The recent debt ceiling debate and S&P downgrade of the U.S. government reminded me of a fight between an ex-spouse and boss over who can make your life the most uncomfortable. You realize that they both have lots of weapons to do it and there is precious little that you can do to change the outcome.

Congress fiddled and S&P lit the match last week and the rest of us will suffer. That’s the bad news. The good news? It shouldn’t be any more than nine to eighteen years that we’ll be stuck in purgatory. At least that’s what a S&P official said when asked how long it took previous downgraded countries to regain their AAA rating.

Ironic that a rating agency would start the ball rolling on this most recent downgrade, when it was the rating agencies sloppy ratings that started the recession in the first place by giving their highest ratings to what could only be charitably called junk bonds. Or worse.

But my favorite moment, is when the Treasury Department found a $2 trillion dollar mistake in the rating agency’s calculations about how bad our fiscal hole is moving forward.

It was Senator Everett Dirksen who said, “A billion dollars here, a billion dollars there, soon it adds up to real money.” Senator, the quote still works, you’ve just got to change the “b” to a “t”.

One more metaphor, you know how I love my metaphors. This one comes from Africa, “When the elephants fight it’s the grass that suffers.”

We can dig ourselves out of this mess. But so many of our institutions need to be cleaned out an refocused on actually addressing our long terms financial health. I guess that last statement would officially make me an optimist. Or crazy.

Okay, I’ll accept a combination of both.

We can rise above this but only when we put self interest in the side and do what’s best for everyone moving forward. Okay, I’ve not seen it in my lifetime, but I’ll choose to keep an upbeat tone to this missive.

Wish us luck. We’ll need it.

About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author and award-winning journalist. For free job and work advice, check out the award-winning workplace911.com. Check the revised edition of his Wall Street Journal best seller, “The Boss’s Survival Guide.” If you have a question for Bob, contact him via bob@workplace911.com.

Challenges within the primaries allow us to define what it means to be a real Democrat—to insist that the party truly puts the interests of working people first.

That’s what makes elections like Tuesday’s run-off in Arkansas between Bill Halter and incumbent Senator Blanche Lincoln, the victor, so important. Labor and progressive movements got together to target Lincoln because she had opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, helped to block a robust public option in health care reform, and refused to back one of President Obama’s key nominees to the National Labor Relations Board.

Conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party states that we need strong majorities in order to pass better public policies in Washington, DC. But the logic of “more” doesn’t add up if those people we elect do not provide us with the votes we need. As long as our political strategies ask only that candidates have a “D” behind their names, we’ll never get the type of majorities that will take hard stands to confront the power of big business and create real reform.

Going back to the Carter years in the 1970s, we had large Democratic majorities in Congress, yet we saw labor law weakened and the right to collective bargaining eroded. Under Clinton, Democratic majorities gave us NAFTA and more unfair trade.

If we don’t want history to repeat itself with the current administration, we cannot get wrapped up in the temporary excitement of a given electoral campaign. We need to have the memory, foresight, and strategy to craft something different. That’s why we should hope that challenges within the primaries become more standard.

‘Different,’ not ‘more’

Doing politics differently means two things:

1) having a higher standard of accountability; and

2) judging our success in electoral contests based on a dual bottom line.

Accountability first means being clear about what our agenda is. Strong health care and labor law reforms are key structural changes needed in our economy if we are to rebuild the American middle class. We can’t forget these in the next Congress and simply move on to new matters. Rather than waiting for the White House to lead and hoping that candidates follow, we must lead by putting our priorities forward. We don’t need friends on issues that are foundational to working people, such as health care, living wages, and making collective bargaining the norm; we need champions.

There have been countless calls from labor and other progressive constituencies for accountability from politicians. Nobody disagrees that elected officials should be made to answer for their votes. But there is not much said about how to make this happen–about what the vehicle for ensuring accountability will be.

The answer is an organized base. None of the progressive lobbies in Washington, DC can hold any elected official accountable without strong, organized, permanent grassroots organization in the home states.

