Policy updates, continued
People's Secretariat for Labor
Emma Goldman, by any respect, had the most interesting position within the UASR's government. As a life-long self-professed anarcho-communist, the prospect of even agreeing with a state socialist program, let alone being a government minister, would have once given her chills. She fell in with their lot originally in hopes of using her popularity among American workers to drum up support for an independent syndicalist movement. Now she found herself the architect of policies that made a truly independent syndicalism impossible.
Perhaps more than any other person, Emma Goldman would be the architect of the American economic system, and the great political tension that would shape American history: the conflict between grassroots participatory democracy, and the program of the nationwide planned economy.
In October of 1934, the passage of the First Five Year Plan would begin a major reorganization of the American economic system. Under the terms of the Plan, the atomic unit of the economic system would be the Solidarity labor union's syndicate. Each syndicate would organize a single workplace, ranging anywhere from a dozen workers to several hundred, and would be managed by an elected worker council. Syndicates would be part of larger, economically rational units called combines, which would unite any number of syndicates in the same industry under the leadership of an elected committee. Each combine would be part of a manifold, which would organize the economic plans of an entire industry. In turn, each manifold would send to representatives to a National Congress of Workers, chaired by the People's Secretary for Labor.
The primary goal of this federal system was two-fold: to collect economic information to be used by the State Planning Commission to develop the economic plans, and then to carry out the updating plans set by StatePlan.
The Labor Secretariat would in turn set and enforce the rules of conduct within the industries. As part of Goldman's tenure, a comprehensive system of health and safety laws were passed. Child labor, previously prohibited by union rules, would now be comprehensively abolished. Strict workplace safety standards were enacted, along with the standardization of the five day, forty-hour work week. Women workers, a sizeable and growing part of the labor force, would be given state subsidized maternity leave, and a comprehensive system of government subsidized daycares were created by a joint trade union/government initiative.
People's Secretariat for Finance
Thomas G. Corcoran would have the unenviable duty of completely reorganizing the system of government finance from the ground up. He would have to do this while continuing to service American public debt owned by foreign nationals, lest a major international incident begin. America's previous systems of taxation at the federal level would no longer be viable in the post-revolutionary era. Similarly, provincial tax systems based upon the property tax were similarly obsolete.
Corcoran's creative solution to the dilemma was to pass the burden of taxation primarily from individuals to economic units. Based on the principal of public ownership of land and natural resources, a system of economic "rents" paid from a firm's surplus value would be the primary means of finance for both the Union and provincial governments.
The Comprehensive Finance Act would establish a dual federal and provincial tax system. Each economic firm, from the large industrial manifolds to local cooperatives, would pay a portion of its surplus value to the Finance Secretariat's provincial tax bureaus. The portion owed to the provincial government would then be paid to the province's Finance Secretariat. The portion owed to the Union government would collected, used to fund the operations of the government.
The Act would set variable rent rates based upon the health of an industry, and the gross amount of value-added. The tax system would also be used to subsidize critical industries and promote economic development in under developed areas, such as the American South, or Haiti.
People's Secretariat for Foreign Trade
Foreign trade in the UASR existed under the Union's state monopoly, and the critical job of managing trade with foreign nations, capitalist and socialist, would fall on academic Walter Lippmann. With a team of some of America's best economists, Lippmann set out to create a trade policy that would assist with development in America's allies, but not sell out the country to foreign capitalists.
The most critical trade policy in this era was the emerging trade relations with the Soviet Union. The USSR was rapidly industrializing, but faced critical shortages of basic industrial inputs, skilled labor, and consumer goods. Under the terms of the 1934 Moscow trade accords, America would provide free university education for the Soviet Union's best and brightest, who would return with the skills and expertise that would be of service to their mother country. America would provide a market for the USSR's Class A industrial goods in exchange for finished consumer goods. The American Union Bank would also arrange investment in the Soviet Union through the purchase of bonds.
Foreign trade and investment with Mexico was another key plank of the Foster-Reed doctrine. Mexico, as an allied developing nation under a left-wing social democratic government, would be a natural ally, and a perfect propaganda tool in the inevitable world revolution. Trade and aid to Mexico would be the tool used to transform Mexico into a first-world socialist state. The government of Mexico would enthusiastically comply. In Mexico from the 1930s to the 1950s, socialism would be synonymous with modernization.
Next installment: Agriculture, Education, and Public Safety
