Can Kamala Harris reach blue collar workers?

There’s a way, but it won’t be easy.

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will have to do what few Democrats have been willing to do—directly prevent corporations from laying off workers to finance stock buybacks.

Imagine if Kamala Harris said the following: “My administration will do all in its power to stop the needless mass layoffs that have plagued working people for over a generation.”

Right now, in Racine, Wisconsin, Case-New Holland (CNH), a global maker of agricultural equipment, is laying off 200 workers as part of a $150 million cost-reduction effort. That savings is helping to finance the $652 million CNH has spent over the past year on stock buybacks.

The same goes in spades for the John Deere company, which is exporting 1,000 jobs from Illinois and Iowa to Mexico to finance $12.2 billion in stock buybacks.

Are these stock buybacks adding new technologies needed to build better farm implements? Are they putting new AI programs into tractors to plow fields on their own? Do they help make workers more productive or enhance company sales? Not a chance.

Stock buybacks are stock manipulation. A company buying back its stock artificially boosts the stock price without creating new products or developing more efficient ways to produce old ones. It’s the same earnings, but more per share, driving up the share price, because the buybacks reduce the number of shares.

How do stock buybacks help a company? They don’t, but they sure help CNH executives, who are paid in stock incentives, and they surely enrich the Wall Street barons who cash in their shares to reap a quick profit.

But wait, isn’t stock manipulation illegal, akin to insider trading? Before 1982, stock buybacks were illegal—corporations could only use 2% of their profits to repurchase their own shares. But that year the Securities and Exchange Commission foolishly removed that restriction, and all hell broke loose. Corporations have ever since laid off workers to finance more and more stock buybacks. Today about 68% of all corporate profits go to stock buybacks. And since 1996, when the government started keeping track, more that 30 million workers have been subject to mass layoffs. (For all the gory details, please see Wall Street’s War on Workers.)

What Can Kamala Harris Do for Case-New Holland Workers?

Not much, worries Richard Glowacki, a union official trying to deal with the CNH mass layoff. “President’s don’t dictate what companies do—except in wartime,” he said.

Technically, that’s true, but presidents have the bully pulpit, and they can use it to get the attention of CEOs who need to do business with the federal government.

That’s exactly what former President Donald Trump did to Carrier, the air conditioning giant, in 2017, when he pressured the company not to move 1,100 jobs to Mexico. (About 800 may have been saved, at a cost.)

Greg Hays, the CEO of Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, made it clear why he gave in to the demand.

“I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night. I also know that about 10% of our revenue comes from the U.S. government.”

Hays understood the implicit power of the federal government, which purchases more than $700 billion a year in goods and services from private corporations. That power could be used more generally to protect the livelihoods of working people.

Imagine if Kamala Harris said the following:

© Common Dreams