The dual bottom line

That gets to my second point about doing politics differently. When labor and progressive movements enter into any electoral contest, they should measure their success based on a dual bottom line: Did we get our candidate elected? And what did we leave behind in terms of lasting organization?

If we have to parachute people in to run a campaign, it’s a good sign that we need to invest more in building local talent and developing local capacity in the area. In A New New Deal David Reynolds and I profile case studies from around the country that show how regional activism will lead to building the type of progressive infrastructure we must have to hold politicians accountable: We need local organizations that have their own ability to run their own political campaigns. We need organizations that can form alliances across institutional boundaries, crafting coalitions between unions, community groups, and other progressive institutions. And we need organizations that can develop policy proposals and do top-flight research.

This type of organization is what will allow us to be part of a governing coalition. Accountability means that, in candidates’ eyes, our core constituencies are as just as essential to governing as they are to getting elected.

Labor and progressives have an urgent need to think long-term. Let’s not abandon our strategy just because we lost on the Halter drive. It will take several attempts before we will really start to send a message about what a new approach to politics means.

Come November, simply restoring or exceeding a 60-vote majority won’t solve the problems we face. Instead, we must go beyond “more” and start doing politics “different.”

About This Author: Amy B. Dean served as President of the South Bay AFL-CIO in Silicon Valley from 1992-2003 and chaired AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s committee on the future direction of labor strategy at the regional level. She is co-author, with David B. Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement.

I am pro-corporate. I’ll go a step further with that and proclaim that I believe that there are no bad corporations, and that I haven’t seen any corporations do anything wrong.

I see the way you are looking at me. I’d better explain.

The reason I say there are no “bad” corporations is because corporations are not sentient beings that can “do” things or that can be good or bad. They can’t make decisions. Corporations are just a bundle of contracts that allow groups of people to more easily raise capital and amass resources. Corporations are things, like chairs, and things do not make decisions, any more than a chair does. Corporations are tools and tools are neither good nor bad.

When I say I am pro-corporate, this is what I mean: The things that the corporate legal structure enables people to do are good for society. This is why We, the People decided to enact the laws that created corporations. If we want to be able to accomplish things on a large scale, like build a railroad or airports and airplanes or skyscrapers – or solar power plants to replace coal power plants – we want to enable people to more easily raise the necessary capital and amass the resources needed to get the job done. The legal structure of the corporate form of a business accomplishes this.

Corporations, a bundle of contracts, don’t “do” anything, people do. And that is why this discussion is important right now. We are looking here at how to restructure our economy, but before we can do that, we have to correctly identify what went wrong. We have to understand who the good and bad actors were.

So what are some of the things that companies have been doing that we as progressives think should change? Let’s use the highly-publicized example of Wal-Mart and their low wages and benefits and Chinese imports. Wal-Mart always complained about being cast as the bad-actor. They said that if Wal-Mart raised wages and benefits and their competitor Target didn’t, then they would be at a competitive disadvantage and Target would take over the business. And, by extension, any company that tries to “do the right thing” is immediately at a disadvantage to a company that does not.

Looked at this way, if we make Wal-Mart raise wages and Target doesn’t, then not only is Wal-Mart in trouble as a company but now we’re starting all over again trying to get Target to raise wages. And if THEY do so, then along comes K-Mart or Costco or a new company X-Co to pay the low wages, charge lower prices and take away the business. This feels like it is going around in a circle, trying to fix a problem in one place and the pressures of the system immediately make the problem appear somewhere else.

I think blaming companies for the things they “do” also places a lot of stress on people inside of them who might agree with us, and even can alienate them from otherwise supporting progressives. People in the corporate world often feel trapped because the rules of the game require them to engage in what we think of as bad behavior. These are good people who would be very helpful to us in making the correct changes but they feel forced by the system to do the things they do. They are pulled two ways. Executives at Wal-Mart on the one hand can be want to raise wages, and on the other hand have a responsibility to compete with Target.

