Two articles came to me today from different sources. Taken together,
they paint a bleak future for working-class and middle-class people
for the foreseeable future. Comments?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/americas-confidence-defic_b_787987.html?utm_source=DailyBrief&utm_campaign=112410&utm_medium=email&utm_content=FeatureTitle&utm_term=Daily+Brief
"The furious debate over how best to cut the deficit illustrates the
point. The debate is about how we best enforce austerity.....This is a
debate about who takes the hit. It is likely to turn ugly. There are
progressive answers and regressive ones; some that make more sense,
and some that make less.....it is possible to balance the budget by
taking more from the Pentagon, hiking corporate taxes, and preserving
Social Security....This debate rises from what has become a bipartisan
elite consensus, reinforced by a multimillion dollar public relations
campaign seeded by Pete Peterson, a Wall Street billionaire, who has
been rousing alarms about deficits for decades, and is intent on using
the current crisis to enforce the turn to austerity. But if there is
one thing we should have learned over the years, it is that Americans
should be particularly wary about bipartisan elite consensus...."
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/11/24-2
The outlines of a massive new structural downshift in wages are
emerging more and more clearly.
The largest wage-cutting wave since the Great Depression has already
been sweeping the United States for the last couple years in response
to the Great Recession. At small firms, many of these pay cuts have
been viewed as a temporary means of reducing costs until the recession
is fully ended.
The pervasiveness of this trend undoubtedly leads much of the public
to assume large corporations are merely seeking the same temporary
relief as small firms when they demand concessions in high-profile
negotiations. The workers' pay will surely rise back to previous
levels when the situation improves for the company, as occurred during
the 1980s, right?
Not this time around.The recession camouflages a far more insidious
and long-lasting corporate strategy: Instead of temporary pay cuts to
get through a few tough months, major corporations have something
very, very different in mind.
As NY Times economics reporter and The Disposable American author
Louis Uchitelle wrote on Sunday, major firms are on the verge of
consolidating a long-sought goal with a two-tier wage system:
The managers of some marquee companies are aiming to make this
concession permanent. If they are successful, their contracts could
become blueprints for other companies in other cities, extending a
wage system that would be a startling retreat for labor.
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