Says MOMA protester Michael Regan, who has been striking since late April for higher pay and job security: “A lot of people have the attitude, ‘I am an innocent bystander, why should I be affected?’ Unions aren’t what they were and people simply aren’t aware.”

Indeed, the Verizon strike — involving 87,200 workers who walked off the job first thing Sunday demanding better working conditions and more job security — has hardly been the subject of heated dinner party debates. After all, basic phone service hasn’t been disrupted, and customers across the East Coast have barely begun to feel the pinch of finding no one available to do repairs, establish new service or look up a number for them when they call 411. And when it comes to basic solidarity with unions, well, Americans just don’t seem that fired up about labor issues.

Americans still clamor for good working conditions, and corporations still tend to be characterized as big, nasty beasts out to squash worker bees. But, on the whole, Americans have come to accept layoffs, downsizing and other corporate malfeasances as facts of life. To many, the accepted solution to bad working conditions is to quit, not protest and put the public out. And, if people’s own lives are not terribly disrupted, the only way a strike gets their attention is through careful media orchestration.

“In each struggle, unions have to get the message out as to what the problems are,” says Judy Stepan-Norris, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine. “It’s not an easy thing to do.” And she’s not sure that Verizon workers have managed to create a compelling story to win vast public support.

In fact, the demands of the striking members of Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers are hardly captivating to a public that has shown itself uninterested in organized labor. The unions are negotiating with Verizon for assurances that they will be able to organize employees without management interference at Verizon Wireless, the nation’s largest mobile phone provider, and they want limits on forced overtime for telephone operators and customer service representatives among other demands.

The issues may be important to the workers at Verizon, but they hardly have the kind of galvanizing force that, say, Cesar Chavez’s exposi of inhuman working conditions and criminally low pay on America’s farms did in the 1970s. Chavez had a story to tell — and it was one that Americans felt they had to act on, making his 1975 grape boycott a historical win for organized labor.

Though the issues they are fighting for may be much less dramatic, Verizon workers believe the strike will garner public support for their cause. “The people who work for a living understand,” says James Joyce, a computer technician at Verizon, which formed last month by the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE. “I love my job. We all love our jobs. We want to stay here.”

So, many an American will ask, why are you striking?

“There seems to be greater public acceptance [of strikes] when lower-wage workers are involved,” says Howard Kimeldorf, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, who has done extensive research on labor unions. “But there’s no tolerance for airline pilots, baseball players and others with high salaries.”

Just this past weekend, United Airlines canceled at least 270 flights at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and put the blame on its pilots, who have refused to work overtime since their contract expired in April. And while the pilots’ union and United continued negotiating a contract with a federal mediator, passengers were seen on television bad-mouthing pilots for selfishly trying to bolster their own six-figure salaries without concern for thousands of stranded customers.

United pilot Herb Hunter, a spokesman for the pilots’ union, said he has sensed increased consumer disgust. Hunter was delayed heading toward Chicago on Saturday and walked back to the cabin to show passengers weather maps so they understood the wait had nothing to do with labor problems. “It’s unfortunate that some people in management have been saying it’s the labor dispute, and that is just flat not true,” Hunter told the Associated Press, adding that some United pilots have refused to work overtime, but that there’s no organized effort by the union.

Still, the perception exists that, collectively, pilots are choosing to harm customers.

“The one thing unions can’t do is alienate the public,” Kimeldorf says. “I think public support is critical in every case, because politicians care about that, and they’re the ones who eventually intervene in strikes. Not having public support also can compromise a union’s ability to stay together as a unit.”

Workers at the United Parcel Service seemed to understand this during their two-week strike in 1997, in which the company ended up adding 10,000 full-time jobs for part-time workers. The UPS labor victory was crucial because it was the first time in many years that organized labor was able to win public support for a major strike. Using extensive advertising and public relations, the Teamsters were able to portray union workers as victims, trying to earn decent pay with part-time positions. The union also effectively painted the ranks of UPS’ part-time employees as diverse, working-class Americans, and despite a disruption of service, customers seemed to forget that they weren’t getting their packages — or at least didn’t mind switching to another courier. “The union got out the message that workers were making under $25,000 and that there were lots of single mothers on the picket lines,” Kimeldorf says.

