------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 23, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
IT'S A FACT: WAGES ARE FALLING
By G. Dunkel
Workers in the United States know times are tough. Whether you're shaping up in a 7-11 parking lot, catching a job every other day, or using your high-speed Internet connection to surf job banks and mail hundreds of resum�s, you are going to have a hard time finding work.
The figures bear out this feeling. A half-million workers lost their jobs this year, making a total of 2 million jobs lost since the beginning of 2001 when Bush took office. It now takes a worker on average 20 weeks to find a job, the longest since the recession of 1984. Statistics for undocumented workers are not collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, even though they make up a substantial sector of U.S. workers. Anecdotes in newspapers from across the country indicate they are facing the same slowdown.
Wages are also starting to slip as producer prices decline. The BLS in a report issued the last week of May states that the compensation for civilian workers increased by only 1.3 percent in the first three months of this year.
But that's not the whole story. Accord ing to an analysis of government data by Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute in Washing ton, wages, when adjusted for inflation, are falling for workers across the board. They found that the median weekly paycheck fell 1.4 percent over the past year, and that workers in all pay grades, white-collar and blue-collar, had taken a hit. (Bob Herbert, "Caught in the Squeeze," New York Times, May 29)
The Commerce Department, one of whose tasks is to prepare reports for businesses that need to make investments, released a report May 30 showing workers' compensation fell sharply in April for important sectors of the U.S. working class, even as "personal income increased $4.0 billion, or less than 0.1 percent."
This decline is not just due to large layoffs and the loss of overtime. Workers are getting paid less per hour, according to BLS reports. (www.bls.gov/ncs/ect/home.htm)
There are lots of ways to pay someone less without cutting their salary. Bosses reduce benefits, extend the working day, cut out breaks. They also hire new workers at a lower pay scale than current workers. They can claim financial inability to meet their payroll and force the workers to take less pay or do more.
In Oregon, for example, some school districts fired their janitors and bus drivers and told their teachers to do that work as well as their own. Other school districts there shut down weeks early or got their teachers to work without pay.
The actual decline in the income of working people in the United States can be seen in what is happening at food pantries throughout the country. In the recent past, these charities mainly served single men with substance abuse problems. Now they are serving many working families who can't make ends meet.
Because workers are earning less, sooner or later they will lose access to credit to maintain their living standards. When this happens, the U.S. economy is going to face a major problem. The average household's credit card debt is up to $8,000, and many people have huge mortgages and car payments as well.
There's nothing automatic about wage increases or even wage stability under capitalism. The tendency, in fact, is for the bosses to keep demanding more work for less pay, citing the pressures of competition-- until the multinational working class puts up such a broad fight that the bosses have to raise wages. n
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