and that’s a terrible thing.”
Drop by Ross Eisenbrey’s Washington office on a weekday morning, and you’ll probably find him banging away at one of the position papers he writes regularly for EPI. Launched in 1986, EPI is a highly regarded economic think tank—several noted economists, as well as two former Labor secretaries are on the board of directors—that researches economic issues in order to “promote the interests of low- and middle-income American workers and their families.” Based on that research, the institute then makes policy recommendations to federal and state governments. In a recent policy paper, co-authored by EPI president Lawrence Mishel, Eisenbrey drew upon a number of revealing statistics to paint a dire picture of the U.S. economy as it relates to the working class. Among his findings:
Wages continue to stagnate: While U.S. productivity has surged by 13.5 percent since the last recession ended in 2001, inflation-adjusted hourly and weekly wages have gone down slightly. “The American economy has been doing pretty well during the past five years,” says Eisenbrey, “but most of those gains have gone into corporate profits—rather than into the paychecks of workers.”
Household income spirals downward: The federal data show that median household family income has declined during the past five years—working families earned $46,129 on average in 1999, but only $44,389 in 2004.
The minimum wage remains frozen: America’s minimum wage stalled in 1997, at $5.15 an hour. For more than two million full-time workers, a week’s paycheck amounts to $206.
The poverty rate jumps: Between 2001 and 2004, the number of Americans living below the poverty level increased from 11.7 to 12.7 percent, as 5.4 million people joined the destitute.
Of course, Eisenbrey has an agenda, and his reports have rattled some cages over the years. Responding to a recent EPI study that predicted massive U.S. job losses if the U.S. greatly expanded trade with China, for example, Daniel T. Griswold, the trade-policy researcher for the conservative Cato Institute, blasted EPI for its “alarmist predictions based on flawed economic reasoning and empirical evidence.” Like Griswold, other right-leaning pundits often accuse EPI of misinterpreting or slanting data to promote labor interests.
Ask Ross Eisenbrey how he developed his passion for defending wage earners, and he’ll give much of the credit to his upbringing. He is a Michigan native who grew up admiring the “heroic struggles” of the United Auto Workers labor union. The son of a pediatric neurosurgeon and a “Catholic working-class girl” whose family had struggled through the Great Depression, Eisenbrey says he learned to care about working people at the family dinner table. After earning a law degree from the University of Michigan in 1978, Eisenbrey spent a year working for a Motor City law firm that specialized in labor cases before joining Congressman Ford’s staff, where he stayed for more than a decade. After an eight-year stint at the Labor Department and a presidential appointment to formulate policy at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, he was recruited in 2002 for his current job at EPI.
Although Eisenbrey describes himself as a “hopeful optimist,” he readily concedes that these are “tough times” for many American workers. Describing a recent visit to Detroit, where more than 100,000 auto industry jobs have been lost in recent decades, he remembers gazing from a jetliner at the blighted inner city and the “ring of concrete and steel high-rises” that now separate the struggling urban poor from the affluent suburbs. “From 20,000 feet, you can see clearly what happened to this once great American city,” he points out, “and it’s pretty sad.
“These are difficult times for American workers, to say the least. But we’ve overcome difficult times before. Eventually, the tide will turn, and the country will wake up to these issues. We just have to keep on making the case [for workers] . . . and that’s exactly what we intend to do”
Tom Nugent is a Michigan-based freelance writer.