Most New Jobs Low Pay, Despite Unions & College Degrees

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

Studies indicate that those with college educations are more likely to have jobs and earn more money in those jobs than those who lack a degree. Similarly, union workers tend to earn more than workers in similar jobs who lack union contracts. Yet the majority of jobs lost over the past few years were in the middle range of wages, while most of those added during the recovery have been at the lower end of the income range, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, suggesting that neither degrees nor unions provide the same security they did a generation ago.

The report examined 366 different jobs covered by the Labor Department, dividing them into three groups based on average wages. The middle group, which included jobs in manufacturing, construction and information, with wages ranging from $13.84 to $21.13 per hour, accounted for 60% of the job losses between 2008 and 2010, the New York Times reported. These same fields made up only 22% of the job growth, and higher-wage jobs, with wages ranging from $21.14 to $54.55 per hour, made up only 20% of the job growth. The bulk of the job growth during the recovery (58%) has been in the lowest wage occupations (e.g., retail sales and food preparation), with hourly wages ranging from $7.69 to $13.83.

Since 2001, lower-wage job growth has been 8.7%, while mid-wage jobs have declined by 7.3%. According to Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, worker productivity in the U.S. has risen by 80% over the past 40 years, while wages have declined by 11%. This has been a boon to the bosses, who have been able to extract even greater profits from their workers. Greater productivity means more widgets per hour per employee. This would benefit capitalists even without cutting wages. However, they have also downsized, getting fewer employees to produce the same or more widgets, without raising wages, resulting in a downward spiral of both working and living conditions for the majority of American workers.

Over the past 40 years, union membership has declined by 50%. This is part of the problem. Union workers do tend to earn more than their nonunionized counterparts, while regions with high union membership also tend to have higher wages for other workers in the area, even the nonunionized workers. Rising health care costs have taken a cut out of workers’ compensation packages (at least from those who are lucky enough to get health benefits). Outsourcing is another cause of both declining union membership and wages, as workers find themselves accepting lower wages just to keep a local job.

Yet it is not accurate to blame these problems entirely on the capitalist class, though its members are certainly the driving force and sole beneficiaries. The mainstream union leadership has all but given up unions’ two main sources of power—organizing and striking—in exchange for the safer, easier and more comfortable tactics of lobbying and hobnobbing with the bosses and politicians, thus hastening the demise of unions and losses for workers.

The unions have also taken the strategically stupid tactic of valuing job protection/creation over compensation and working conditions, thus contributing to the downward spiral of wages. This was perhaps best exemplified by their Detroit compromise/sellout, in which the UAW accepted a two-tiered wage and benefits package giving new workers salaries that were half what autoworkers had traditionally been earning, all in exchange for an agreement by autoworkers to lay off fewer workers.

While being jobless certainly sucks, having a job that kills or injures or keeps one living in poverty is not much better. Unfortunately, most Americans accept that jobs are the only solution to the problem of feeding and housing ourselves. Thus, when Romney or Obama promise more jobs, people cheer, ignoring the quality of job, whether it is low wage, high stress, degrading to the soul or the environment.

Yet if worker productivity has really increased by 80%, then why not let the workers work 80% less for the same wages or increase their wages by 80%, thus lower the wealth gap or the number of unemployed workers? Certainly not a revolutionary idea (the bosses would still own the means of production and the employees would still be at the mercy of the bosses to keep them on the job and pay them), but one that would be justifiable considering they are the ones whose productivity has increased.

This kind of thinking is alien to both the bosses of the workplaces and the unions. Workers are seen by bosses as a means to an end: pay them $5 for a product or service that can be sold for $20 and pocket the profits. Increased productivity means only one thing to them: they get to pocket even more of the profits.

Bosses and employees truly have no common ground. The bosses have the power to hire and fire, set wages and working conditions, speed up, layoff, shut down and outsource. Employees are dependent on bosses, both to offer jobs in the first place and to pay wages, since the only thing they have to sell is their time and their bodies and minds, and this is the only way they have to put food on the table. So if the boss wants to keep all of the rewards of increased worker productivity, the workers can either accept it and hopefully keep their jobs and current income, or risk being replaced by striking for more.