Says Stepan-Norris: “There’s no consistency in public support for strikes. Winning over the public is something labor unions have to earn. But that’s hard to do when the public is directly affected.”

Employees at Verizon have raised concerns that longtime telephone workers could be pushed out if the company hires lower-paid, nonunion employees at its fast-growing wireless division. “All we want is a few crumbs from the table and don’t give our jobs away,” John Lang, a 32-year veteran of Verizon, told the Associated Press.

But the public, so far, does not appear moved.

“Verizon, as far as I know, offers one of the best benefit packages in the corporate world. (Free benefits.) They also have excellent working conditions … So why are these issues on the table? I’m in total agreement with unionizing the Verizon wireless sector and seeking job protection. But come on folks, stick to the issues [at] hand,” wrote one visitor to the Verizon stock message board at Ragingbull.com.

On its Web site, the AFL-CIO says negativity toward unions has waned in recent years. In 1993, one out of three Americans felt negatively toward unions, compared to one in four last year, according to a study by Peter Hart Research, commissioned by the AFL-CIO. And union membership rose from 16.21 million to 16.48 million last year, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Standards — but that still pales in comparison to years past. In 1979, for instance, 21 million Americans were members of unions.

Now, union leaders are scrambling to boost their rolls, targeting women, minorities, high-tech workers and even college students, in an effort to keep the union spirit alive. To do this, the AFL-CIO now finds itself doing a lot of community outreach to explain what unions do, and why it’s important to support them.

“Making the public aware is an important piece of leverage,” says Elaine Bernard, director of Harvard University’s trade union program, an executive program for union leaders. “Unions have to show that they provide a long-term benefit that outweighs any inconvenience the public may feel. But it’s a challenge, because the public is a tough taskmaster.”

Whitman’s decision will probably result in some layoffs in California, but it wouldn’t be fair to label her an outright hypocrite on the basis of this strategy alone. Downsizing may well be the right course for Hewlett-Packard, which is having a hard time adjusting to an era where computing is moving to the smartphone and leaving the PC far behind. But there’s a data point in the New York Times’ report on the layoffs that deserves close attention: “China, which is one of H.P.’s highest growth areas, will probably be spared.”

Again, this makes strict bottom-line sense. Hewlett Packard, by its own admission, now derives around 60 percent of its revenues from overseas. China is the world’s fastest-growing market for computer gizmos. Cutting staff in China would be suicidal. And HP’s behavior is in no way extraordinary. In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that between 2009 and 2011, fully three-quarters of the new jobs created at the 35 largest U.S. multinationals were overseas. And this isn’t just about offshoring to cheaper labor. Overseas is where the demand is.

The job creation plan outlined by Whitman when she ran for governor included cutting red tape, lowering various government fees, and tax breaks. Again, it’s an agenda that maps quite closely to Romney’s — and that’s no accident: Whitman was Romney’s finance chair during his 2008 campaign, and hosted a California fundraiser for him in March. But while cutting regulations may boost corporate profits,  it doesn’t do a darn thing for boosting demand. HP is probably more likely to take the money saved via a tax break and spend it on a new R&D center in Shanghai than it is to staff up in Silicon Valley.

All of this explains why having an illustrious business resume doesn’t mean that one is automatically qualified to occupy the White House in a time of economic stress. Business executives have a mandate to act in their own self-interest — to seek profit by any means, including  downsizing in the U.S. and pouring resources into China. That’s why HP’s “Government Affairs” page stresses its support for ” free trade and the reduction of barriers across borders,” even in the face of growing evidence that outsourcing to China has a negative impact on U.S. job creation.

A political leader is supposed to think in terms of the larger public interest — which means things like figuring out how to fund education or pay for the social welfare net that protects the unemployed and feeds the hungry. California’s voters figured that out when they rejected Whitman. Once again, it will be interesting to see where the general public at large comes down in the case of Romney.

Long Op-Ed short, Brooks says “cyclicalists” (unnamed) think we should deficit-spend our way to prosperity, because, according to Brooks, they believe that “the level of government spending is the main factor in determining how fast an economy grows.” (No one actually believes this.) But according to Brooks, all of our problems are “structural,” which is to say that the reason we have mass unemployment and debt and growing wealth disparity is because of “technological change” and crappy schools. And “special-interest deals” in the tax code.

