The economy added another 227,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday. That's good news, sort of. It means that the recovery is slowly progressing. At this rate, we will be back to pre-recession employment levels sometime around 2018.
However, this growth in jobs was not enough for wages to keep place with inflation; nor did the unemployment rate drop, but stayed stuck at 8.3 percent. Why? Because folks who had given up have started entering the labor force again, but the percentage of people in the labor force is still two points lower than it was before the recession began. A new study by the Economic Policy Institute reports that earnings declined over the past decade even for college graduates -- so much for the education cure.
In short, the recession made a bad problem worse, but the economy on the eve of the recession was nothing to be proud of. Throughout the first decade of the new century, before the recession hit, wages lagged behind living costs for the vast majority of Americans -- because those in the top one percent were capturing such a large share of the economy's total productivity gains.
Some of this trend was the result of globalization undercutting the bargaining power of U.S. workers; some of it resulted from weakened trade unions and minimum wage laws lagging behind inflation.
Flat or declining wages did not result from declining average productivity. So when we finally climb out of this jobs recession, perhaps we can belatedly confront these deeper trends.
I have been writing about the hotel workers union in New York City.
Thanks to an extraordinarily effective union, Local 6 of the hotel and restaurant workers union, nearly every large hotel in Manhattan is unionized, and everyone who works in these hotels, from dishwashers to room cleaners to doormen to banquet waiters earns a middle class wage. The union recently signed a seven year contract giving workers a 27 percent wage.
Local 6 is an exceptionally effective union, and New York is a unique tourist destination. But since the vast majority of jobs in America will soon be service sector jobs, not vulnerable to global competition, there is no good economic reason why they can't all be middle class jobs. The challenge is political. We as a society simply need to decide, as President Obama famously told "Joe the Plumber," that we want to "spread the wealth around" rather than having it concentrate at the very top. All service jobs could pay a living wage. How to do that? Unions, wage regulation, progressive taxation, and government using existing powers over contractors that it seldom exercises.
But what about manufacturing? This brings me to the other Jobs of my title, the late Steve Jobs.
The New York Times, in a two part series earlier this year on Apple's Chinese contractor, Foxconn, finally made front page news and added some telling detail to what was already fairly well known. The cool, must-have iPads, iPhones, and iPods to which we are increasingly addicted are manufactured with brutal sweatshop labor in Shenzhen, China, where 230,000 employees are making an average of less than $2 an hour work in a single factory complex. Foxconn's dormitories now have nets outside to prevent suicides.
I recently saw a one-man show, Mike Daisey's amazing "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," in which Daisey, a spellbinding monologue artist, recounts his own conversations with the workers of Foxconn in Shenzhen.
Daisey was on to Foxconn long before the Times. If you get a chance to see this show, which runs for one more week at New York's Public Theater and which will be on tour in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere later this year, don't miss it. Two weeks ago, Daisey made the stunning decision to put his script in the public domain, so that other performances could go viral.
Daisey wonders out loud: what if everyone who buys these products began upping the pressure on Apple to do right by its workers?
I would add: What if Apple made a decision to bring this work home, and to pay decent wages for it, say $20 an hour. Right now, this is literally impossible, because the production facilities to make such products no longer exist in the United States. But the Pentagon has insisted that America hang on to production capacity for certain other sensitive micro-electronics products. And if hostilities escalated between the U.S. and Beijing, you can bet that we would see a crash program to restore more micro-electronics output at home.
Apple earns about $600,000 per year per employee. It can well afford to share a little more of that with its workers.
The New York Times calculated that it would add only about $65 to the cost of an iPad or iPhone to produce it at home at good wages. And over time, it would tend to cost less, since higher-paid workers lead the company to redouble its investment in automation.
Apple can certainly afford this transition. It is now the richest company in the world, sitting on a pile of nearly a hundred billion dollars in cash. If Apple led, it would become bad form for America's other prestigious companies to manufacture for U.S. markets in foreign sweatshops.
Ralph Nader recently published the most improbable of books, a novel titled Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us. Nader, looking at the grotesque economic and political power imbalance in the U.S., imagined that a cabal of billionaires led by Warren Buffet and Ted Turner have an outbreak of conscience and become crusaders for progressive reform. It's Nader's way of both laying out a reform agenda and spotlighting where the real power lies.
