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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Workers Deserve More Than A Day Off

Holly Sklar Knight-Ridder/Tribune

This Labor Day’s real bargain is the American work force. While Wall Street celebrates soaring profits, real wages for average workers have plummeted - despite rising productivity.

Workers’ average inflation-adjusted weekly earnings crashed 16 percent between 1973 and 1993 - falling below 1967 levels. Since 1990, college graduates “have been losing ground, at the same rate as workers with less education,” reports the Economic Policy Institute.

Fortune 500 profits jumped 54 percent in 1994. Wealth is not trickling down. It is flooding upward. In 1960, according to “Business Week,” the average chief executive of a major corporation earned as much as 41 factory workers; in 1993 the executive earned as much as 149 factory workers.

The United States is number one in inequality among industrial nations. One out of four children is born into poverty in this, the world’s wealthiest nation. The richest 1 percent of American families have nearly as much wealth as the entire bottom 95 percent. Such obscene inequality befits an oligarchy, not a democracy. Manhattan’s income gap is worse than Guatemala’s.

Jobs and wages are being downsized in the “leaner, meaner” world of global corporate restructuring. Corporations are aggressively automating and shifting operations among cities, states and nations in a continual search for lower taxes, greater public subsidies and cheaper labor. “Cheap labor” does not mean low-skilled. Computer engineering and software programming are increasingly being “outsourced” to Third World and East European countries, where workers with doctoral degrees can be hired for less than $10,000.

Union jobs provide much better wages and benefits than their non-union counterparts, but they are fast disappearing. The unionized percentage of the U.S. work force was just 15.5 percent in 1994.

Full-time jobs are becoming scarcer, as corporations shape a cheaper, more disposable work force of temporary workers, part-timers and other “contingent workers.” Workers are increasingly expected to migrate from job to job, at low and variable wage rates, without paid vacation, much less a pension. Millions of people are without jobs.

How can we care for ourselves and our families, maintain a home, pay for college, save for retirement, plan a future? How do we build strong communities?

Economists play deceptive games with employment statistics. An unemployment rate of 6 percent is considered “full employment”: in the 1960s, that rate was 3 percent. To be counted as officially unemployed, you must have searched for work in the last four weeks. This excludes people defined as “discouraged workers,” people with child-care problems and millions of others without jobs. As Business Week puts it, “Increasingly the labor market is filled with surplus workers who are not being counted as unemployed.”

Instead of full employment, the United States has full prisons. It leads all nations but one - Russia - in locking people up, and it imprisons black men at a much higher rate than South Africa did under apartheid. The official black unemployment rate averaged 14 percent between 1976 and 1993.

The American Dream - always an impossible dream for many - is dying a slow death. As the systemic causes go untreated, a host of local and national leaders are peddling scapegoating and other snake oil.

The angry, shrinking middle class is misled into thinking that those lower on the economic ladder are pulling them down, when in reality those on top are rising at the expense of those below. People who should be working together to transform the economic policies that are hurting them are instead turning hatefully on each other.

Since 1973, reports the Children’s Defense Fund, “most of the fastest increases in poverty rates occurred among young white families with children, those headed by married couples, and those headed by high school graduates. For all three groups, poverty rates more than doubled in a single generation, reaching levels that most Americans commonly assume afflict only minority and single-parent families.”

We have a surplus of greed and a deficit of justice.

The federal budget deficit - produced by military spending and large tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy - has been used, as conservatives intended, as a permanent enforcer of cutbacks in social services and public works. The military budget consumes resources. Subsides for corporations and the well-off remain high - while programs to invest in people, infrastructure and the environment are sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction.

We are destroying the building blocks of a decent future. In 1944, President Roosevelt proposed an Economic Bill of Rights, recognizing that “true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security.”

It is time to stop building more prison cells, and instead build the foundation of income security, child care and education. It is time to adopt an updated Economic Bill of Rights.

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