The point of the Brooks argument is simply to make continued non-action to address actual short-term pressing problems sound serious and wise. He’s not even making a partisan argument, you see. Oh, people on “the left” have been having their silly little debate, but all the serious people — “some on the left but mostly in the center and on the right” — have accepted the sad truth, like Brooks. And Brooks is soberly explaining the situation. He is not at all responding to Paul Krugman, his fellow New York Times columnist, who has lately taken to fiercely rebutting arguments put forth by various unnamed “centrists” and “moderates” in his columns.

This is Brooks’ conclusion:

But you can only mask structural problems for so long. The whole thing has gone kablooey. The current model, in which we try to compensate for structural economic weakness with tax cuts and an unsustainable welfare state, simply cannot last. The old model is broken. The jig is up.

It’s so sad, but everyone will now just have to accept that social democracy is an impossibility. We have learned that “the old economic and welfare state model is unsustainable,” so shut up about your unemployment benefits running out and there being no jobs still. (Silly me, here I was thinking the recent massive international financial crisis actually exposed post-industrial capitalism as the “unsustainable” thing.)

Ezra Klein has the rather polite, policy-based response to Brooks’ argument: Essentially that even if Brooks is right about America’s structural problems needing to be addressed, we should still also give poor people money and indebted people relief and spend money on infrastructure improvements to prevent these structural problems from becoming even worse.

Dean Baker has the response in which it is pointed out that Brooks is full of predictable, repetitive shit. The “we have no jobs because of technology and also there are plenty of jobs but unemployed people have the wrong skills” line is as old as the Great Depression and there is no actual evidence for it. It’s just what people who want to sound serious while dismissing efforts to spend money on economic stimulus say.

Hey, let’s check out some recent real estate news at the Washington Post’s Reliable Source blog, for fun. Looks like a Mr. David Brooks just bought himself a $3.95 million home in Cleveland Park!

The New York Times op-ed columnist and wife Sarah are trading up — from their longtime home near Bethesda’s Burning Tree Club to a century-old (exquisitely renovated) five bedroom, four-and-a-half bath house in Cleveland Park. It includes a two-car garage, iron and stone fence, generous-sized porch and balcony, and what appear to be vast spaces for entertaining. The timing seems to have been right: After only a few days on the market, their old place (which also boasts five bedrooms) is under contract for $1.6 million.

Whoops, sorry about your welfare state collapsing, 12 million out of work Americans, but it was just too “unsustainable” to keep you employed — you should all consider developing new skills and trying to find more “productive” work, like writing bullshit columns for the New York Times, maybe.

Unfortunately, it’s still a tiny number, and it is dwarfed by a much larger figure: 607,000. That’s the number of public sector jobs — federal, state and local — that have been lost since Obama took office. It’s a story that probably isn’t getting told enough about the Obama administration: Big government keeps getting smaller.

But the real eye-opener comes when we compare Obama’s numbers to George W. Bush’s. In Bush’s first term, the economy shed 913,000 private sector jobs! 913,000! The only thing that saved Bush’s first term from being a complete economic disaster, in terms of employment, was robust public sector growth: The economy added 900,000 government jobs. One wonders: Without the massive growth in the public sector during Bush’s first term, would he have been reelected?

This is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it punches a big hole in the theory that Bush’s tax cuts were responsible for boosting employment during his first term. Let’s also recall that the Bush recession (which he inherited from Clinton) was far, far milder than the near-Depression Obama inherited from Bush. In that context, Obama’s performance resuscitating the private sector has been miraculous. The Washington Post published an article criticizing Obama for not doing enough to resist job losses in the public sector, without fully acknowledging the political impossibility of additional stimulus after the first round, but we haven’t heard all that much over the years about how the growth of government saved Bush’s bacon.

Of course, Obama isn’t running against Bush, so that’s moot. But as this presidential campaign heats up, it might be worth periodically reminding ourselves: Bush led the U.S. economy out of a weak recession with strong public sector growth. Obama is leading the U.S. economy out of a near-death experience while a steadily shrinking government swells the unemployment rolls. Which magic trick do you think is harder?

