In America, You Can Work Hard, Play By the Rules, and Still Get Screwed

[marmar]

from The Nation:


In America, You Can Work Hard, Play By the Rules, and Still Get Screwed
Being steadily employed ain’t what it used to be.

By Pat Tomaino , James M. Larkin andZach Goldhammer


 Last week we spoke about the surprising history of the bloody, decades-long fight for a two-day weekend, an eight-hour workday, for pensions, worker safety, and a minimum wage.

 But we also heard Calvin Coolidge’s famous line, that “the chief business of the American people is business.” Almost a century later, that’s still true. Ours remains the biggest economy in the world, and American workers remain more productive per capita than any (big) nation in the world.

 Americans spend more time working than doing anything else, and more than almost any other developed economy. A pre-crash study by the International Labor Organization found that we worked 137 hours more per year than Japanese workers, 260 more than Brits, almost 500 more than the leisure-loving French. And 86% of American men and 67% of women—sons and daughters of the union movement—work more than the union-preferred 40 hours a week.

 Then again, the United States is exceptional in other ways: Among OECD nations for the share of our people living in poverty (more than 14%, or almost 47 million people), and among almost all nations for offering, as part of the law of our land, neither paid maternal leave, nor paid sick leave, nor annual minimum paid time off.

And then there are the problems we cannot quantify—or even always see: The stresses and disappointments that pile up, disproportionately upon the 35 million Americans who earn less than $10.55 an hour. .................(more)

http://www.thenation.com/article/in-america-you-can-work-hard-play-by-the-rules-and-still-get-screwed/