It's a fact: wages are falling
By G. Dunkel
Workers in the United States know times are
tough. Whether you're shaping up in a 7-11 parking lot,
catching a job every other day, or using your high-speed
Internet connection to surf job banks and mail hundreds of
resumés, you are going to have a hard time finding
work.
The figures bear out this feeling. A half-million workers
lost their jobs this year, making a total of 2 million jobs
lost since the beginning of 2001 when Bush took office. It now
takes a worker on average 20 weeks to find a job, the longest
since the recession of 1984. Statistics for undocumented
workers are not collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
even though they make up a substantial sector of U.S. workers.
Anecdotes in newspapers from across the country indicate they
are facing the same slowdown.
Wages are also starting to slip as producer prices decline.
The BLS in a report issued the last week of May states that the
compensation for civilian workers increased by only 1.3 percent
in the first three months of this year.
But that's not the whole story. Accord ing to an analysis of
government data by Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel of the
Economic Policy Institute in Washing ton, wages, when adjusted
for inflation, are falling for workers across the board. They
found that the median weekly paycheck fell 1.4 percent over the
past year, and that workers in all pay grades, white-collar and
blue-collar, had taken a hit. (Bob Herbert, "Caught in the
Squeeze," New York Times, May 29)
The Commerce Department, one of whose tasks is to prepare
reports for businesses that need to make investments, released
a report May 30 showing workers' compensation fell sharply in
April for important sectors of the U.S. working class, even as
"personal income increased $4.0 billion, or less than 0.1
percent."
This decline is not just due to large layoffs and the loss
of overtime. Workers are getting paid less per hour, according
to BLS reports. (www.bls.gov/ncs/ect/home.htm)
There are lots of ways to pay someone less without cutting
their salary. Bosses reduce benefits, extend the working day,
cut out breaks. They also hire new workers at a lower pay scale
than current workers. They can claim financial inability to
meet their payroll and force the workers to take less pay or do
more.
In Oregon, for example, some school districts fired their
janitors and bus drivers and told their teachers to do that
work as well as their own. Other school districts there shut
down weeks early or got their teachers to work without pay.
The actual decline in the income of working people in the
United States can be seen in what is happening at food pantries
throughout the country. In the recent past, these charities
mainly served single men with substance abuse problems. Now
they are serving many working families who can't make ends
meet.
Because workers are earning less, sooner or later they will
lose access to credit to maintain their living standards. When
this happens, the U.S. economy is going to face a major
problem. The average household's credit card debt is up to
$8,000, and many people have huge mortgages and car payments as
well.
There's nothing automatic about wage increases or even wage
stability under capitalism. The tendency, in fact, is for the
bosses to keep demanding more work for less pay, citing the
pressures of competition--until the multinational working class
puts up such a broad fight that the bosses have to raise
wages.
Reprinted from the June 12, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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