Americans are not happy, and for good reason: They continue to suffer financial stress caused by decades of flat income. And every time they make the slightest peep of complaint about a system rigged against them, the rich and powerful tell them to shut up because it is all their fault.
One percenters instruct them to work harder, pull themselves up by their bootstraps and stop bellyaching. Just get a second college degree, a second skill, a second job. Just send the spouse to work, downsize, take a staycation instead of a real vacation. Or don’t take one at all, just work harder and longer and better.
The barrage of blaming has persuaded; workers believe they deserve censure. And that’s a big part of the reason they’re unhappy. If only, they think, they could work harder and longer and better, they would get ahead. They bear the shame. They don’t blame the system: the Supreme Court, the Congress, the president. And yet, it is the system, the American system, that has conspired to crush them.
A Ford Motor Company worker works on an assembly line. Credit: Bill Pugliano, Getty Images
How to Evaluate the Renegotiated NAFTA
Overview
The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), President Trump’s 2018 revision to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), misses the chance to place workers at the center of U.S. trade priorities. Congress should insist on an approach that does.
Introduction and summary
American workers’ real wages have been stagnant for decades. While a wide range of domestic forces have led to that outcome—from a decline in union coverage to the slow and uneven recovery from the Great Recession1—trade has also played an important role in generating economic stress. Capital is increasingly mobile across country borders, yet workers are not. Business, in effect, can level an ultimatum to workers: Accept what we offer, or we will outsource or move to another country where wages are lower. Millions of working families have personally experienced this threat in recent decades, and the resulting economic stress on many American workers—especially in the Midwest—has been significant. Continue reading “Trump’s Trade Deal and the Road Not Taken”
An apprentice makes tools at a shipyard, where she is learning traditional ship-building skills, December 2008. Credit: Christopher Furlong, Getty Images
The Effects of Gender, Race, and Region
Policymakers frequently approach the question of developing the workforce to meet the needs of the 21st century. Despite today’s historically low unemployment rates, wages for typical workers have barely budged for decades.1 While productivity has increased, gains have largely trickled to the richest Americans, exasperating persisting income inequality and painting an ominous picture of middle-class living standards.2Furthermore, gaps in both wealth and income by race and gender have caused disproportionate labor market penalties for certain groups. Wage gaps and growing income inequality along racial lines have persisted despite higher educational attainment. For example, earning a bachelor’s degree or higher has not proven to reduce either the black-white or the Latinx-white wage gap.3Meanwhile, employers are spending less on worker training than they used to. And too often, the training that they do provide is firm-specific, meaning that those skills do not translate well to other firms.4
Registered Apprenticeship programs, which have bipartisan support, aim to address this issue by connecting Americans to decent-paying jobs as electricians, carpenters, and dental assistants, among others.5 The program, which the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) administers through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, aims to help businesses develop highly skilled employees through hands-on customized training for a variety of occupations.6 The DOL asserts that the average hourly wage for a journeyperson who completes an apprenticeship is $23.94, equivalent to an annual salary of $49,795.7
Investments in the workforce of tomorrow are necessary both to ensure pathways to relevant economic opportunities as well as to bridge economic disparities along racial and gender lines—including racial wealth and pay gaps—that continue to plague families across the country.8 Unfortunately, data on Registered Apprenticeship programs identify prominent economic disparities among women and people of color—many of whom face low enrollment rates within such programs and are concentrated in lower-paying occupations.9
Trump promised the massive tax cuts Republicans gave to the rich and big corporations would benefit workers, spur job growth and grow the economy. None of that happened. Instead, the Trump tax law led to more outsourcing, and workers at plants like GM have lost their jobs.
Hear from the workers who have lost their jobs and are hurting from Trump’s broken promises:
Trump’s broken promises have devastated autoworkers and their communities in the wake of the latest announcement of layoffs and plant closures from General Motors. As one autoworker said, “I can’t believe our president would allow this to happen.”
Here are real stories of autoworkers and communities hurt by Trump’s broken promises:
“You are going right into Christmas, you are looking for celebration, and that’s not there now. So what do you do? Do you still continue to buy gifts?” – UAW member
“I can’t believe our president would allow this to happen.” – GM Lordstown worker
Most voters are not feeling any benefits from the growing economy. That’s because Trump and Republicans’ policies are only benefiting those at the top. While wealthy CEOs and big corporations take in record profits, real wages for workers continue to decline. Now, Republicans want to make life even harder for working families by gutting vital safety net programs they rely on, in order to help pay for more tax cuts for the rich.
