Sen. Sanders:The U.S. now has more low-paying jobs than any other major country on earth. Morality?

[cal04]

Last edited Fri Nov 28, 2014, 07:04 PM - Edit history (1)

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/538319203321659392/photo/1
The U.S. now has more low-paying jobs than any other major country on earth.



https://twitter.com/SenSanders
The Walton family owns more wealth than the bottom 40% of Americans combined.

What kind of morality is it...?

https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/538033770364825600/photo/1

[SheilaT]

1. Once again, we're number one!

How fabulous is that?

Oh, wait, low paying jobs, no health insurance. Maybe that's not something to be bragging about.

[yeoman6987]

2. I am sure China and places in Africa would call

Him out on this.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

5. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how he means that.

Is he talking 'low' in some relative sense? There are certainly plenty of places with far lower wages on an absolute basis.

[bettyellen]

9. I am curious too, but China has raised pay and standards of living to the point where they

do outsource a great deal of their production to other countries. They are investing heavily in Africa these days, so they can exploit lower wages there. From what I understand, the average factory worker in China puts up with 3-5 years of the grind living in a dorm, and working 12 hour days, six days a week and banks as much as they can. Then they go back to their hometowns, and are able to fund a very decent lifestyle compared to most others. I don't know how it compares to the US in terms of opportunity, but they have been steadily increasing pay over the last 10 years, while here salaries are stagnant or being cut.

[JDPriestly]

12. "low-paying jobs" That may refer to the fact that we no longer have the higher paying

industrial jobs -- not compared to our workforce.

This quote is probably taken out of context.

I rejoice when I find a product that is actually made in the US. Most of the stuff I see is junk made in other countries.

Professional jobs still pay decent wages in the US. And people who work for themselves can do decently if they work hard and smart. But most Americans who work as employees at jobs do pretty menial things.

Used to be a woman could easily get a secretarial position that paid fairly decently. Now a large percentage of those jobs are gone. Just look around and ask people what they do.

And the pressure to lower pay for jobs like teachers, lawyers, etc. is really heavy.

We have a very low minimum wage and few programs that make up for that low wage.

I suspect he is talking about industrialized, developed countries. The quote needs some context.

[Lizzie Poppet]

22. I suspect he means relative to cost-of-living.

I also suspect he's right: that if one normalizes for cost-of-living, the US may well be the "leader" in low-paying jobs. That would be part-and-parcel of our unmatched movement towards ever more extreme wealth concentration. We've had both stagnant incomes and enormous increases in the cost of goods, services, and housing for over 30 years now.

[Igel]

6. Too many poorly defined terms.

"Major countries." If a country has more low-paying jobs, merely reclassify it as "not a major country," if possible.

"Low-paying jobs." If a country has too many jobs that don't have high wages, relativize the pay scale to the mean or median income. Then take an arbitrary percentage of that income to define "low-paying." Even if you can't deny China "major country" status, then jobs that barely permit survival aren't "low paying." Or declare agrarian workers to not have "jobs".

There's also the minor issue of # versus %. Let's say I'm in a country with 50 million workers, 35 million (or 70%) of which have low paying jobs. Compare that to the US, with 147 million workers employed (seasonally adjusted #s) in October 2014. OECD says 25% or so had "low paying jobs" (not the OECD's, take, but that's how it got spun in the OP), or about 36 million. US is worse off according to the numbers, but not the percentage.

That's just the OP.

In fact, the OECD report that this seems to be based on defines speaks not of "low paying" jobs but of "low pay workers," receiving 33% or less of the median wage as average income. If the US median wage is $52k, then anybody making less than $17k/year is a low-pay worker. Notice the bait-and-switch ploy used: My students making $11/hr are low-pay workers because they make $11/hr, which handily puts them over the OECD's cutoff. A full-time worker has to earn $8.51/hr, hardly a living wage, to stop being a low-pay worker. No, the students are low-pay workers because they work part time.

How you calculate median wage varies country by country, and the OECD report takes pains to point them out. (But they're not all in one place). Apparently the US has an above average median wage; however, that means we have a high dispersion rate, pretty much by definition. We also have greater work-place participation than the OECD average, esp. those that the OP probably considers to be our peer countries. Reduce participation by 4-5% and you'd probably reduce part-time work by a fairly large amount (or increase demand--barring any influx of cheap immigrant labor) and that would solve much of the "low pay" employed.

[JDPriestly]

14. One of the big problems today is that so many jobs, and not just those for students,

are part-time. That is a major cause of low incomes.

This quote needs some context.

On edit, I just think it is great that Bernie Sanders dares to approach this topic. Most politicians talk about raising the minimum wage. And when they do, they give even less context than this tiny quote from Sanders does.

Fact is. American working people are not doing well considering the profits being made by American businesses with their "make it in a country with cheap labor" and import it to the US where people can live on credit.

Our corporations treat Americans like a huge money bag from which they can take out but into which they don't need to put much. That's called profit I suppose. I call it a recipe for another financial crash. We are still over leveraged. We individuals still have too much debt. Student loan debt is just a nightmare in this country.

Wages only tell a tiny bit of the story of the financial misery of Americans.

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. Less than 2/3rds of median wage, not less than 1/3rd, and it's for full time employment

"Note: Estimates of earnings used in the calculations refer to gross earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. However, this definition may slightly vary from one country to another. Further information on the national data sources and earnings concepts used in the caculations can be found at: www.oecd.org/employment/outlook."