The union bosses actually have interests more in line with the workplace bosses. Laid off workers do not pay dues, thus cutting into the pool available for the wages and benefits of the union leaders. A strike is risky for the union bosses, not only because the pool of dues paying members could decline, but because the union itself could be cut out of the picture. If they lose the right to collectively bargain, the union leaders could end up unemployed themselves. Thus, protecting jobs and collective bargaining (through lobbying and campaign contributions) become far more important than protecting working conditions and compensation for the workers (through organizing and job actions). The former keeps the union leaders materially comfortable, while the latter is just a lot of work and risk for someone else’s benefit. 

Strike Wave 2011: SoCal Grocery Workers Ready to Strike

As so typically happens in these situations, the negotiators for the supermarkets have stonewalled, bullied and generally blown off Southern California grocery workers during their contract negotiations. Fed up, the grocery workers have issued a 72-hour notice canceling the contract extension they had conceded to the bosses, the OB Rag reported this morning, setting the groundwork for a strike.

The contract negotiations have been going on for the past nine months. The union, by its own admission, has agreed to numerous concessions to help keep the food giants (Ralph’s, Vons and Albertson’s) highly profitable. Yet management continues to insist on a health care plan that would effectively eliminate access entirely for 62,000 workers.

Many of the workers recognize that this is no longer just about them versus their bosses, but part of the largest assault on working and living conditions for all workers. The ruling elite, including the grocery bosses, see this as an historic moment, when unions are weaker than they’ve been in generations and when the public has little sympathy for them. They believe they can successfully make whatever demands they choose on employees and that employees will graciously accept these demands rather than face unemployment.

However, you can only push people so far before they start to fight back. Apparently, completely gutting health care was that point for grocery workers.

If grocery workers do go on strike next week, it would be the largest U.S. strike in years, bigger than even the recent Verizon strike. However, a strike is not yet certain. Cancellation of the contract is a step in that direction, but negotiations could continue with a contract and a deal (or sell out) being worked out before a strike occurs.

Nevertheless, it seems that some of the union presidents have given up on a settlement. Greg Conger, president of UFCW Local 324 in Orange County, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times saying, "It's time to bring these negotiations to an end. . . The talks have been going at a glacial pace. . . If the employers don't snap out of it, and give our members a proposal that we can live with, the only option we have left is a strike."

Grocery workers last struck in California in 2003. The strike lasted 141 days and cost the employers an estimated $2 billion, according to the Times. However, it also cost employees a bundle since they were without work for nearly five months. The struggle ended with a sell-out contract negotiated by the union bosses after a very weak effort by the union bosses to build solidarity with other unions.

Grocery workers face many of the same difficulties today. Many of the jobs can be done by scabs with little or no experience. In today’s climate of high unemployment, it should not be difficult for the grocery bosses to find an army of eager strike breakers. Therefore, simply refusing to work and picketing the stores will be insufficient. They will have to also convince teamsters to refuse to deliver products to the stores. They will need the ILWU to refuse to unload cargo destined for the stores. They will need to convince shoppers to take their business else, which will not be easy, since everyone is struggling right now, and few have the time, money and options to shop elsewhere.

Those Radical Nurses: Make Wall Street Pay!

Wall Street Speculators, We're Coming For You (Image by Barbara Bessa)

Nurses from across the U.S. are planning to call on Congress members on September 1 to support a tax on Wall Street financial speculation. The OB Rag and the Left Labor Reporter say that nurses will be joined by other groups who are planning soup kitchens to help feed the hungry and homeless, community speak outs and street theater to draw attention to the growing wealth gap. Events are planned in large cities like Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Orlando, as well as smaller cities like Corpus Christi, Texas, Marquette, Mich., Bakersfield, Calif., Dayton, Ohio, and Worcester, Mass.

Nurses Marching (On Wall Street???) Image by timefornurses

 Sponsored by National Nurses United (NNU), the RNs will be calling on Congress members to support a Wall Street transaction tax and make it “pay for the devastation it has caused on Main Street.”