The only good news in the report: The numbers for February and March were both revised upward, from 240,000 to 259,000 in February, and from 120,000 to 154,000 in March. The economy is still growing.  Indeed, over the past 12 months, the U.S has added 1.8 million private sector jobs.

The glum report comes as little surprise. While economic data points were all over the map in April, some key indicators — jobless claims, Wednesday’s ADP private sector labor report, and the first estimate of GDP growth for the first quarter of 2012 — all suggested that the economic recovery that seemed so robust over the winter was losing steam. The numbers aren’t bad enough to justify outright panic; Americans are still lustily buying cars, the manufacturing sector appears strong, and gas prices are dropping steadily for their recent highs  – but it’s still very difficult to see signs of sustained momentum. This is the economy we’ve got right now. We can’t even blame austerity: Government payrolls dropped by only 15,000.

Ironically, on Thursday, Gallup’s presidential approval survey showed Obama at 51 percent, the highest mark he’s received since Seal Team Six took out Osama bin Laden. Conventional wisdom has assumed that Obama’s steadily improving approval ratings tracked the growing economy. If so, it will be interesting to see if those numbers start coming down again.

Mitt Romney, as one might expect, is already on the case. He promptly told Fox News that it was a “terrible job report.” That, strictly speaking, is not true. A “terrible” jobs report is one in which the economy loses half a million jobs or more in a single month — as was the case when Obama took office in 2009. (In fact, economist Justin Wolfers tweeted, April’s jobs report marks a milestone of sorts: Private sector job creation is, for the first time, in positive territory for the entirety of Obama’s term. Since January 2009, the private sector has added 35,000 jobs. The public sector, in contrast, has shed 607,000. So much for Big Government!)

April’s jobs report is disappointing, and could signal worse news to come, but there’s still a decent chance that we are just experiencing a bump in the road. By most measures, the U.S. economy is performing much better than it was a year ago.

The healthcare industry makes up 16 percent of our economy. Yet even in these days of close to 10 percent unemployment, we do not invest enough money in our young people to train them for jobs in healthcare — an already understaffed industry that will have to serve an additional 32 million people once the provisions of the 2010 health-reform law take full effect. Instead, when faced with pressure from hospitals and nursing homes for more healthcare workers, the federal government grants visas to import nurses, physicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, and many other types of healthcare workers from countries that can ill afford to lose them.

In some U.S. industries, the outcome of globalization is positive or neutral. Take the sugar industry. Due to lower labor and land costs and better weather conditions, it’s far cheaper to grow sugar cane in the Caribbean than sugar beets in North Dakota. As import taxes fall, global transportation improves, and the number of sugar beet farms in the United States declines, more Americans are sweetening their cereal with sugar from Jamaican sugar cane. Americans save money buying cheaper sugar; the economy of the poorer sugar-growing countries improves, lifting thousands of people out of poverty; and the few displaced American sugar beet farmers generally find other work. But sugar is not a strategic commodity. If CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, were to halt sugar exports to the United States, we would experience no crisis. Sugar is not essential to our diet or life, and we have plenty of substitutes, from honey and corn syrup to NutraSweet. If necessary, within a year we could again be producing sugar in the United States.

The U.S. healthcare industry is 200 times larger than the U.S. tire-manufacturing industry, yet President Obama risked a trade war with China, our biggest trade partner, over tires. He was understandably trying to protect well-paying manufacturing jobs for American workers. Yet each year, we bring thousands of nurses from China to work in even better-paying jobs rather than train young people in this country to become nurses. The irony is that the economic costs of “insourcing” healthcare workers, including the loss of jobs no longer available to Americans, are far greater than the costs when we import Chinese tires. In 2003 the Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS), a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization that administers the U.S. nursing licensing exam for foreign-trained nurses, opened a testing center in Beijing. The opening of this center initiated a “mushrooming” of new nursing schools in China and led to credible predictions that China will soon surpass the Philippines as the number one source of foreign-trained nurses imported to the United States.