So what am I getting at here? The companies are not the problem, the rules we set up for them are. Companies operate on a playing field on which the rules of the game are supposed to be decided by US. We, the People are supposed to set up the ground rules and then the companies are supposed to follow those rules. Wal-Mart followed those rules. If we didn’t like the wages and benefits that companies pay, why don’t we change the rules and tell them they all have to pay higher wages and provide better benefits?

Now we’re getting somewhere. Many progressives have been trying to get companies to “behave” in better ways, and haven’t been getting much done — I think due to not correctly identifying the problem. The real problem is that we haven’t set up the rules of the playing field to require these companies – all of them – to provide good wages and benefits, etc. It is our job to regulate what these corporations do. So why didn’t we, through our government, change the rules for all the companies, so they all had a level playing field and clear rules? Identifying why we have not fixed the rules is the path to fixing the larger problem.

What has been happening is that a few people in the bigger companies have been using the resources of those big corporations to influence our system and set the rules of that playing field to give an edge to their companies. They do this so they can personally gain.

This is where we need to focus to fix the corporate system. There should be no way for people in companies to have any say whatsoever in how the playing field on which they operate is set up. How to accomplish this is a subject for future posts.

As I said above, corporations are just a tool, like a hammer. But a hammer can do a lot of damage if a person hits you upside the head with it. That is what we have to stop: a few people using corporate resources and hitting us upside the head.

Oh, and for the record, I am pro-chair, too, though my wife will probably insist I am a pro-couch partisan.

Dave Johnson:Dave is at Fellow at Campaign for America’s Future and a Fellow at the Commonwealth Institute.

This article originally appeared at Blog for Our Future and is reprinted here with permission from the author.

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The Government Accountability Office has recently released a report showing that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Voluntary Protection Program is ineffective. OSHA’s VPP, established in 1982 and expanded to over twice the number of job sites during the Bush administration, allows businesses to avoid routine OSHA inspections by, among other things, demonstrating below average injury and illness rates, and having a good health and safety program. This allows businesses that participate to voluntarily monitor employee health and safety, without much government oversight. This “hands-off” approach by OSHA was seen by many as giving too much leeway to employers, and insufficient to protect the health and safety of the workers. United States Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) even declared it a “recipe for disaster.”

Unsurprisingly, the GAO report concluded that not all participants in the VPP were maintaining the minimum safety levels required by the program, yet there was not an adequate system set up within the VPP to ensure that only qualified participants were allowed to remain in the program. First, there was no policy that requires documentation of OSHA’s follow-up actions in response to jobsite injuries or fatalities and second, there are no internal controls within the VPP that monitor jobsite injuries and fatalities to ensure that they stay below a minimum required for the program.

According to OSHA’s VPP manual, regional offices are required to review the safety and health systems of a jobsite following a serious injury or fatality. These reviews are supposed to help to protect the workers by determining if changes are needed to prevent that type of accident from happening again, or by removing the jobsite from the VPP. The problem is there is no requirement that these reviews be documented within the VPP files. Documentation would allow OSHA to maintain a check on the regional offices and ensure that appropriate actions were being taken; however, in their study, the GAO found no documentation of actions taken by VPP staff in regard to a number of jobsite fatalities. GAO’s further inquiry determined that while a small number of these sites voluntarily removed themselves from the VPP, a much larger number remained VPP participants, including a site which had three fatalities in five years and a site which received ten violations relating to a fatality, including seven serious violations. A small number of these sites never even received a complete investigation after an onsite fatality. These discoveries left the GAO to conclude that several sites, including sites that were part of the VPP’s Star program (the highest level of safety standards and least frequency of OSHA reviews), did not “successfully protect employees from fatality, injury, and illness” and yet remained in the program.

