For Workers, It Was No Holiday

[marmar]

from The American Prospect:


For Workers, It Was No Holiday

America remains on a course where the biggest gains go to a narrow elite, and ordinary people face increasing insecurity. Hopefully by Labor Day 2009, we will have more to celebrate.

Robert Kuttner | September 5, 2007 | web only



This Labor Day, America's working families did not have a great deal to cheer. According to the new Census report on economic trends in 2006, median earnings for fulltime year-round workers last year fell by about 1 percent, even with a booming economy.

Only the most affluent one-fifth of U.S. households had net income gains between 2000 and 2006. The rest had declines, despite productivity growth averaging about 3 percent per year. The share of people with health insurance provided by employers declined, as did those with guaranteed pensions. And all of this discouraging news happened before the current financial turbulence.

Housing values have now gone into their worse tailspin since the Great Depression. Even if the Federal Reserve manages to contain the effects on the broader economy, America remains on a course where the biggest gains go to a narrow elite, and ordinary people face increasing insecurity.

How did this happen?

Although education gaps are sometimes cited as the cause of widening inequality, America had much more broadly distributed prosperity in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a period when more people failed to complete high school than earned college degrees.

But what America did have in that era was a set of opportunity institutions. A much larger fraction of workers were members of trade unions. The minimum wage was much higher in its real purchasing power. More sectors of the economy were regulated, and one benefit for workers was that industries such as airlines and public utilities competed on the basis of quality and innovation, not by cheapening wages or relying on outsourcing. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=for_workers_it_was_no_holiday