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U.S. Workers: Running in Place or Getting Behind |
The days seem long gone when we could chill out during the summer. The nation is abuzz with issues like the Iraq war, the burning up of the West and a certain Homeland Security honcho’s “gut feeling” about impending terrorist attacks (or maybe it’s just that recalled chili sauce…).
Burbling under these hot-button issues are lesser-reported but equally important trends that more closely affect us working stiffs. In fact, several rather disturbing economic reports have coagulated in recent days and they need to get more air. Here’s a roundup.
- Wages are frozen. Hashing out the numbers on Daily Kos, Bonddad finds we’re still in a wageless economic recovery. He writes the nation’s economic expansion
started in November 2001 when the average wage was $14.72. This figure was $17.38 in June of 2007 for an increase of 18.07 percent. Over the same period, the inflation level increased from 177.4 to 208.352 for an increase of 17.44 percent. That means that since this expansion began, wages have increased .63 percent. From a practical perspective, this means wages have basically stood still.
- Wages frozen and few new jobs created. Bush may be at a 25 percent approval rating, but his job creation record is even worse than that. Bonddad crunches the numbers for us here and concludes:
No matter how you slice the job growth of the current expansion, it is the weakest the country has seen in the last 40 years. The compound annual growth rate is the lowest we have seen. And the higher-paying jobs lost have been replaced by lower-paying jobs, partially explaining why wages have been stagnant for this expansion.
- Note to college students: Don’t graduate. If you do, chance are high you’ll lose the health care coverage you’ve got now. A new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds that college graduates between ages 23 and 27 are less likely to have health insurance in their first jobs than they were five years ago. Some 69.6 percent got health coverage in 1999–2000, and 60.5 percent in 2004–2005.
- College grads may do without, but Big Pharma rakes it in. Drugmakers, the biggest recipients of what was supposed to be a one-time massive tax break, in which they gained $100 million in foreign profits and paid only minimal taxes, are using complex strategies to shelter billions in profits in international tax havens. Today’s New York Times reports the tax break was supposed to encourage drug companies to bring home jobs they offshored. Instead, they laid off tens of thousands of America’s workers.
As famed labor organizer Joe Hill would say:
Don’t Mourn. Organize.
To which we add: Vote in 2007 and 2008.
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U.S. Workers: Running in Place or Getting Behind
“We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” to quote Benjamin Franklin. I believe that is an appropriate thought for this article as is the fact that Joe Hill was murdered by the anti union people of wealth and power who hired thugs’, including police, to do their killing for them. They did not like opposition, I feel that, after listening to President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Karl Rove along with some of our major business owners, and CEO’s I hear the same feelings that faced early Union organizers.
They speak and if you are listening closely, you will hear their complete indifference to the fate of Americas’ children and of the middle class. This is not new; our founders, having dealt with Monarchies, aristocracy and the privilege that goes with them created a set of documents to help us stay on course. The “Declaration of Independence” was step one, the “Constitution” was step two but Thomas Jefferson still feared that even these documents would not be enough and so he fought for the addition of another document. That document was the “Bill of Rights”
I believe that we are in an economic war here at home, a war where large numbers of our middle class have fallen into poverty. War is never anything but ugly and deadly yet there are times we must fight. We may begin with words, marches, and our new agent of freedom, the internet, yet we need to prepare for worse times ahead.
They may, or may not, have become too smart to kill people outright thus risking creating martyrs; unfortunately they have developed other ways that are almost worse. Take away a person’s reputation, their ability to speak their mind publicly and without fear and that is war. Take a person’s ability to feed their family, isolate them from each other and you will not need a gun or a knife. Our union’s as they organize must also compromise among themselves, as the founders had to do, in order to build the numbers, money and mutual support we will need in the days ahead. In addition, we also, need to establish a new document, a “Constitution,” for Americas’ unions and middle class. This is not just a union fight but also a fight for the dignity of humanity here and abroad, we need to be the example for people everywhere. Not by killing each other but by standing together and caring for each other as the family of humanity.
This man George W. Bush is stabbing in the back of the American worker. He ought to be charged with treason and faced justice. Not including the high costs for the war in Iraq, his administration had eliminated millions of jobs through bad trade deals and allowing aliens to come to this country and steal American jobs! When will the American people wake up and demand that George W. Bush be brought to trial for crimes against the Nation.