The GAO has suggested that if OSHA is going to continue with this “hands-off” approach they should, at the very minimum, establish better internal controls, which will help regional offices to ensure that only job sites that truly have exceptional health and safety procedures and records to remain participants of the VPP. The GAO found that the vast majority of jobsite reviews performed by regional OSHA offices were performed without access to past medical records of workers at that site, which is information that should have been obtained from the national office before the review. This information is required for the jobsite reviews to provide the national office with accurate jobsite injury and illness rates. The GAO also found that the OSHA’s national office took no effort to review the actions of the regional offices to ensure that only jobsites that met the minimum health and safety levels remained as participants in the VPP. As a result, the GAO found that 12 percent of jobsites had injury and illness rates that were higher than the national average for their respective industries, including a jobsite that had an injury and illness rate that was 4 times higher than the industry average. It does not take much to realize that a jobsite with an injury and illness rate 4 times higher than the industry average should not be able to forgo routine inspections by OSHA, and having jobsites such as these seems to defeat the whole purpose of the VPP. Needless to say, this “hands-off” approach has some serious shortcomings, and maybe trusting companies to maintain safe work environments is not such a good idea if the program does not have a procedure for dealing with jobsites that do not actually keep workers safe.

The final major flaw that the GAO discovered when compiling their report was that OSHA has set no performance goals for the VPP nor found ways to measure its actual effectiveness. OSHA has acknowledged they do need to set up performance goals in accordance with the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, but have claimed as evidence of the program’s effectiveness that VPP participants’ safety rate are consistently lower than the national averages. However, the GAO investigation discovered that there were discrepancies between the injury and illness rates shown in OSHA’s annual reports and the actual rates shown by the jobsites. Additionally, the GAO investigation found some workers who claimed that “the injury and illness rates requirements of the VPP are used as a tool by management to pressure workers not to report injuries and illness.” This means that OSHA’s claims about the effectiveness are not backed by any real data, and further goes to show the serious shortcomings of the VPP.

While OSHA has stated that they have accepted the GAO’s recommendations, maybe the solution is to not try and patch together this broken and faulty program. Maybe it is just not possible to trust the health and safety of America’s workforce with the employers who are encouraged to cut corners on safety procedures to save money. It seems a “hands-off” approach to worker health and safety simply may not be a viable option.

David Combiths: David Combiths is a Legal Intern with Workplace Fairness, where he writes and edits legal content relating to employee health, safety, injury and illness issues. He is currently a second year student at the George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC.

Nothing surprises me at work any more. After personally responding to over 50,000 emails from the corner office and the cube and 14 years as a workplace advice columnist, I thought I’d seen it all. I was wrong.

CareerBuilder asked employees how often they arrived late for work. At the end of 2007, 15 percent confided they’re late at least once a week. By the end of 2008, with a million people being laid off all around them, you’d imagine that the percentage of late arriving employees would decline dramatically.

And you’d be wrong.

The number of workers routinely showing up late for work increased to 20 percent, with 12 percent admitting that they showed up late more than once a week.

Suicide. That’s what leaps to mind because being consistently late for work is seen by many managers, and Human Resources, as the easiest excuse to fire someone. In fact, 30 percent of companies say they have.

Anyone who is a regular reader of Workplace911, knows that I see former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain as a human piñata, an example of wretched excess that just can’t be poked enough. Unfortunately, management doesn’t own a monopoly on stupid.

Take the California State employees who recently protested a cutback in their hours. Please! Too bad so many newspapers are going out of business, because these state employees need an easy way to learn that their plight ain’t so bad. They still have jobs.

Yes, this blog is an equal-opportunity criticizer. We take on CEOs and employees when either deserves a trip to the woodshed. Unfortunately this is far too rare, in a country where one political party seems to spend all its time fawning over leaders while the other party idolizes its followers. Isn’t it time for everyone to take off the rose-colored glasses and see how both sides have contributed to the nightmare we find ourselves in today?

Back to the increasing number of tardy workers, not only are more and more of us late, our excuses are getting exponentially dumber. You just can’t make this stuff up:

· “I got locked in my trunk by my son.”

· “My left turn signal was out so I had to make all right turns to get to work.”

· “I was attacked by a raccoon and had to stop by the hospital to make sure it wasn’t rabid.”

· And my personal favorite: “I feel like I’m in everyone’s way if I show up on time.”

I understand that the current economic headlines can drain the life force out of the most optimistic person. But seeing one in five workers choosing to be late stunned and depressed me. Let’s remember the context here, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press, 47 percent of workers fear they could be laid off, 71 percent know someone who has been and 63 percent report having trouble paying their bills. And the number of people late for work increases. Ouch!