Given the publicity and furor over the loss of manufacturing jobs, the lack of protest over healthcare-worker insourcing is surprising. Congress passed legislation and President George W. Bush signed a law in 2007 to protect the American sock industry from the rival Honduran sock industry. Yes, that’s right: socks. Protecting a few hundred $15-an-hour sock-manufacturing jobs based solely in the small town of Fort Payne, Ala., was worth acting on. Yet insourcing hundreds of thousands of $60-an-hour healthcare jobs has prompted no such similarly high-level response from our leaders.

Instead, on a regular basis, Congress approves and presidents from both political parties sign legislation to enable the legal entry of an ever-increasing number of foreign healthcare workers. Each year, about 20,000 new healthcare-specific visas are issued for these workers.

The United States has traditionally not allowed strategic industries to be outsourced. That’s why the U.S. steel industry and the U.S. car industry have received bailout after bailout. Access to enough steel and automobiles is essential to our economy; without a sufficient supply of each, our economy would be severely damaged. It’s time we acknowledged that the health of the population is just as important as steel and autos in keeping our economy strong. Healthcare is too important to risk continuing to insource it.

It’s not just a matter of protecting and expanding jobs for American workers. Every year, thousands of Americans die, and the health of thousands more is compromised, because of the shortage of healthcare workers in every one of the healthcare professions.

On the surface, insourcing may appear to be a harmless or even win-win solution to the country’s healthcare-worker shortage. The hospital receives a much-needed worker, and the worker escapes life in a struggling country for a better life here. But we should be training more people in this country to work in those professions, especially people from poor and minority communities. Rather than investing in our own people and communities, however, the U.S. government has decided to take the best and brightest workers from struggling countries.

Many foreign-trained healthcare workers, no matter how smart, are not adequately prepared for practice in the fast-paced, high-tech world of U.S. medicine. Whether in operating rooms, hospital wards, or nursing homes, inadequately qualified and poorly oriented foreign healthcare workers endanger the lives of their patients, as well as the lives and careers of their American-trained colleagues.

But the main reason for this country’s rise in unnecessary deaths and delayed care is understaffing — a result of the failure to train and place enough healthcare workers, especially in rural and underserved communities. Americans who live in rural areas make fewer visits to healthcare providers and are less likely to receive preventive care. The infant-mortality rate for African-Americans is twice that for the average American; Latinos are twice as likely as white Americans to die from diabetes. These health disparities are due in large part to a lack of healthcare workers, especially primary-care workers, in their communities. The quick fix has been importing foreign healthcare workers for these unfilled positions. Unfortunately, once these workers fulfill their initial contracts, most move to communities without healthcare-worker shortages; in fact, foreign-trained healthcare workers are more likely to practice in the well-served, major metropolitan areas than their American-trained counterparts.

Even if good foreign-trained healthcare workers were here in numbers adequate to meet our needs, the U.S. healthcare system is about encounter a tidal wave of demand as 78 million baby boomers approach their 60s. Older people make, on average, six visits to a healthcare provider a year, compared with two visits per year for people under 60. The healthcare workforce is aging, too: More than 50 percent of practicing healthcare workers are eligible to retire during the next 10 years, which will leave us with fewer workers to treat more and sicker patients.

In the eyes of employers, of course, insourcing healthcare workers appears to offer many benefits. Most doctors and nurses in developing countries earn a fraction of what American doctors and nurses earn: A Caribbean nurse makes around $1,000 a month; an Ethiopian physician, about $100 a month. Not only are many foreign-trained healthcare workers accustomed to lower salaries and quality of life, but they also carry little or no education debt, while their American-trained colleagues typically graduate with five- and six-figure debt burdens. With average student debt burdens of $155,00011 for newly graduated physicians and $30,375 for nurses, American-trained health workers require a higher salary just to help pay for their education. Trained in a much more hierarchical environment, foreign workers are much less likely to unionize, or even express dissatisfaction with their work. As the percentage of imported healthcare workers increases, their attitudes toward salary and terms of employment undermine the bargaining power of U.S. workers, and even affect the important feedback loop between employees and management.

Polls indicate that 70 to 80 percent of Americans want to reduce the rate of immigration into the United States. Yet the American public is not aware of our policy of using healthcare-worker-specific visas to solve the healthcare-worker shortage.