Most voters are not feeling any benefits from the growing economy. Trump’s economic policies only benefit those at the top.
CNBC: “‘The economy’ may be roaring, but for most voters their economy is not. The difference between those two things reflects the income inequality that has defined America’s modern economy. The positive news Wall Street savors — robust corporate profits, rising stock prices, surging output growth — deliver the greatest rewards to a relatively modest share of more affluent Americans. The rest don’t feel it all that much.” Continue reading “Voters Are Not Feeling Benefits From The Economy”
The following article by Thomas Kochan, the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management, Work and Organization Studies Co-Director MIT Sloan Institute for Work and Employment Research, MIT Sloan School of Management; Duanyl Yang, PhD. Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Erin L. Kelly, Loan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies Professor; Work and Organization Studies MIT Sloan School of Management and Will Kimball, Ph.D. Student, MIT Sloan School of Management, was posted on the Conversation website August 30, 2018:
Only 10.7 percent of American workers belong to a union today, approximately half as many as in 1983. That’s a level not seen since the 1930s, just before passage of the labor law that was supposed to protect workers’ right to organize.
The results obtained from nearly 4,000 respondents show that 48 percent – nearly half of nonunionized workers – would join a union if given the opportunity to do so.
The following article by Daniella Zessoules and Michael Madowitz was posted on the Center for American Progress website August 9, 2018:
The state of the U.S. economy recently has become an increasingly partisan topic, but there are basic facts on which everyone can agree. The continued positive job growth and latest gross domestic product (GDP) growth numbers have brought about some excitement in the last few months. While these measures of progress are important, they reveal less about the health of the day-to-day economy that most workers experience. Real wages have been flat for most of the last decade—particularly since President Donald Trump took office.
To understand the health of the economy as workers see it, policymakers should look more closely at earnings—an indicator that shows the true progress, or lack thereof, facing many workers.
Figure 1 shows that a wage-centered perspective is especially important, because real wage growth is how middle-class workers typically benefit from economic growth. Soaring corporate profits, on the other hand, provide little to no gains to virtually all workers. With the slow growth in earnings; the rise in credit card, mortgage, and higher education debts; and the costs of child care, health care, and other salient needs continue to grow, it’s understandable that many workers feel their economic position is precarious.
“Trump asking companies to sign a pledge to invest in American workers is the definition of hypocrisy. Trump has hired more than a thousand foreign workers to work at his properties and his companies make their merchandise overseas. Actions speak louder than words. Trump must take real action to invest in American workers — who are tired of his phony rhetoric.” – DNC spokesperson Daniel Wessel
Trump’s ‘Council for the American Worker’ is meaningless. Rather than take real action to invest in American workers, Trump is merely setting up another symbolic advisory board.
Washington Examiner: “According to the White House, the advisory board will be comprised of administration officials, state and local officials, and CEOs from a variety of industries to advise the president on how to address the current workforce crisis, provide affordable training, and expand apprenticeships across the United States.”
The following article by Eliza Schultz, Anusha Ravi and Rebecca Vallas was posted on the Center for American Progress website November 2, 2017:
Credit: AP/Matt Rourke
Taking away food, shelter, and health care from jobless workers won’t help them find work any faster. But that is exactly what President Donald Trump and his colleagues in Congress are proposing to do. While they call their proposals “work requirements,”1 what these policies would do in practice is to kick people while they’re down, punishing unemployed or underemployed workers for not being able to find a job with enough hours and penalizing those who face barriers to work. As this issue brief sets forth, proposals to take food, shelter, and health insurance away from struggling workers would only exacerbate poverty and inequality, while putting opportunity even further out of reach for the very “forgotten man and woman” President Trump famously pledged to help.2
Certain groups of workers are left behind
The recovery from the Great Recession has, by many measures, been a success: Today, the national unemployment rate is 4.4 percent,3 compared with 10 percent in 2009.4 But these figures obscure significant variation by factors such as geography, as well as persistent discrimination in the labor market based on race, ethnicity, age, and disability status—not to mention labor market disadvantages faced by workers with limited educational attainment or a criminal record. Continue reading “Work Requirement Proposals Would Kick Struggling Workers When They’re Down”
Americans are not happy, and for good reason: They continue to suffer financial stress caused by decades of flat income. And every time they make the slightest peep of complaint about a system rigged against them, the rich and powerful tell them to shut up because it is all their fault.
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