Democratizing our economy.

The new Republican majority has pro posed an extraordinarily harsh agen da: eliminating subsidized housing, limit ing the duration of welfare benefits, and capping funding for school lunch pro grams. Kinder and gentler liberals like President Clinton offer education and other incentives to get citizens off wel fare. Paradoxically, however, both sides seem to agree that welfare recipients are the root of our problems. They assume that decent jobs are available and that we need only force or persuade the poor to seek them. Most citizens, however, know what politicians are loathe to acknowledge: good jobs are scarce. This artificial scarcity will endure until we have a political movement willing to curb the excesses of the market and democratize our economy. It is time to move beyond both Newt and Bill.

Let's take a closer look at the recent economic "boom" The only boom I see is in corporate profits and the temp agency market. An unprecedented number of the new jobs which have been created are part time or temporary and offer no benefits. Businesses are able to keep costs low and profits high--but at great long term detriment to the society.

Many of those fortunate enough to have full time employment are working the longest hours of their lives-often at jobs which remain rote, narrow, and minutely supervised. Kim Moody and Simone Savognac have reported in Time Out, a monograph recently issued by the Detroit based journal Labor Notes, that average factory overtime, which is fre quently involuntary, has increased by nearly a third in the last decade. When some workers are forced to work long hours, others are left with only tem porary jobs or no jobs at all.

Beyond that, core office and factory workers are insecure and afraid of losing their jobs-but fear and overwork do not make productive workplaces. Productivity growth stagnates, while the pool of unemployed and underemployed workers allows employers to keep a lid on all worker wages.

Even in the face of obvious worker discontent, corporate management, subject to the pressures of pension and mutual funds, worry more about short term profits than long term investment in job redesign and worker training for either employed or unemployed workers. Since overworked employees enjoy little opportunity for family life or the devel opment of skills and interests inside or outside those jobs, they can all too easily come to resent those who, for whatever reasons, are not working full time and receive even meager support from the government.

Conservatives can easily step into this climate of fear, anger, and insecurity by promising lower taxes and freedom from government "strangulation" of the market. Eliminate affirmative action, roll back welfare, and curb unions, and the "private sector" will unleash new waves of prosperity, we are told. Those with any historical sense know, however, that further waves of market deregulation will exacerbate already intolerable in equalities and leave workers too poor to buy the goods our corporations produce. Such extreme deregulation is the road to business cycles which can destroy societies. We must, therefore, devise an alternative which improves the quakty of life for both welfare recipients and traditional full time office and factory workers.

In the current climate of hostility to welfare, humanists should begin with a critique of welfare for the rich and should advocate a set of programs that would provide basic security and em powerment for all. Republican cuts in housing assistance should be opposed, but we should also point out that the government's biggest housing program is not for the poor but for the rich. Eighty percent of the $52 billion in benefits conveyed by the deductibility of home mortgage interest goes to the top 20 percent of the income pyramid.

If this program were to be changed to a simple tax credit (the benefit from which does not depend upon one's tax bracket) and capped at a reasonable amount, it would increase the supply of affordable housing for all poorer and working class citizens--without added cost to government.

Tax and welfare policies affecting parents of young children are also in need of reforms modeled on European child-allowance programs. Harvard soci ologist Theda Skocpol has suggested in her recent work, Social Policy in the United States, that we turn welfare programs for mothers and dependent children from means tested charity into universal entitlements on the social security model. She advocates a child allowance for all parents along with legislation that would establish auto matically fixed child support require meets for absent parents to be collected through wage withholding, just as social security taxes are collected now.

These programs would ease the burden of poor single mothers and pro, vice more flexibility for middle class families. Studies of the poor both here and abroad show that out of wedlock teenage pregnancy is reduced by pro grams which foster greater equality and security for young women.

In the long run, only improvements in the number and quality of jobs will give all our citizens the security and independence to keep them out of dead end personal or occupational tracks. Today, however, we have lost all faith that government can create useful jobs. University of Massachusetts econo mists Sam Bowles and Herbert Gintis have recently suggested a way out of this political impasse: allow each citizen a tax credit of several hundred dollars for contributions to the local tax exempt charity or service of their choice. This simple change in tax law would give working and middle class citizens, who are more generous in relative terms than the wealthy, equal credit for their gen erosity and more say in the direction of the nonprofit sector. It would allow citizens directly to fund and thereby create jobs in those local agencies which meet pressing community needs in ef fective ways.

Periodic borrowing by government will still be needed to fund such tax credits and to finance long term social capital, such as schools and transit systems. But deficits are not the only way to create new jobs. Nor should we be eternally wedded to the 40 hour work week as "full time" if we care about quality of life. Over the long haul, labor should have the right to convert future gains in productivity into shorter working hours rather than higher year ly wages. Anti discrimination and af firmative action provisions should also be broadened to include the requirement that part time workers receive the same benefits, on a prorated basis, that other full time workers receive.

These proposals are low cost ways to increase the number of quality full and part time jobs and give workers more time for family and leisure pursuits. If such reforms were accompanied by revisions in labor law and pension regu rations to give workers more voice in the design of their own jobs and in broader company policy, our economy would become both more productive and more humane. And far from increasing the size of the government, these reforms would level the economic playing field and make our markets more just and efficient.

While we must, for the time being, fight against cruel cuts in the safety net for the poor, liberal welfare policies will not blunt the forces which expand the pool of poor, jobless citizens nor lessen the growing emotional and economic burdens on a tired working class. They are palliatives at best. If humanists don't keep a more democratic analysis and agenda alive, the increasing difficulties of traditional liberal reforms in stemming the tide of corporate power can only oc casion an intensified and ever more angry conservatism.

John Buell lives in Southwest Harbor, Maine, and writes on labor and environmental topics. His most recent work is Democracy By Other Means: The Politics of Work, Leisure, and Environment (University of Illinois Press, 1995).