"b) The incidence of low pay refers to the share of workers earning less than two-thirds of median earnings. Data refer to 2003 (instead of 2002) for Chile and Ireland; to 2004 for Austria, Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Portugal and Spain; and to 2005 for Mexico and Poland. They refer to 2010 (instead of 2012) for Switzerland; and to 2011 for Chile and Israel."

http://www.oecd.org/els/emp/Earnings.xlsx

[uhnope]

11. yeah, a dumb "factoid"

the US is a large country with one of the biggest economies. A better stat would be per capita.

The low wages in US definitely sucks, but factoids don't help

[muriel_volestrangler]

20. It is per capita; it's for OECD countries

which Sanders shouldn't call "all the major countries on earth".

[uhnope]

28. thx nt

[Frustratedlady]

3. And, people still shop at WalMart for what reason?

In my family and group of friends in this area, no one still shops at WalMart. How do they manage to stay open? Their local parking lot is nowhere near as occupied as it was years ago. It must be their employees who shop there. I don't get it.

[sadoldgirl]

4. It is called American exceptionalism, don' you know?

[Octafish]

7. Mission Accomplished

33 years of Reaganomics, union busting, and welfare for the wealthy.

[Wella]

13. You beat me to it

This was the whole point of globalization, GATT, NAFTA, and all the other bills: to impoverish everyone except a tiny elite.

[pampango]

18. Blame FDR/Truman for GATT, Clinton for NAFTA,

I think I see a partisan globalization pattern.

I suspect that low-paying jobs has a lot to do with Taft-Hartley and a regressive tax system, neither of which exist in progressive countries.

[Wella]

21. Poppy Bush was negotiating GATT in the late 70s

It's a bipartisan thing, methinks.

[pampango]

23. GATT's been around since 1948. n/t

[Wella]

24. GATT has actually been a series of treaties and meetings since the late 40s to the 1990s

There are different rounds, including the particularly damaging Uruguay round. Please read this Princeton University website and get yourself educated:

https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/General_Agreement_on_Tariffs_and_Trade.html

[pampango]

25. You are right. It started under Democrats but was

amended many times through international negotiation and agreement under both parties.

[RiverLover]

26. FDR died in 1945.

And I know your comeback here, because I found this thread from last year~

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=653430

I'm with Brentspeak.

"Now you're even making up stuff about the same Pew poll you posted, claiming -- without any reason -- that FDR would have supported today's corporate-written "free trade" agreements of NAFTA, CAFTA, and KORUS. FDR supported trade in general, not lobbyist-overseen deals to create your beloved job-offshoring.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was authorized by the Act for a fixed period of time to negotiate on bilateral basis with other countries and then implement reductions in tariffs (up to 50% of existing tariffs) in exchange for compensating tariff reductions by the partner trading country. Roosevelt was also instructed to maximize market access abroad without jeopardizing domestic industry, and reduce tariffs only as necessary to promote exports in accord with the "needs of various branches of American production.".

Therefore, FDR's trade policy was the opposite of today's free trade agreements, which are authored deliberately to relocate domestic industry to overseas facilities and which are not required at all to consider domestic American production."
____________________________

(Is he still around?)

[pampango]

35. True but he introduced the IMF, the World Bank and the

International Trade Organization in 1944. The first 2 became reality. The last was rejected by a republican congress.

FDR was all about creating international organizations to guide international politics (the UN), trade (the ITO), banking (the World Bank) and finance (the IMF). He was not a proponent of enhanced national sovereignty.

Roosevelt was also instructed to maximize market access abroad without jeopardizing domestic industry ...

Those were indeed the instructions given to FDR by congress when they passed "fast track" to authorize those trade treaty negotiations.

He was a supporter of lower tariffs, more trade and multilateral (rather than national) control of trade, finance and banking.

[Thinkingabout]

8. And we have two thirds of eligible who does not care enough to go and vote.

Democrat member have been targeted by members of the Democrat party and they are getting replaced by far RW TP.

[TRoN33]

10. Yet rich people are demanding that we are being thankful of them

[cstanleytech]

15. I agree with senator sanders and one thing the government can do that the republicans

would be hard pressed to complain about use the EBT program itself.
Make it first so that companies cannot ask if a person or a persons family has ever had EBT, plans to apply for EBT nor ask the person anything related to the EBT program nor can the companies track who uses EBT nor may try to purchase or trade in order to get information about a persons EBT history from a 3rd party.
Second the program itself should be altered so that a retailer with more than 30 workers cannot have over a certain % of its employees (lets say 20%) drawing on EBT if they do then the retailer is banned from participating in the EBT program.

[deurbano]

16. More at this link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/23/low-paying-jobs_n_5868350.html

[RiverLover]

29. Thanks for the link deurbano! More details on our sad state of US employment...

America Has More Low-Paying Jobs Than Any Other Developed Country

?6

We need to wake up.

[cal04]

34. Thank you for the link deurbano

[lpbk2713]

17. The Walton family prospers at the expense of their employees.

Their employees can't afford to heat their homes, feed their families
properly or give their kids medical or dental care when they need it.

The Walton family has no shame.

[grahamhgreen]

27. It's high time the Waltons paid their fair share!

[highmindedhavi]

30. NAFTA

nt

[doc03]

31. AS much as I admire Senator Sanders I think he has

gone way overboard with that statement.

[TBF]

32. DUers read these quotes and doubt them -

and then wonder why the heck people don't vote. Wake up.

[indepat]

36. The unwritten creed of our corporatist government and TPTB who have bought it

is to maximize corporate profitability by all means conceivable, keep taxes on the plutocrat class to a minimum, and leave the standard of living, the infrastructure, and public health and longevity to their own devices.

[Rex]

37. But but but...I heard it right here on the DU, we have to move to the right

By a 'DUer'.