It is so pathetic to hear reasonably rational people repeating the anti-labor memes fed them over 40 years. The nearly successful destruction of the labor movement is hurting us all and it is simply denied by these same people. This is a very sad labor day for progressives who have watched the slow extinction of the only real counterbalance to the power of capital. The theme of low wages was touched on last week here at EYNU.
From Hullabaloo . . . Digby writes, Low Wages and Low Expectations. The full read is worth it, but here is a hefty excerpt.
Jeff Faux, a progressive economist who founded the Economic Policy Institute in 1986, is the author of the new book, The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class. "The mantra, as you know, in today's political debate is jobs, jobs, jobs," he told an audience at EPI recently. "Listen carefully because the subtext is low wages, low wages, low wages."
Faux argues that by the mid-2020s, even with the most optimistic assumptions about economic growth, current trends indicate that the average American's wages will drop about 20 percent. One big factor is that more and more good jobs will go overseas, leaving even America's best and brightest no alternative but to enter the service industry.
"You go into an Apple store and you see the future," Faux said. "The future's not in the technology -- the future of the labor force is all in those smart college-educated people with the T-shirts whose job is to be a retail clerk for Chinese goods."
[ . . .]
Interestingly, this turned up in the New York Times, just this past week:
While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.
The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has probably been accelerated by government layoffs.It's like it is happening in an alternate universe if one would listen for such news or discussion in Encinitas City Council and local watering holes. Even if this community is wealthier than most, it is filled with working class, middle class people who are economically suffering.
“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy group.
The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010.
