Ed wrote:
There has been an increase
in the rate of GNP growth in the US recently, while at the same time large
numbers of people have lost their jobs. GNP growth is not based on
increased employment, but on increased productivity. The people who
continue to be employed are working harder and longer. They have to
keep their jobs, at least for a time. The bargaining power of the
employer vis a vis the employee has increased. But even the employer's
bargaining power is a bit of a sham. Ordinarily, he would try to keep
his labor force intact and meet his costs by raising prices. That does
not seem to be an option now because people, worried about their jobs, or
having lost them, are reluctant to buy. It's a bit of a
vicious
circle.
A Basic Right:
Living-Wage Jobs
By Sean
Gonsalves, AlterNet
September 3, 2003
Break out the champagne
on Wall Street! A new report is out called "Labor Market Left Behind,"
co-authored by Economic Policy Institute senior economist Jared Bernstein and
the Institute's president, Lawrence Mishel. "Unemployment has continued to trend
upward, from 5.6 percent in November 2001 to 6.2 percent in July
2003....(There are) three unemployed people for every job opening....
Unemployment has risen 0.6 percentage points overall and 1.3 points among
African Americans," according to Bernstein and Mishel.
And get this:
"Employment
opportunities have declined more for college graduates than for high school
dropouts. Underemployed workers – those working fewer hours than they want to or in a job
for which they are overqualified – reached double digits (10.2 percent) in July 2003."
And that doesn't
include the 2
million workers who've stopped looking for work in this abysmal job market.
Fortunately for the Bush
administration, the question, "Who would Jesus bomb?" is crowding other
important inquiries, such as, "How do we end poverty as we know it?"
Loyola University's
distinguished professor of law, William P. Quigley, addresses the latter
question in his new book "Ending Poverty As We Know It" (Temple University
Press). You
should check it out, even if you're too busy trying to make ends meet.
The book is full of facts
kept safely away from the consciousness of the voting public. For starters,
Quigley reports: "There are approximately 30 million
people in the United States who are working full-time but earning
poverty-level wages."
Now,
add to that the 15 million or so who are either out of work or are working
part-time but would love to be working full-time, and we've got one big,
good-news story for the investors who, like a teenager reading Penthouse,
get their jollies from reports of surplus labor.
"Historically, the first
response to poverty has been to advise the poor to work. But if the poor are
already working or cannot find a job, what's the next
response?
Usually, silence. And because of that silence, more and more people join the
ranks of the poor," Quigley writes.
Of course, we have this
persistent belief that work is the
way out of poverty and into affluence. "While I applaud the sincerity of
these beliefs," Quigley observes, "as a longtime student of poverty issues I
know that they simply are not true." Then he suggests we ask
ourselves the following questions: Do you think that every person who wants to work
should have the opportunity to do so? And, do you think that every person who works full-time
should earn enough to be self-supporting?
In speaking in various
venues across the country, Quigley gets an overwhelming "yes" to those
questions. The problem, as was
so pointedly stated by University of Washington professor Diana Pearce,
"this is not about people doing a bad job of budgeting or making bad
choices. They simply don't have enough to make it."
Quigley's solution? A
Constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to a job with a living
wage. You'll have to read the book to
understand his proposal and how it would work. The idea is not a new one.
Martin Luther King made similar proposals back in the 60s.
Speaking of which, since
9/11, we've had two Martin Luther King Days and two "celebrations" of his
Aug. 28, 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. Yet, somehow we manage to forget that
King was assassinated while working in solidarity with unionized Memphis
sanitation workers seeking a living wage.
As we follow policies that lead us
further down the path of escalating violence and
destruction, we
take time out to get all warm and fuzzy, holding hands singing kumbaya,
congratulating ourselves about integration or bad-mouthing the goals of
affirmative action while citing King's famous "content of our character"
line, which our neoconservative brothers and sisters have shamelessly
wrenched out of context.
Sean
Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and a syndicated
columnist.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16698
