Competitive Intelligence

Labor Day 2003: The Betrayal of American Work

On a day off for most of us here in the U.S., I was thinking about work in the modern world and what it means to us all... reminding myself of a new book - "The Betrayal of Work: How Low-Wage Jobs Fail 35 Million Americans" by Beth Shulman - I'd heard about on NPR recently, and recalling how it seems like more people are struggling to make ends meet today than there used to be in America.

Echoing the themes described in (the much-better, in my opinion) "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich and "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal" by Eric Schlosser, it reminds me that the critique of work as it exists for many Americans is by no means an "American Dream". For anyone interested in the future of work in the U.S., I think all three books make for a good left-of-center foundational bibliography that speaks to the greed of corporations and the hopelessness many feel about the future of their careers.

Since George W. Bush took office, more than 3 million jobs have been lost, including 2.5 million good-paying jobs in manufacturing, and the President announced in his Labor Day address to union workers in Richfield, Ohio the creation of a assistant secretary of commerce for manufacturing to try and stem the tide; even as he acknowledged that rising productivity means fewer jobs for Americans. Most of those jobs are essentially gone for good too - the result of structural changes in the economy. All this at the same time the Bush Administration is poised for a Senate vote on whether to allow Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) regulation that would let the Department of Labor permit business to end the right to overtime pay for more than 8 million Americans. Meanwhile, the Census Bureau reports that the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased by more than 1.3 million in 2002, to 34.8 million, or 12.4 percent of the population. Today some 20 percent of children under 5 live below the poverty line.

Maybe it's time to consider a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to a living wage; an idea Martin Luther King proposed in the 1960s. That wouldn't do much to stem the exporting of jobs abroad, but might encourage debate at the WTO about a global living wage rule and tarriffs against countries that violate such a rule. Comparative advantage aside, the disillusionment many of us feel with offshore outsourcing, designed to insulate corporate profits at the expense of wages, is a trend that is set to intensify, even as the WTO is set to meet in a few days in Cancun, Mexico. American business calls it "staying competitive"; I think it amounts to erosion of disposable income for a stable market domestically.

In an era where, over the past 30 years, the productivity of our people has increased 66 percent while the median wage has gone up only 7 percent, I don't know that Labor Day 2003 is anything to celebrate, not without at least considering those alongside us that have little hope for a more prosperous future, even as those still hopeful find their jobs evaporating in the American middle class. This quote at AlterNet says it all: "As billionaire Warren Buffett said to ABC's Ted Koppel last month, 'If it's class warfare, my class is winning.'"

- Arik