A Rescue Plan for Workers! Jobs. Good jobs!

by: Erica Brody

Tue Oct 05, 2010 at 17:19:15 PM EDT

For its October issue, the American Prospect teamed up with Demos to put out a special section dedicated to one of our favorite topics here at JFS. Jobs! Good jobs.

Appearing under the headline "Jobs Well Done: What the Obama administration can do for American workers right now," the special section includes articles on domestic workers, unionizing and collective bargaining and -- an issue dear to my heart -- government contracts and purchasing, from food processing and farm work to the low-wage companies that make our soldiers' uniforms.

And there's even a piece about how increased American productivity has gone hand-in-hand with decreased wages. That's longer hours, less money, fewer options, and for the unionized, decreased bargaining power. And that's just for the Americans who are lucky enough to have full-time work.

Read all about it.

Or start off with Robert Kuttner's piece:

The Case for Presidential Action
For more than three decades, the wages of American workers have been close to flat while economic insecurity has risen massively. Although the productivity of the U.S. economy has doubled in a generation, most of those gains have not been captured by workers. And in the decade that began in 2001, inflation-adjusted wages have fallen for all but the most affluent 3 percent of the population.

This pattern of deepening inequality was well entrenched before the financial collapse -- which only made things worse. In 2006, economists at Goldman Sachs, sounding almost Marxian, reported that "the most important contributor to higher profit margins over the past five years has been a decline in labor's share of national income." By 2006, wages as a percentage of gross domestic product were already at their lowest share -- 45 percent -- since government began keeping statistics in 1947. In the past three years, the decline in worker earnings has only intensified, as worker bargaining power has been undermined by very high unemployment. As the economy has stumbled toward a feeble recovery, corporate profits and executive bonuses have rebounded smartly, but salaries and wages have not.

In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, wages and productivity moved upward in lockstep. Beginning in the 1970s, as government regulation of labor conditions faltered, trade with nations that exploited their own workers increased, and corporations declared open war on unions, the lines diverged. Productivity kept increasing, while median wages were nearly flat.

What can government do about these trends?

You can read the rest here.