It's a lovely fantasy, but it's not going to happen -- any more than Apple, out of the goodness of its corporate heart, is about to decide to phase out its high-tech Asian sweatshops in favor of decently compensated production jobs in the United States.
But what could perhaps happen is a mass movement of Apple consumers, declaring that it's not cool to treat the people who build these products like beasts of burden or like expendable non-human parts.
Alternatively, as incomes keep falling further behind the cost of living for most Americans, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that we enjoy the coolest of gadgets and that others are even poorer than we are.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is A Presidency in Peril.
I wish I could a get earnings per employee numbers for every buisness that claims it cant afford to pay workers a living wage.
http://reciprocity-failure.blogspot.com/2012/03/steve-jobs-was-is-and-will-always-be.html
'Jobs gap' won't close till 2020 - Economy
"Though employers are finally hiring again, it could take until 2020 to get employment back to pre-recession levels.
The new estimate of the jobs gap, released Monday by Brookings' Hamilton Project, is based on a relatively rosy monthly job creation estimate of 208,000. (That's the average rate for 2005, which was the best year of job creation in the 2000s.)
While that may sound optimistic, job growth has been on a winning streak, hitting above that mark for the last three months. In February, the economy created 227,000 new jobs.
The "jobs gap" includes positions lost during the Great Recession, as well as new ones that must be created to accommodate a growing population..."
The public health care system will be partially funded by a tax on imports. That will bring manufacturers back to this country in droves.
That has been proven so many times, on so many occasions, throughout human history, the only holdouts are rigid rightwing ideologues.
This was the dumbest thing to come out of Obama's mouth and its dumber still for Bob Kuttner to be repeating it. Its the one shining example that proves how bad Progressives are in messaging. 'Spreading the wealth' means taking from the rich, plain and simple - that is how it is understood and will ALWAYS be understood . The progressive message about wealth should always be about increasing equality of opportunity and giving a chance for the small guy to succeed and become wealthy himself/herself -not spread the wealth around.
That means everyone.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/signs-of-dissent-what-about-the-47-who-pay-no-federal-income-taxes/246721/
Signs of Dissent: What About the 47% Who Pay No Federal Income Taxes? - Derek Thompson - Business - The Atlantic
"...Who pays no federal income taxes? I think I have the picture you're looking for. This piechart shows the households paying no FIT, with all inset numbers in thousands of dollars (i.e.: 20-30 means $20,000 to $30,000). The big takeaway is that more than half of the folks who pay no federal income tax make less than $20,000 a year. It is also true that 7,000 millionaires paid no federal income tax last year (more on that factoid here)...."
Many of the 47% give something more far more precious than money: their young to serve in the U.S. military.
Some favors indeed come at far too high a price.
The USA has instead elected to produce large numbers of liberal arts graduates, history graduates, philosophy graduates, English graduates, foreign language graduates, economics graduates, musicians, artists, social workers, government graduates, political scientist, anthropologists, archaeologists, and/or other similarly educated US citizens that will not contribute anything to correcting the foreign trade deficit or generate any new NATIONAL WEALTH in the USA that is needed to save the US economy.
So far as National Wealth it still exists here, just not in the middle class.
Bring back manufacturing jobs, or;
Drop the ability to educate our children in the Liberal Arts entirely and lose everything that is meaningful about being a human.
Which government laws?
Which government Treaties?
Why did US businesses relocate their factories and jobs to foreign countries?
How can we get jobs to return to or be created in the USA?
The jobs are growing in the industrialized nations and shrinking in the USA and other de-industrialized nations!
We need creative people as leaders and not good speakers or good looking people. to sellect a ;leader is not the same as to sellect an idol.
2. Various pacts and bi-lateral trading agreements, to say nothing of tax laws that incentivize
foreign activity
3. To earn more profit and then multiply executive compensation to degrees never before seen in
in US business history while simultaneuosly giving US investors the smallest return on their
investments in history
4. Lower the standard of living for the majority of Americans
5. Not naturally, but by the intent of of the greedy
It is what it is, but that doesn't mean to say that there are not those who cause it. More to the point, if it can be caused, it can be reversed.
3. I think that Corporation Stockholders should organize to take over the corporations and then find somebody that will be the president and other officers and then work for less money!
LOL