I have a simple philosophy. I try to make it hard for my company to fire me. I make them work at it. Clearly I’m old school in this regard.

This survey reminded me of a boss who once wrote to me about one of his employees. She was sitting at her desk reading People magazine. He asked her to put it away and to get back to work. She began to cry and went on disability for two days. That’s what I’d call people who really need People.

Entitlement. That, unfortunately, seems to be the one thing that far too many bosses and employees share today, the belief that 90 percent of work is just showing up, perks included. We need to replace that “E” word with a new one, empathy. More employees who take the time to see the world through their boss’s eyes and more bosses who take the time to see through their employees’ eyes.

Our collective excesses got us into this mess. I believe only our collective empathy will allow us to dig our way out and to build a more humane and productive workplace. In the coming weeks I’ll outline strategies on how to accomplish this. Stay tuned…

About the Author: Bob Rosner is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist and contributor to On The Money. He has been called “Dilbert with a solution.” Check out the free resources available at workplace911.com. You can contact Bob via bob@workplace911.com.

A few years ago Workplace911 did an online poll. It asked, “Which movie title best describes your relationship with your boss?” Sure, the question was light-hearted, but the results weren’t:

Little Shop of Horrors: 20%

It’s a Wonderful Life: 24%

But the #1 movie title describing the relationship between employees and bosses?

House of Games: 56%

To all the bosses out there, I have some bad news. In the “good old days,” your people didn’t like you that much. Given today’s economic meltdown that occurred on your watch, I’m sorry to say, it’s really hit the fan.

Welcome to “Velcro” management. Where every stupid statement uttered by the former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, sticks to YOU. Where every corporate jet sticks to YOU. Where every million dollar bonus payment sticks to YOU. Think about it, who was the enemy in the last movie you saw? Odds are it was a corporate villain. Is it fair? No. But populist anger against you is growing exponentially.

I discovered how angry people are on a recent flight to New York City to appear on OTM. I asked my seatmate if he minded if I practiced some of my observations on him. After doing a riff on the $35,000 executive commode, I paused and asked if I’d gone too far. He said, “NO. That is exactly what I’m feeling and so are most of my friends. Please speak up for all of those of us who don’t have a voice.”

Wretched CEO excess isn’t reserved for just “a few bad apples” anymore; it’s the norm in the eyes of most of the people that I hear from today. I’ve got six words to help any CEO who is ready to lead and wants to really escape being tarnished by other CEOs: “One dollar a year in salary.” Only truly bold action will separate you from the tawdry norm that has become the CEO standard operating procedure.

And you ain’t seen nothing yet. According to a recent Associated Press poll, almost half of us now fear losing our jobs. And almost two-thirds of us are now concerned about being able to pay our bills. And more than seven in 10 of us know someone who has been laid off.

Mr. and Mrs. CEO, it’s time to smell the coffee. This economic mess didn’t happen despite your best efforts. It happened because of them. Same-old-same-old layoffs and lecturing everyone about tightening their belts won’t work anymore. You either need to lead, or you need to leave.

As more of us lose our jobs, I think we’ll start to see this anger spilling out into the suites, and the streets, if for no other reason than people suddenly have time on their hands to make their feelings known and little left to lose. It’s our job to speak out. Start with your next corporate proxy statement. That’s safe and won’t threaten your job. Anonymous blog postings are next. Look for every opportunity to add your voice of displeasure about our current crop of leaders.

However, there is a white knight out there for all of us: Donald Trump. When the peacock and The Donald are done with celebrities, the Apprentice needs to take on CEOs. Imagine the huge ratings as Trump says, “You’re Fired!” to executives from the banking and auto industries. The people are ready for someone to say those two magic words that you’re famous for to corporate leaders across the land. You go guy!

Bob Rosner is a best-selling author, award-winning journalist and contributor to On The Money. He has been called “Dilbert with a solution.” Check out the free resources available at workplace911.com. You can contact Bob via bob@workplace911.com.