Some legislators who publicly support stabilizing immigration consistently vote to increase the number of healthcare-worker-specific visas granted each year. It’s not that American citizens don’t want to become healthcare workers and fill these jobs. This distinction is critical, because every industry that has brought in foreign workers has argued that American workers won’t do the work for the prevailing wage, or won’t do the work no matter how high the pay is. In the healthcare industry, this argument does not apply. U.S. citizens want the jobs. They just can’t access the training. The United States does not have enough positions in health-professional schools to meet industry demands.

The tens of thousands of qualified nursing school and medical school applicants who are denied entry to school each year permanently lose out on their chosen careers, work that is consistently ranked in the top tier of salaries, with excellent benefits and almost guaranteed job security. This loss of career opportunity is even greater for rural and minority young people, who are grossly underrepresented in the higher-level health professions, such as physicians and nurses, and overrepresented in the lower-level professions, such as technicians and home health assistants. Something is wrong when so many young Americans are forced to pursue other, lower-paying careers at a time when we desperately need more healthcare providers. In exchange we get foreign healthcare workers who are less well trained (they consistently score lower on licensing exams than U.S.-trained healthcare workers) and far less culturally competent than native-born Americans.

The most tragic and most preventable effect of our hiring so many healthcare workers from other countries is the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in developing countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that each year more than 10 million people die needlessly, from easily treatable maladies such as diarrhea, pneumonia, malaria, tuberculosis, vaccine-preventable diseases, and complications of childbirth. The WHO Global Health Workforce Alliance estimates that there are a billion people alive today who will never see a health worker in their lives. In Ethiopia, one in 10 Ethiopian children will die before his or her fifth birthday — yet there are more Ethiopian physicians in the Chicago area than in all of Ethiopia, which, with 80 million people, is the second most populous country in Africa. As their most skilled nurses emigrate to work in U.S. nursing homes, middle-income countries such as Jamaica and Trinidad have nurse-vacancy rates of 60 percent or higher.

Throughout the developing world, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, and many other types of healthcare workers are being approached and offered 10 times their salaries to practice in modern U.S. healthcare facilities with state-of-the-art technologies. Even the most dedicated, socially conscious worker would be tempted by such an offer. A colleague of mine relayed a conversation he’d had with the head of the Nursing Council of Kenya, who told him about the damage the exodus of senior nurses was doing to her country’s healthcare system. In the next breath, she confessed that the next time he visited Kenya, she might not be there. She was thinking about emigrating herself.

Our unofficial policy of relying on the world’s poorest countries to pay for the training of workers whom we then entice and bring to this country is devastating healthcare systems around the world. The loss to a developing country when a single physician, representing what may be a significant portion of their total number of physicians, emigrates is far greater than our gain. Our failure to provide education for our own citizens and to better plan for healthcare staffing and distribution does not justify poaching nurses and physicians from the countries that can least afford to lose them. How many additional deaths, how much more needless disability and suffering, will we allow this misguided policy to cause?

And consider American competitiveness. Certain industries are vital to U.S. global leadership. Recognizing their importance, we protect those industries. We don’t allow them to move overseas and make the United States vulnerable to the actions of other countries. Poor farmers in the developing world can certainly grow food staples more cheaply than American farmers do. But because of the strategic importance of the U.S. food supply, we subsidize some basic food crops, such as corn and soybeans.

And yet we are overreliant on foreign healthcare workers to meet our most basic health needs. This is particularly dangerous because many countries, almost completely drained of healthcare workers and tired of subsidizing the U.S. healthcare system, are trying to slam the door shut for emigrating healthcare workers. Meantime, of the world’s wealthiest nations, the United States has the worst health outcomes, with lower life expectancies and higher rates of deaths from preventable causes. In infant mortality, for instance, we rank 27th, behind Poland and Hungary. Our disability levels are higher than in most former Soviet countries.

If the United States is to remain competitive in the global economy, we need a healthy workforce. In order to achieve that, we need a healthcare workforce made up of adequate numbers of properly trained physicians, nurses, pharmacists, community-health workers, and other healthcare providers.