Mullings: An American Cyber-column By Rich Galen

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Love's Labours Lost

Wednesday June 11, 2003

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As we swing into the 2004 election campaign - and the attendant issue advertisements - we know that the Left and its exchequer, the AFL-CIO, will be running ad after ad after ad accusing the Bush Administration of favoring corporate board members at the expense of working men and women.

The Left loves using Labor as the metaphor to push its shop-worn class warfare message.

In the Paris Travelogue, I pointed out that May is what American Ex-Pats in Paris call the "French Ramadan" because so few actual days are spent actually producing actual work. In addition, I pointed out that "the French unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 9.3%."

In comparison, although the US unemployment rate went up to 6.1% in May, it appears to be increasing at a DECREASING rate. Some economists saw a silver lining suggesting that, as the business climate in the US continues to improve, people who had given up looking for work are coming back into the job market.

Stay with me before you sigh and give up on this. It turns out that I was onto something when I wrote about Ramadan and the French unemployment rate.

In a column published in the NY Times, NYU professor, Niall Ferguson, looks at what Americans have self-consciously called, "The Protestant Work Ethic."

Drawing on the famous essay of German sociologist Max Weber, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," he writes about a "dramatic divergence over [the past] two decades between the amount of time Americans work and the amount of time West Europeans work. By American standards, West Europeans are astonishingly idle."

According to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [the US Ambassador to which, Mull Fave Jeanne Johnson Phillips, has recently returned to Texas], "The average working American spends 1,976 hours a year on the job." The average German works about 1,540 hours per year - nearly one week per month LESS than his US counterpart.

Ferguson writes that about one half of the American population works (unemployment rates only include people who are looking for a job but can't find one. The Mullmeister, although he has no job, is not considered "unemployed") while in France only 39 percent of the French population works - or wants to.

On the matter of strikes, Ferguson says that the number of days per 1,000 workers lost to strikes in a year in Europe ranges up to 271. In the US that number is about 50.

The expansion of the European Union will not help these stats over the long haul. Even though, as Ferguson points out, "The average Czech worker does more than 2,000 hours of work a year - a figure steadily rising since the collapse of communism," European Union labor laws will REQUIRE individual workers' hours to decline to maintain a constant level of labor costs across the EU.

There is a pattern here: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the month that George W. Bush was sworn in as President, the percentage of unionized workers in the US had fallen to its lowest level in 60 years.

The World Socialist web site states that the continuing decline in unionism cannot be blamed on "a hostile administration in Washington. For the most part the AFL-CIO enjoyed the closest relations with the Democratic Clinton administration, which it supported politically."

So, unions continue to lose power in the US while they continue to hold their strength in Europe. US workers are doing better than European workers. And the US economy is recovering faster than the European economy.

The strength of the US is our commitment to capitalism - Bernie Ebbers and Martha Stewart included.

Keep these numbers in mind when you watch the television ads proffered by the Left and paid for by the AFL-CIO. They will attempt to convince voters that they are correct and Conservatives are wrong. We will win.

Call it, Love's Labours Lost.

On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: Links to the Ferguson piece and to the Weber essay (this WILL be on your final) and to an analysis of the May unemployment figures and to the World Socialist web page. Also a Mullfoto with the Mullmeister and your favorite Lib at Fox over the weekend, and a fairly amusing Hillary Catchy Caption of the Day.

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