In a recent piece in the New York Times, Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote that a 0.5% tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives, currencies, credit default swaps, future options, and other exotic speculative transactions could bring in $175 billion annually. Contrary to the crocodile tears of Wall Street speculators, economist Mark Thoma says that only short-term trades will be affected by the tax, and these are based on speculation that has little social value.

Mark Thoma is being too generous. There is no social value whatsoever, only profits for a few rich people. And the nurses are being too generous, as well, asking for only a pittance from people who can afford far more. What about marginal tax rates, corporate tax rates, capital gains taxes and inheritance taxes, each of which is at record or near record lows? If the rich had to pay taxes at the rates they were paying under their hero Reagan, which were higher than today, the government might bring in hundreds of billions or even a trillion each year. And if they paid the 80% marginal tax rate of the post-WWII years, it would easily over a trillion annually.

According to the Left Labor Reporter, the NNU’s September 1 action is part of the union’s ongoing campaign to “Heal America; Make Wall Street Pay,” whose goal is to get Americans back to work, provide health care to all, and help the working class regain some of the ground we’ve lost over the last 30 years.

Of course Wall Street should pay through the teeth, but this will not heal America. In fact, regaining the ground we’ve lost over the last 30 years, will only take us back to a time when the wealth gap was huge rather than monstrous. The world will still be dominated by a tiny minority of people who will still possess the vast majority of the wealth and for whom the rest of us will still be forced to toil. There will still be poverty, as there was 30 years ago. There will continue to be people who lack health care, decent housing, adequate food, free time, or control over their own wellbeing and destiny.

Taxing the rich is a bandage and perhaps a decent first step. But if we really want to heal America, then we need to be fighting for an end to the wage system and bosses and for a system in which everyone has access to the good things in life.

Working Class Hostility Toward Jersey & Philly Teachers

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has been trying cut teacher salaries and benefits (like many other governors) in order to balance his bloated budget. He has been filmed telling teachers to quit if they don’t like their pay. He has derided teachers for getting employer-paid health benefits, and called teachers unions disgraceful.

Which Side Are You On?

There are currently 19 school districts in South Jersey, and another 13 in the suburbs north and west of Philadelphia, that are in contract disputes. While teachers fight to hold onto their salaries and benefits, parents and taxpayers are getting riled into a lynch mob mentality against teachers. While it is understandable and justifiable that people are angry about their own financial insecurity and the gutting of their schools, it is misdirected anger when it is placed on teachers, rather than the rich and corporations who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes, or at the banks and financial institutions that created the recession and then received trillions of taxpayer dollars to be bailed out.

Teachers, like all workers, should be compensated fairly and sufficiently to live comfortably in the communities in which they teach. Everyone should get health care and be able to afford food and housing. Anyone who does not have this level of material security is getting screwed, by the bosses and the rich, not by other workers. Rather than attacking fellow workers and denying their right to a decent and secure life, we need to remember that all workers have far more in common with each other than we do with the bosses.

Don’t scab for the bosses,
Don’t listen to their lies.
Us poor folks haven’t got a chance,
Unless we organize.

Which Side Are You On (Listen to Billy Bragg)

Cut Teacher Salaries and Lose The Best Teachers

Interestingly, even executive teacher-basher Barack Obama believes teachers should be paid a decent wage. In the Audacity of Hope he wrote that, “there is no reason why an experienced, highly-qualified teacher shouldn’t earn $100,000,” although he did tie this to a weakening of tenure protections. While Obama would like to give administrators greater authority to fire teachers and weaken teacher authority and independence, he does at least recognize the relationship between adequate remuneration and the ability to recruit and retain the best quality teachers.

Despite the president’s good intentions, teacher pay generally lags well behind comparable jobs, which is one reason why it is so hard to recruit good teachers. The Economic Policy Institute wrote that teacher pay lagged 15% behind similar jobs, and that the gap has been widening. When I left the lab to become a science teacher, I took a 15% pay cut.