Working In These Times

Roger Bybee 2 Apr 2010
9:45 am

This is an excellent piece, reminding us of the incredible strains placed on working families, and the need for more flexibility.

We should keep in mind several significant trends underlying the problems faced by parents juggling the responsibilities of work and home::

**Real wages have been dropping since 1973, and we are in the midst of the biggest wage-cutting spree by employers since the Great Depression, according to the NY Times’ Louis Uchitelle.
**The supply of family-supporting jobs has been shrinking severely, with close to zero net jobs created in the last decade compared with 22% to 38% job growth in previous decades since 1940. We have lost one-third of our manufacturing jobs, often unionized and high-paying, since 2000, amounting to a loss of 5.6 million factory jobs.
**As unionization has plummeted, management has forced blue-collar workers into forced overtime and white-collar into working extra hours, generally without compensation, under the pretext that they are managers. Retail workers have often been illegally coerced into working “off the clock.”.
**American workers—until the Great Recession hit—were working far more hours than any other workforce in the advance word.
**In recent decades, according to a study by Sylvia Hewlett, Americans have lost 40% of their time off the job due to increased work hours and decreased vacations, paid sick days, and other time away from work. Julia Schor also discusses these trends in The Overworked American.
**While the current severe downturn has dropped average workweeks to as low as 33 hours per week (presumably a bit higher now), this has only intensified stress because it means another sharp reduction in earnings.

In light of all these adverse developments and increased management power, we urgently need a set of fundamental reforms to make flexibility work for workers:
1) A massive public jobs-creation program. The private sector has already clearly shown its lack of interest in creating jobs in the US, and its contempt for the sacrifices of American workers and communities.

2) A major rise in the minimum wage.

3) Paid sick leave, including time spent caring for other family members.

4) The re-establishment of the right to organize unions through the Employee Free Choice Act.

5) Revitalized enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act on wages and hours.

6) Effective curbs on further off-shoring of US jobs, built around President Obama declaring an official national jobs emergency. These curbs could take a variety of forms, beginning with no federal contracts to firms conducting work or chartered off-shore (ag., Accenture); the ending of all tax provisions that encourage off-shoring, and economic penalties for US-based firms producing in low-wage nations like Mexico and China for exporting products back into the US market.

Again, an excellent job, Art! Best, Roger Bybee